Followers Say Baha’i Message Is Needed in L.A. : Religion: The faith preaches unity through diversity. Adherents say beliefs have special resonance in racially divided city.

On a cool, breezy evening in Chinatown, beneath a soulful black-and-white portrait of a man wearing a turban and white beard, weekly visitors trickle into the comfortable living room of Lourdes and Vahid Sanaei.

An unemployed secretary, a computer programmer, a full-time mother, a flower-shop owner, a building supervisor. White, black, Latino and Iranian. Some murmur an Arabic greeting: Allah’ u Abha: God is most glorious.

Most have embarked on spiritual quests to arrive here, at a Baha’i “fireside,” an informal educational gathering that mingles believers in the Baha’i faith with prospective followers and the merely curious. Under the photographic gaze of one of the faith’s leaders, Baha’is talked about their independent religion.

“Los Angeles needs the Baha’i faith,” said Bob Hopper, 58, a Baha’i and a city tour guide who regularly attends firesides. “Other religions have brought similar principles, but they need to be renewed and looked at again, and that’s what the Baha’i faith does.”

Founded 150 years ago by a Tehran-born nobleman now called Baha’u’llah, the Baha’i faith preaches unity through diversity and promotes a progressive agenda of social and economic justice and racial and gender equality.

For believers, it is the means to accomplish what no war or political movement has--a peaceful world without borders uniting all people, all religions and gods.

Baha’u’llah’s central message, “The earth is one country and mankind its citizens,” followers say, has special resonance in Los Angeles, a city so recently shattered by racial divisiveness.

“We’re pioneers in living in unity and diversity,” said Amin Banani, a Baha’i and UCLA historian. “Los Angeles is becoming a multiracial, multicultural place, and we are a people who have practiced living as a unified people and have a (systematic) plan for doing it.”

In Los Angeles, that plan has included launching an institute on healing racism, a multiethnic youth theater group and an after-school enrichment program, and a multicultural gospel choir, all based out of the Baha’i headquarters in Baldwin Hills.

One of those groups, the Baha’i Youth Workshop, founded in 1974 by Oscar and Freddie DeGruy in their living room, has worked toward encouraging youths to find common interests. The traveling theater troupe, which has toured nationally, has included black, white, Latino, Asian, Iranian and about 10% non-Baha’i performers.

As workshop members, “they can be together from different religions and different cultures and different races and they can find a point of unity,” Oscar DeGruy said.

The group visits schools, community centers and other sites and uses hip-hop, rap, jazz and other styles to address topics such as peace, equality, education and social ills.

At the workshop meeting each Sunday, troupe members rehearse but also talk out problems they experience during the week, DeGruy said.

“We’re brought up to believe that if you don’t fit we don’t want you,” Oscar DeGruy said. “We’re all different for a reason, and now it’s time to share those differences with each other. . . . The Baha’i faith gives (the youths) the opportunity to come together.”

The Los Angeles Baha’i community’s aim is to triple its active members from its base of 1,500 in the next two years. There are 5,000 active Baha’i members in Southern California and about 110,000 nationwide.

Already, the Baha’i community in Southern California is one of the largest in the country. Its hub is the Baha’i Center, located at the edge of Baldwin Hills at Rodeo Road and La Cienega Boulevard.

Thornton Chase, an insurance company executive who became the first American Baha’i, is buried in Inglewood Park Cemetery, and his grave site is considered a holy place of pilgrimage. Los Angeles is also home to a Baha’i radio show and Kalimat Press, one of three Baha’i publishers in the country.

The Los Angeles Baha’i community formally organized in 1909, making it one of the country’s earliest multiracial religious communities, said Muhtadia Rice, public information officer for the Baha’is of Los Angeles.

The religion does not allow missionaries and Baha’is are not allowed to proselytize, so the informal firesides held every week across the city are the foremost way believers spread the faith. Perhaps because of this low-key approach, the faith is relatively unknown, despite an 85-year presence in Los Angeles.

“We’re confused with B’nai B’rith, we’re confused with Buddhists, or people have never heard of us at all,” Rice said. “It’s critical for us that we are accepted as credible and very mainstream.”

Islamic fundamentalists have called the Baha’i heretics. Other critics dismiss the religion as a cult. Scholars still view the faith as somewhat new, small and exotic, and there are few non-Baha’i specialists in academia.

Nevertheless, said Diana Eck, a professor in comparative religions at Harvard University, the Baha’i faith is a world religion in the sense that, “though it is neither very ancient nor very large, you can find Baha’is all over the world today.”

With 5 million members in 233 countries and territories worldwide, it is among the widest spread and fastest growing religions by percentage increase in the world, according to Baha’i researchers.

This modern faith has attracted followers ranging from entertainers Dizzy Gillespie and Jim Seals and Dash Crofts, the singing duo Seals & Crofts, to jurists Dorothy W. Nelson, a U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals judge and her husband, retired state Judge James F. Nelson.

The Nelsons have hosted weekly firesides in their home for 36 years, some of which have drawn more than 200 people.

“At first we went to firesides (in the early 1950s) to see if (the Baha’i religion) was just one of those ‘California things,’ ” admitted Dorothy Nelson, an elected member of the Baha’i National Spiritual Assembly, who was raised an Episcopalian. By 1954, the Nelsons had left their traditional Christian backgrounds for the Baha’i faith.

Baha’is believe racism is the greatest challenge facing Americans today. The faith demands that followers work toward the abolition of prejudice and encourages intermarriage to overcome racial barriers.

In 1969, Gloria Haithman-Ali, now a USC administrator, realized that Baha’i principles of unity and racial equality gave a spiritual name to her personal beliefs. As a young black woman in Greensboro, N.C., she had protested and demonstrated against discrimination during the civil rights movement.

Later, as a mother in New York, she recalls seeking a home for her family and being shut out of trailer parks and neighborhoods because of her color. One day, she was invited to a Baha’i retreat in Teaneck, N.J.

“At one point, I looked around (the multicultural group) and said, ‘These are the true Christians,’ and at that point, in my heart, I knew I was Baha’i,” recalled Haithman-Ali, who is vice chair of the Los Angeles Baha’i Spiritual Assembly.

After the riots, a group of Baha’is formed the Institute for the Healing of Racism, and began offering nine-week courses in how to cure what the faith considers a moral and social disease.

“There has really been a demand for (the classes),” said Haithman-Ali, one of the institute’s founders. “At the end (of the session), hopefully people realize it’s really the beginning.”

Anthony A. Lee, 47, a second-generation Baha’i, said early lessons on equality have guided his life.

“When I was in Baha’i Sunday school, I remember them saying that you should think about marrying different races as a way to demonstrate the oneness of mankind,” said Lee, who is black and married to an Iranian. “If they hadn’t said that, then by looking at television, you’d just assume that blacks marry black people and whites marry white people.”

What may distinguish the Baha’i faith most from other religions is the belief that all religions are part of one religion and that each faith’s prophet has provided humanity updates from God.

Baha’u’llah (1817-1892) is considered the most recent in a line of holy messengers sent by God to guide men on Earth. Another messenger is expected in 1,000 years, according to Baha’i teachings.

“The Baha’i have a real perspective on the unique contributions of all the different religions,” Eck said. “Other religions don’t do that, especially the Western, monotheistic religions.”

In Islamic Iran, where orthodox Muslims believe Mohammed to be the last prophet, Baha’is have been tortured and killed for their beliefs. Since the 1979 Islamic revolution, more than 200 Baha’is have been executed, and Baha’i scholars report that slayings occurred as recently as last year. An increasing number of Los Angeles Baha’is are Iranian immigrants.

The fact that the Baha’i encourage openness and investigation of other religions appealed to Lourdes Sanaei, 37. Sanaei spent 14 years in Catholic school and always wondered why, as a young girl, her church taught that sinners--everyone, including even children who were not baptized--would be doomed to eternal hell.

“I had all these questions and the priests would say, ‘Oh, don’t ask that. Have faith,’ ” recalled the mother of three. “Then I started to read the Baha’i writings and the answers I’d looked for were there. This is a religion that is very clear and there are no dogmas. It’s like there were veils before my eyes and they fell away.”

Angelica Huerta remembers how her Catholic family became alienated from the church after the changes of Vatican II. Now 44, she spent her early 20s investigating other religions and even traveled to Jerusalem in search of answers. Then she discovered the Baha’i community in Los Angeles.

“They were wonderful, warm people who had embraced all the messengers of God and that made a lot of sense to me,” Huerta said.

One evening, she gathered her family and friends to announce her decision to convert. Family members thought she had been sucked into a fraud and found it hard to accept such a foreign-sounding religion, she said.

“They were very upset, let me tell you,” she said. “It was a scary situation.” But within a year, her parents and five brothers and sisters had also converted.

“When people understand that it’s not some irrational cult and it is the fulfillment of religious promise, it’s not difficult to accept,” said James Nelson, once a junior minister in the Presbyterian Church who now chairs the National Spiritual Assembly. “What’s difficult for most people is to let go of the emotional attachment to traditional religion.”

Other key teachings of Baha’u’llah envision the elimination of economic injustice, a universal language and a world government to unite nations. Equality between men and women is also paramount. If a family can only afford to educate one child, it should send a girl to school, said Baha’u’llah, because mothers are the first teachers of the human race.