Thornton Chase: The First Westerner to Embrace the Faith

In *God Passes By,* Shoghi Effendi devotes a passage to the significance of the small event that took place in Chicago in the early summer of 1894. A travelling Syrian believer named Ibrahim Kheiralla, who had embraced the Faith in Cairo some years earlier, had recently begun a small series of informal teaching gatherings in his Chicago apartment. The gatherings drew a mixed local audience — students of Christian Science, theosophists, members of the Chicago spiritualist circles, and a small number of business and professional men who had come out of curiosity.

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Among the latter was Thornton Chase, a Chicago insurance executive of middle years and conventional Protestant background. He had read of the Faith in a brief newspaper notice. He was an unlikely candidate for religious conversion: practical, professionally established, with no prior pattern of religious enthusiasm. He attended the Kheiralla gatherings out of intellectual interest.

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The intellectual interest, in his case, ripened into spiritual conviction. The Guardian, in *God Passes By,* gives the brief sketch of the resulting declaration: in June 1894, after attending a sequence of the Kheiralla classes, Thornton Chase formally embraced the Faith. He became, by that act, *the first American and the first Westerner* — the Guardian uses both designations — formally to embrace the Bahá'í Cause.

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The historical weight of the small event was not at first visible. Chase himself continued, for years afterward, his ordinary professional life as an insurance executive. He married, raised a family, supported himself by his trade. The Faith was, in those years, a private spiritual commitment held in a personal life otherwise indistinguishable from those of his colleagues.

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But the precedent had been set. Other Americans followed — slowly at first, in small numbers, then more rapidly as the opening years of the twentieth century saw the establishment of small Bahá'í communities in Chicago, New York, Washington, Boston, and the Pacific coast. By the time of 'Abdu'l-Bahá's American visit in 1912, the American Bahá'í community numbered several hundreds. By the time of Chase's own death in 1912, it was a body with established institutional life.

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The Master, when He heard of Chase's death — which occurred shortly before the Master's own arrival in America — travelled personally to the cemetery in Inglewood, Los Angeles, where Chase had been buried. He stood at the graveside, prayed for the soul of the first Western believer, and gave him the title that has since accompanied his name. *He was the first Bahá'í of the United States.*

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The title was not honorary. It was the literal description of the historical role Chase had played. In the providential ordering of the Faith's emergence in the West, one individual had to be the first. Thornton Chase, the unremarkable Chicago insurance executive of 1894, was the person to whom that providence had been entrusted.

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*Paraphrased from God Passes By (Shoghi Effendi, Bahá'í Publishing Trust, 1944), with one quoted phrase from 'Abdu'l-Bahá; see original for full text.*

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