The BAHA’I FAITH and the SEPARATION of CHURCH and STATE
The calamities of current events are the forces of God propelling the world closer and closer to the time of the Most Great Justice, and the Most Great Peace that shall be laid down upon that foundation. “Peace on earth without Justice is tyranny”. Therefore the establishment of the Most Great Justice is the paramount forerunner for truly universal, international peace.
Part of the problem regarding this issue is the lack of understanding amongst the people of the key issues involved. These issues are divided into the religious and political realms.
These are the two topics: politics and religion, that are not to be discussed in “polite” society here in the United States. Yet these two issues are the most important fundamental social issues that should be discussed by the people. Thus there exists an oppression upon the American people in particular and the people of the world in general, forbidding them to discuss either politics or religion, and that is, to discuss these things where cool heads prevail and with critical thinking, intellectual investigation and the agreement on the facts. Instead these twin issues have been obfuscated by high emotionality, opinion, speculation, propaganda and antics. Thus the people have been deprived of a Forum for this venue.
The Baha’i Faith is a truly all INCLUSIVE UNORGANIZED RELIGION, and the Kingdom of God is the government from God that is respectful of all the diversity of mankind. This is a difficult and abstruse issue to understand and should be meditated upon profoundly by all the people. This is the subject: that God has revealed an “unorganized religion” for His Kingdom, which in effect separates “spiritual matters” which are NOT to be organized, from matters of State.
Neal Chase, Guardian/President of the Baha’i Faith.
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AMERICA in PERIL
The American nation, of which the community of the Most Great Name forms as yet a negligible and infinitesimal part, stands, indeed, from whichever angle one observes its immediate fortunes, in grave peril. The woes and tribulations which threaten it are partly avoidable, but mostly inevitable and God-sent, for by reason of them a government and people clinging tenaciously to the obsolescent doctrine of absolute sovereignty and upholding a political system, manifestly at variance with the needs of a world already contracted into a neighborhood and crying out for unity, will find itself purged of its anachronistic conceptions, and prepared to play a preponderating role, as foretold by ‘Abdu’l‑Bahá, in the hoisting of the standard of the Lesser Peace, in the unification of mankind, and in the establishment of a world federal government on this planet. These same fiery tribulations will not only firmly weld the American nation to its sister nations in both hemispheres, but will through their cleansing effect, purge it thoroughly of the accumulated dross which ingrained racial prejudice, rampant materialism, widespread ungodliness and moral laxity have combined, in the course of successive generations, to produce, and which have prevented her thus far from assuming the role of world spiritual leadership forecast by ‘Abdu’l‑Bahá’s unerring pen—a role which she is bound to fulfill through travail and sorrow.
Excerpt from: Shoghi Effendi-Citadel of Faith, July 28, 1954, Subsection-American Baha’is in the Time of World Peril.
