The Promised Day: The Decline of Established Religion

In *The Promised Day Is Come*, the Guardian's substantial 1941 letter to the Western Bahá'ís, Shoghi Effendi devotes a long passage to the decline of the established religious authorities of the world across the early twentieth century — a decline which he reads as the religious parallel of the political collapses of the same decades that he had treated in the immediately preceding portion of the letter.

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The Guardian's survey proceeds, again, by considering several principal cases.

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*The Roman Catholic Church.* Bahá'u'lláh had addressed Pope Pius IX in a Tablet of the late 1860s, summoning him to recognise the second coming of Christ in the new Revelation. The Pope had not responded. The temporal authority of the Papacy, which in the 1860s still extended over the substantial Papal States in central Italy, was lost in 1870 with the absorption of the Papal territories into the unified Italian state.

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The Pope became, by the events of 1870, *the prisoner of the Vatican* — confined for the next several decades to the small palace and courtyard precinct that the Italian state had left to him. The Lateran Treaty of 1929 restored a small fragment of the older temporal sovereignty in the Vatican City state, but the substantial loss of political authority was not reversed.

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*The Russian Orthodox Church.* The Orthodox patriarchate of Moscow, which had been the ecclesiastical pillar of the Russian imperial system, was effectively dissolved by the Bolshevik regime that succeeded the Czarist government. The senior clergy were arrested or executed. The churches were closed or repurposed. The patriarchate would not be substantially restored until the Second World War's exigencies forced a temporary accommodation between the Soviet state and the Orthodox hierarchy.

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*The Anglican Establishment.* The Church of England, established by law in the United Kingdom and entwined with the British political and social system, experienced across the early twentieth century a substantial decline in attendance, in cultural authority, and in moral influence. The cataclysm of the First World War had broken the easy nineteenth-century alliance between Anglican Christianity and the British imperial self-understanding. The interwar period saw an acceleration of the decline that has continued into the modern era.

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*The Sunní caliphate.* The Ottoman caliphate, which had been the principal claimant to the leadership of Sunní Islam since the early sixteenth century, was abolished by the Turkish revolutionary government in 1924. The abolition was unilateral and definitive. The Sunní Muslim world has not, in the century since, been able to constitute a successor authority of comparable acknowledged standing.

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*The Shi'í establishment of Persia.* The Shi'í clerical establishment of Persia, which had been one of the principal historical persecutors of the Bahá'í Cause, underwent in the same period a substantial loss of political authority through the secularising reforms of Reza Shah and the modernising elite that succeeded the Qájár monarchy.

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The Guardian's reading is not gleeful. He notes the human suffering attendant on each of these declines. He notes the loss of the genuine spiritual goods — the pastoral care, the ritual ordering of the year, the continuity of the religious tradition — that the established religious institutions had previously delivered.

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But the reading is unflinching. The institutions, in his framing, had refused the call to renewal that Bahá'u'lláh had directed to their leaders. The withdrawal of divine confirmation that had followed had now worked itself out, across the half-century since, in the visible collapse of the institutional structures themselves.

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The substance of religion — the underlying spiritual reality which the institutions had been constituted to serve — had not, in the Guardian's reading, perished. It had departed from the institutions that had failed it and was now finding new vehicles in the renewing Cause that had been brought into the world by Bahá'u'lláh. *The institutions had failed; the substance had not.*

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*Paraphrased from The Promised Day Is Come (Shoghi Effendi, Bahá'í Publishing Trust, 1941); see original for full text.*

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