Where Conscience Is Free: Brooklyn's Central Congregational Church

On the evening of June 16, 1912, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá took the pulpit of the Central Congregational Church on Hancock Street in Brooklyn. The congregation was Protestant, well educated, deeply rooted in the tradition of dissent and free conscience that had founded New England Congregationalism. Esther Foster took the notes that survive.

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The Master began where He had begun in many of His American talks: with the diagnosis of religious discord. He did not blame doctrine, He blamed inheritance. The trouble, He said, is not that people believe different things; the trouble is that most people have *not* believed. They have inherited an opinion from their fathers, and they have called it faith.

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The remedy is the independent investigation of truth. And for that investigation a particular kind of public life is required:

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> When freedom of conscience, liberty of thought and right of > speech prevail — that is to say, when every man according to > his own idealization may give expression to his beliefs — > development and growth are inevitable.

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Free expression is, in this telling, not a political add-on to religion. It is the condition without which religion cannot do its work. A truth that is not freely sought is not yet *believed.*

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He then placed His central claim about the religions:

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> The divine religion is reality, and reality is not multiple; it > is one. Therefore, the foundations of the religious systems are > one because all proceed from the indivisible reality.

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The diversity of religions is real but secondary. What is primary is the single reality from which all the Founders draw. The Manifestations differ in language, in time, in custom; They do not differ in essence. *The essential purpose of the religion of God,* He said,

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> is to establish unity amongst mankind.

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Where it does not establish unity, it has missed its purpose. Where it has been used to justify enmity, it has been used backwards. He left the Brooklyn congregation with a single test of every faith they had been taught:

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> If the Holy Books were rightly understood, none of this discord > and distress would have existed, but love and fellowship would > have prevailed instead.

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The talk reframed the work of the religious thinker. The Congregational tradition prized the reading of scripture; the Master invited it to read scripture with one eye on whether the result was love.

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