'Abdu'l-Bahá's Tablet on the Purpose of Religion

Among the Tablets gathered in Selections from the Writings of 'Abdu'l-Bahá is a brief but trenchant address to a believer who had asked the Master what, in essence, the purpose of any religion was supposed to be.

The question had its specific occasion. The believer was an American who had recently come into the Faith from a strict Protestant background. He had been raised on the premise that right religion consists primarily in the correct observance of doctrine — the right creed, the right Sunday observance, the right baptismal practice, the right scriptural reading. He had observed, on entering the Bahá'í community, that the new Faith placed less stress on these outward markers than he had been used to. He had asked, in honest perplexity, what the new standard was supposed to be.

The Master's reply set the standard plainly.

Religion that does not produce love and unity is no religion at all.

The phrase, taken from the closing portion of the Tablet, gave the test by which any religion — including the Bahá'í Faith itself — was to be evaluated. The purpose of religion, the Master wrote, is the transformation of the human heart. The fruit of that transformation is the appearance, in visible community, of love between the believers; of justice in the dealings of the believers with the larger world; of peace among the formerly contending factions of the human family.

Outward observances — prayers, fasts, festivals, sacraments — are valuable to the extent that they cultivate the inward conditions on which the visible fruit depends. They are not valuable in themselves. A community whose members observe the outward forms with great precision but whose dealings with each other and with their neighbours are marked by quarrel, by suspicion, by greed, or by prejudice, has not understood what the religion is for. Such a community, the Master writes, has the form of religion but not its substance.

The Tablet enlarges the principle into the ecumenical view the Bahá'í Faith has consistently held. The same essential test applies to every religion. The Christian community is to be judged not by the ornament of its cathedrals but by the love among its members. The Jewish community is to be judged not by the punctilious observance of its festivals but by the justice of its dealings. The Muslim community, the Hindu, the Buddhist, the Bahá'í — every one of these is to be measured against the same standard.

The closing benediction of the Tablet asks the believer to take the standard into his own life and not to apply it first to others. The serious examination of conscience that the Master proposes is, before anything else, an examination of the believer's own heart and the believer's own community. The proper measure of a Bahá'í, in the Master's understanding, is whether the love of God has visibly produced in him the love of his neighbour.

Source: 'Abdu'l-Bahá, Selections from the Writings of 'Abdu'l-Bahá (Bahá'í World Centre, 1978), Tablet on the purpose of religion. Public domain text from Project Gutenberg eBook #19287.

'Abdu'l-Bahá. (1978). *Selections from the Writings of 'Abdu'l-Bahá*. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/19287/pg19287-images.html