The Revolt Against Materialism: The Guardian Speaks

Likewise didst thou ask whether, in this Bahá'í Dispensation, the spiritual will ultimately prevail. It is certain that spirituality will defeat materialism, that the heavenly will subdue the human, and that through divine education the masses of mankind generally will take great steps forward in all degrees of life—except for those who are blind and deaf and mute and dead.

(Selections from the Writings of Abdu'l-Baha:191)

I am continuing to review quotes from the Bahá’í Writings on materialism.  This post focuses upon statements from Shoghi Effendi.

The Guardian of the Bahá’í Faith wrote often, also in vibrant and virulent language, denouncing materialism and its attendant evils. 

Early in his Guardianship he warned: “What can control youth and save it from the pitfalls of the crass materialism of the age is the power of a genuine, constructive and living Faith such as the one revealed to the world by Bahá'u'lláh. Religion, as in the past is still the world's sole hope, but not that form of religion which our ecclesiastical leaders strive vainly to preach. Divorced from true religion, morals lose their effectiveness and cease to guide and control man's individual and social life. But when true religion is combined with true ethics, then moral progress becomes a possibility and not a mere ideal.

"The need of our modern youth is for such a type of ethics founded on pure religious faith. Not until these two are rightly combined and brought into full action can there be any hope for the future of the race." (From a letter Written on behalf of the Guardian to an individual believer, April 17, 1926,)

 “America”, he wrote in his 1938 letter, The Advent of Divine Justice, was “immersed in a sea of materialism, a prey to one of the most virulent and long-standing forms of racial prejudice, and notorious for its political corruption, lawlessness and laxity in moral standards.” (The Advent of Divine Justice: 19)    Later in that same work he stigmatized America’s materialism as “excessive and enervating.” (The Advent of Divine Justice:29)

A few years later, 1944, he wrote of the fate of religion in a materialist world: “This vital force is dying out, this mighty agency has been scorned, this radiant light obscured, this impregnable stronghold abandoned, this beauteous robe discarded. God Himself has indeed been dethroned from the hearts of men, and an idolatrous world passionately and clamorously hails and worships the false gods which its own idle fancies have fatuously created, and its misguided hands so impiously exalted. The chief idols in the desecrated temple of mankind are none other than the triple gods of Nationalism, Racialism and Communism, at whose altars governments and peoples, whether democratic or totalitarian, at peace or at war, of the East or of the West, Christian or Islamic, are, in various forms and in different degrees, now worshiping. Their high priests are the politicians and the worldly-wise, the so-called sages of the age; their sacrifice, the flesh and blood of the slaughtered multitudes; their incantations outworn shibboleths and insidious and irreverent formulas; their incense, the smoke of anguish that ascends from the lacerated hearts of the bereaved, the maimed, and the homeless.

The theories and policies, so unsound, so pernicious, which deify the state and exalt the nation above mankind, which seek to subordinate the sister races of the world to one single race, which discriminate between the black and the white, and which tolerate the dominance of one privileged class over all others—these are the dark, the false, and  crooked doctrines for which any man or people who believes in them, or acts upon them, must, sooner or later, incur the wrath and chastisement of God.” (The Promised Day is Come:113-114)

Still later, near the end of his Guardianship, he wrote of the “cesspool of materialism” (From a letter written on behalf of Shoghi Effendi to an individual believer, April 5, 1956)  And later that same year: “.. the condition that the world is in is bringing many issues to a head. It would be perhaps impossible to find a nation or people not in a state of crisis today. The materialism, the lack of true religion and the consequent baser forces in human nature which are being released, have brought the whole world to the brink of probably the greatest crisis it has ever faced or will have to face.” (From a letter written on behalf of the Guardian to the National Spiritual Assembly of the United States, July 19, 1956) (Compilations, Lights of Guidance, p. 131)

In the 1950’s again about America, he wrote that: “pervading all departments of life—an evil which the nation, and indeed all those within the capitalist system, though to a lesser degree, share with that state and its satellites regarded as the sworn enemies of that system—is the crass materialism, which lays excessive and ever-increasing emphasis on material well-being, forgetful of those things of the spirit on which alone a sure and stable foundation can be laid for human society.” (Citadel of Faith:124)

In another missive, he wrote that the spirit of the Faith was necessary for “combatting the evil forces which a relentless and all-pervasive materialism, the cancerous growth of militant racialism, political corruption, unbridled capitalism, wide-spread lawlessness and gross immorality, are, alas, unleashing, with ominous swiftness, amongst various classes of the society to which the members of this community belong.” (Citadel of Faith:154)

In 1953 he wrote to an international conference in Kampala, Uganda warning that “…the evils of a gross, a rampant and cancerous materialism” were “undermining the fabric of human society alike in the East and in the West, eating into the vitals of the conflicting peoples and races inhabiting the American, the European and the Asiatic continents, and alas threatening to engulf in one common catastrophic convulsion the generality of mankind.” (Shoghi Effendi, Messages to the Baha'i World 1950-1957, p. 135—February 1953)
Next post will conclude the review of references from the Baha'i Writings on materialism by presenting statements from the Universal House of Justice.