 Hello, Paul friends. Very nice to be here. I should begin with a bit of a confession about this topic, which is when I first approached the Association for Baha'i Studies and suggested it, I did so with a fair bit of hesitation and trepidation for a number of reasons. The main reason being, if we just think for a moment about the writings of the holy figures, the writings of Shoghi Effendi, the writings of House of Justice that are relevant to this topic, it is so vast, it is so extensive that in a short period of time or even in a few days or even in a whole course, we would just be scratching the surface. And indeed, it's impossible in these few minutes this morning to explore those primary sources with any depth. I mean, if you just think about the terms that would be relevant to this question that we know from the writings, Baha'i Theocracy, the Union of Civil and Political and Spiritual Authority, or Baha'u'llah's statements concerning his preoccupation being with the hearts and minds as opposed to the governments of the world. These are all relevant to this question, and they complicated to a great degree. There's many layers of complexity that we'd have to explore to get into those writings and any seriousness. And think about the areas of approach that are relevant, whether it's theology, law, governance, sociology, all of these fields have a bearing on this question. So I really wasn't sure when I gave the title to this talk what I would say or how it approach it. But I think the Association for Baha'i Studies recognized that this topic is a topic of growing discourse and discussion within the Baha'i community and of growing importance. And I think it's for that reason to think about what is being said about this topic at this point in time and then to reflect on ways of speaking about it and approaching it is really what we want to do in these few minutes. And when I say it's a growing topic of discussion, I really mean that in the last 10 to 15 years, we see an increasing number of academics and scholars and secondary pieces of literature being written on this subject, usually labeled church and state in the Baha'i faith. And I should just say I named my talk church and state in the Baha'i faith because this phrase keeps popping up. But I also named a church and state in the Baha'i faith so that we can reject that phrase because I think it's an improper phrase. So you can all take a black mark and cross it out of the program at the end, if you agree. If you don't agree, keep it there. I don't care. But when I say it's an increasing discourse and we see more and more discussion of it, we should take a moment and explore why. And I think there's three reasons why this subject is increasingly being discussed. And the first and the most important is the release of the Katabiyag Das about 13, 14 years ago. I was a teenager at that time and I remember the great excitement and anticipation in this official translation being released to the world. And it's important to think about the significance of what occurs and how we approach the faith and think about the faith when you look at it through laws and a book of laws and how that can encourage a different type of discussion and reflection. Because all of a sudden you have clear understanding or clear statements in complete form of the criminal laws, for example, that Bahá'u'lláh himself enunciated. And all of a sudden we begin to think to ourselves, who is he speaking to? Is he speaking to the world as a whole? Are these to be applicable to all? If so, how? And what institutions would apply them? And in what way? So naturally these questions about social ordering begin to increase more and more when the Katabiyag Das was more widely disseminated. I should just say for myself, I was a university student at that time and I was a very obnoxious and fanatical Baha'i at those days. And I used to, in no matter what course I was taking, no matter what topic it was, I would insert quotes from the Baha'i faith in everything. And I was very aggressive with this and it caused me all sorts of problems, particularly because I was a film study student. And I ended up writing some of the strangest papers one can ever imagine. I remember one that was about Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange and it used Baha'i's Katabiyag Han throughout it. And I was pulled over by the teacher, she was very concerned about me because she just didn't know what was going on. But I got an A on the paper and everything worked out okay. But the reason I'm saying that is at that time in my obnoxious fanaticism, it was around that time that the Katabiyag Das was released and it was really that release that led me to law school and then into doctoral studies. It gave a focus and a direction to the kinds of interest in exploring the Baha'i faith from a more academic perspective that I had. So that's the first reason why there's increasing discussion of this issue is that with the release of the laws we naturally explore and ruminate on our institutions and their roles and the roles of those laws. The second reason why there's increasing discussion of this topic I would suggest is to use the phrase we're all familiar with, the emergence from obscurity of the Baha'i faith. And it's not that the emergence from obscurity necessarily poses new questions for the community, but what it does is raise the expectation of answers from others and responses from the world at large. And I'll give a very sensitive, very public example right now. I'm living in Canada right now and we're in San Francisco which is the hotbed of this discussion in the United States. In Canada, in the past year, the laws of marriage have changed and same sex marriage is now legal. And in fact, it is, I won't get into the legal niceties of the issue, but in essence it's a constitutional norm of Canada. Now that raises, has raised questions for the Canadian Baha'i community because of the exposure and knowledge the public has of the Baha'i community of what is the Baha'i position on this, this very heated debate, this very heated discussion. How does that change in law relate to Baha'i laws? For example, in Canada, like the United States, often marriage officers, Baha'i marriage officers also fulfill civil governmental functions. How does that affect their roles if there is a conflict between Baha'i law and the law of the state and the role there to play? The questions go on and on and on. And as the emergence from obscurity occurs, these kinds of questions, the interface of Baha'i law and the law at large, are increasingly gonna come to the forefront. So that's the second reason why this issue is increasingly important. The third reason is external to the Baha'i faith and it's one that you're all familiar with which is the issue of the relationship between religion and politics, between religious law and politics, is perhaps the most explosive issue in broiling the world in our times. And the general discussion of it is rapidly transforming and rapidly changing. And we could date this change in various ways. We could talk about what we all know and probably why many of our friends aren't here yet, which is post-911 security, the rise of concern over Islamic fundamentalism and Jihad and so forth, the war in Iraq. That's one area that there's this interface about Islamic law, Islamic expectations of the world that some groups within Islam wish to see and it's causing a major discussion about the relationship between religion and politics. But we could look at the United States. In the last 34 years, there's been a religious resurgence in this country that hasn't been seen before. And it is driving a whole new discussion about the relationship between religion and politics. And we could show how generally, especially in the last century, the entire debate about religion and politics is being transformed. So that's really why this topic is one that's increasingly becoming a focus and a point of discussion in the Bahá'í community. So what are people saying? What has been said on this issue? And now I'm not speaking about the holy writings themselves. I'm talking about what Bahá'ís have written. And I think if we look fairly to the tradition within the Bahá'í community, we see very clearly that there is a tradition in the secondary literature that essentially, Bahá'u'lláh intended for Bahá'í institutions to merge into being the civil governments. I'll give you quotes. I won't say who said them. I'll just read a few of them so you get the flavor of this. Bahá'í spiritual assemblies will be the local and national spiritual assemblies, the national government. So in this sense, no distinction between church and state to use this improper phrase that we're all gonna forget about in a few minutes. Or here's another quote. Every community, village, town, city, and nation will be under the control of one of these bodies, houses of justice using the phrase that eventually the assemblies will emerge into. Another quote, this is slightly different. The houses of justice has only a legislative function. So that's a slightly different point. And then it goes on to say, it alone can enact those universal laws that apply to all mankind. And any nation refusing to submit to its commands must be immediately suppressed by a combination of all other nations. These quotes are from different periods and times. That last one was from the 1930s. The others are more contemporary. It essentially shows that the tradition within Bahá'í secondary literature is towards some form of complete merging of civil government with the Bahá'í religious institutions. Now, in recent years, there's been other voices, other ideas that have been put about about what Bahá'u'lláh intended, about what the essential relationship between Bahá'í institutions and civil institutions is in the Bahá'í faith. I'll read you some examples. Religious and state institutions are distinct organs in the body politic. This is what somebody's saying Bahá'u'lláh intended. Religious institutions should not be involved in civil administration or policy matters. The separation of church and state is a sign of human maturity and is irrevocable. Religion should be established, should have a constitutional role and at least moral support without implying the exclusive establishment of any one confession. So very briefly, in this view, it's quite different than the ones that I read to you before. This suggestion is that separation of church and state is embedded within Bahá'u'lláh's vision of the kingdom of God on earth. Now that quote I read said, nonetheless, there would still be an established religion like there is with the Anglican church in England today, for example. And there's other voices out there. Other writers who are saying Bahá'u'lláh didn't even intend that, he's intended Bahá'í institutions to be completely apart from civil government and no relationship at all. So what you obviously see is there's some recent voices that are in great tension with the tradition. Now, and we have many different answers to this question. What is the relationship between Bahá'í institutions and institutions of civil government? I'd like to zero in on one aspect of all of the quotes that I read, which is that they are all asking a question in a particular way and it's a way that drives us to a particular type of answer. They are all asking themselves or asking the question from the standpoint that we should turn to the texts, to the holy writings and within those we will find a single, intended, essential relationship between Bahá'í institutions and civil institutions. In other words, they're asking what we would say is an intentionalist question and our job is to put ourselves in the seats of somebody who is going into those writings and to divine what Bahá'u'llah's intention was, what his essential intention was in terms of how these institutions would relate to one another and that we can find it and we can articulate it and that's the answer and therefore that's how the movement of the Bahá'í community should drive towards. Now I'd like to suggest, and what I'm gonna suggest for the rest of my few minutes is that this approach and this question to ask ourselves what is the essential Bahá'í form of institutional governance in the future is the wrong question and in fact, I'm gonna suggest that this directly reflects the guidance that the Universal House of Justice gave in 1995 about how to approach this very sensitive and important issue. And there's basically two problems with the question, the question and the approach of looking for that one single intended answer. The first problem is that, and I'll explain this but I'll say it right off the top, is that it's an 11th century way of talking. That when we talk in that way, we're talking about a way of speaking that was developed and adopted 1,000 years ago in a specific context and which now we have to move beyond. Let me explain that for a minute. What happened in the 11th century? In the 11th century, and I'll be very brief in the, I'm not a historian and if there's historians here I apologize and whatever. In the 11th century in Europe, there was what has been called the papal revolution. Other historians will call it other things. What it was was the point in time when the papacy, the priestly power, decided to assert its authority over the princely power, over the prince. In other words, it was a struggle for the autonomy of the church, for ecclesiastical autonomy and the ability of the church to assert who should be the leader, when the leader should be appointed, how they should be appointed and the authority of the church in determining those things. Now, how did this revolution come about? How did they affect some degree of control? And the way they did it was through law and through creating institutions. What the church did at this time was take all of the canon law that had been developed over the years. And don't get in your mind, there's some book of canon law. There wasn't, there was little smatterings of law and little monasteries and mountains and hilltops. And what they did is they gathered it and they began to collect it into a systematic body of law and approach. And then there's a beautiful title to the most famous book that came out by a scholar named Gratian, a Christian scholar, a canon lawyer. It was called The Concordance of Discordant Canons. They took all of the discordant canon laws and they made a concordance of them. But this was extremely important because in systematizing the law and then the next step, they built institutions, courts around that law. They were establishing their jurisdictional authority by creating essentially the form of the modern state. The church in the 11th century was the first state. And what they were trying to do was subject the relationship between the political sphere and the religious sphere to a legal, jurisdictional, institutional format. We would call it today a constitutional format. In other words, they put the focus on drawing the lines and setting procedures and setting the roles and clearly delineating them and structuring the boxes. This is the prince's box and this is our box. We're the superior box, of course. And they would flesh that all out in a very structured systematic way. We would use the phrase that what they did in the 11th century was compartmentalize law and religion, religion and politics. And they put an emphasis on the line drawing and setting up procedures and laws of how to draw the lines. Now this was very distinct to Europe. This was very distinct to the Christian world. It so happens that exactly the same time in the Muslim world, a very similar phenomenon was taking place, but with a clear difference. And just to put a little background, in Islam, there's essentially two legal subsystems, two bodies of law. There's what's called thick, and I'm not an Arabist, my pronunciation's awful, I apologize. There's what's called thick, which is the human understanding of Sharia, of the law of Muhammad as articulated in the Quran. That body of law is controlled by the ulama, by the clergy. They divine it, they develop it, they express it. They control it. The second body of law which evolves is what is called siyasa, or the law of the political sphere. That's the law of the caliphs or the sultans, the rulers, whoever they were at that various time. And you had these two bodies of law. Now the ulama using thick, they used a very intentionalist methodology. In other words, each individual ulama was supposed to go into the holy text and divine what the law was on that issue. So if our chairperson came to me, and I was a cleric, which some think I may be, she came to me and asked me, how do I deal with this issue? I would go into the text, and I would derive the answer, I would say it to her, and then that answer would disappear. It wouldn't be a law that would bind anybody else. If you came to me with the same question, the next day, I would do it again. If I came up with a different answer, it's a different answer, it's the right answer for that moment in time. If she didn't like my answer, she would go to our next speaker and ask him the same question. If she got an answer she liked more, she could follow that answer. That was, you'll recall Abdu Baha's phrase about the divines developing a law, and then thousands of laws come out of it. This is what he's referring to when he's discussing that method. Now, what happened, and then the realm of the siyasa, of the political laws, was more of a legislative power, a power to pass a general law, but it was rooted in utility, in what's pragmatic. It wasn't rooted in going to the text. Well, what happened in the 11th century in the Islamic world was the ulama, and this was led by a cleric from Iraq named Alma Wardi. He wanted to assert the control of fiqh over the realm of the ruler. It's quite similar to what I was saying was happening in the 11th century in Europe. So he does this, and he essentially entrails what the ruler does in the realm of fiqh. But you'll look, if you look at the text from the time, it's completely different than what the church did, what the papacy did to control the ruler in Europe. There's no discussion of institutions. There's no discussions of procedures. There's no discussions of the ways in which this would occur. It's merely the assertion of power and control. It shows the very distinctive culture, religious culture and religious frame of reference within which this dynamic is taking place. It's that's why it's inappropriate to talk about church and state in Islam, though you'll often see this phrase. There's none of the constitutional, institutional, procedural focus, none of this focus on compartmentalization that we see in the European context. So you'll see how distinct it is what occurred. Now, when I say then, so that's the 11th century discourse. It's in the 11th century that we first begin to be able to use the phrases church and state. In this relational way. Now, what's the problem with talking in those terms today? The problem is, and many scholars outside the Baha'i community have begun to recognize this, is that what has occurred, and I'll leave the long evolution of this out, is that the 11th century way of speaking has to great detriment become the predominant way of speaking about law and religion, politics and religion. And their relationship. In the 11th century, of course, religion enshrouded all aspects of life. It infused everything. Nothing was outside of the religious context. We just had this new jurisdictional, constitutional way of speaking. But today, and what has occurred primarily in the 20th century, is that the constitutional way of speaking has become the way of speaking about how law and religion and politics relate. There was a study done in the 1970s. It was quite fascinating. I found it in a dusty bin box in the library at Harvard and I don't think it had been touched for years. But it was a study done in the 1970s by Harvard Law School and Harvard Divinity School to assess how much their two disciplines interacted with one another, knew about one another, shared approaches, shared ideas. And its conclusion was that there was a complete separation between these two disciplines. Those who were studying religion knew nothing about law and the approaches to the same questions were completely at odds with what was going in the law school. And similarly, the conclusion about what was occurring in the law school. That there was a total disjunction between these two ways of talking and thinking. The person who directed that study, and I wanna speak about him for a few minutes, was a scholar who I recommend to all Baha'is interested in these questions to read. His name, he was a professor at Harvard Law School. His name was Harold Berman. I believe he's still living. He has institutes at Emory University now. He's very elderly. And he is sort of the godfather of discussing law and religion today. And it all stemmed from a little book he wrote in 1974. And he's a very interesting man. He was of Jewish background. He converted to Catholicism. Throughout the 20th century, he was the expert for the American government on Soviet law systems. And in fact, it was his interest in Soviet law systems that also crystallized this lot of thinking about law and religion. Because he saw that in the Soviet system, they had to fall back on these religious frames of references or the appearance of religion, even though it was ideology, in order to support the legal regime. He then evolves into one of the greatest legal historians of the 20th century. And his main passion is law and religion. And what he said, and I'll read you just in a few quotes, his point. He says that law and religion are dialectically interdependent with one another. That if we look at the history and evolution of legal traditions, when law and religion become separated from one another, they collapse. They both collapse. They rely on each other. They lend each other essential powers and focuses and needs in order to survive. And what things he's talking about, he says religion and law, the two need each other. Law to give religion its social dimension and religion to give law its spirit and direction, as well as the sanctity it needs to command respect. And he goes on to describe how in any legal system, it depends on the fidelity of individuals. The legal emotions and orientations individuals have to the sense of authority, order, and respect embedded in the system for it to have any utility. And people gain those legal emotions through recognizing some projection towards the transcendent, some sense of authority and reality aspiration to something higher than the ordering that we see in this world to move individuals to respect and obey the legal systems. And he does the same reverse back to religion. So he attacks this 11th century discourse, though he doesn't say it in the words I say. He attacks this 11th century discourse. He says what has happened today is that 11th century discourse has become the only discourse and therefore all we are preoccupied with is the compartmentalization of law and religion as opposed to their interaction. And we have to totally shift to focusing on the ways in which they interact and not how they should be divided up into their boxes. That was his first point. His second point, and you'll see why Baha'is would be attracted to this, he says we also have to abandon our own way of talking because we've entered into an age of synthesis. And listen to this beautiful description, a description I find more powerful than many descriptions of ideas of unity and oneness I've read in secondary Baha'i literature. He says everywhere synthesis, the overcoming of dualism is the key to the new kind of thinking which characterizes the new era we are entering. Either or gives way to both end. Either or gives way to both end. Not subject versus object, but subject and object interacting. Not consciousness versus being, but consciousness and being together. Not intellect versus emotion or reason versus passion, but the whole man thinking and feeling. Religion with law, faith and works. Person and act, the law should judge the act, but in order to know what kind of an act it really was, the judge should put himself in the place of the person who committed it. The justice sacred or it is not just, the sacred is just or it is not sacred. He goes on, he says for the first time in history, mankind is united in a practical sense. The idea of unity is of course not new. What is new is the manifestation of this idea in the gradual emergence of world institutions, of political, economic and cultural character. Old dualisms need to be subordinated to a more complex unity, which seeks the interaction of secular and spiritual aspects of life rather than their compartmentalization. Essentially he's saying we need to change the way we're thinking from this old archaic idea of compartmentalizing, constitutionalizing the relationship between these institutions and focus on all of the various ways looking at history, anthropology, all of the disciplines about how law, religion, politics interact with each other and must interact each other in order for the progress and health of societies. I think you can all see in his writing the echoes of the theme of this entire conference, right? The idea, I mean clearly we know as we know from all of the writings that we've been encouraged to read as part of this week, the essentiality of religion to the evolution and change in humanity's fortunes. And as we heard last night, the central role of that. And Berman echoes all of this with the clear point that we need to change our way of talking, the kinds of questions that we're asking. So that's my first critique, concern about the intentionalist question and indeed the very language of church and state that we're adopting. Why are we speaking in a way that adopts these frames of reference and implies an emphasis on drawing the lines between these broad and rich experiences of law and religion that imbue all aspects of life and focusing on this narrow constitutional question. Why are we asking a question that leads us to having to give a constitutional answer, a line drawing answer in a certain way rather than framing it in a much broader, much more complex, much more richer discourse that revolves around the realities of the age of unity. Berman said, he said very clearly, he says, because of the age of unity, what he's talking about, he said what I'm talking about requires a new law and a new religion. He said, I don't know where it's gonna come from. But he said, that's what it's gonna take in order for that new way of talking to be meaningful. So that's sort of the external reason and we could go much more into that about why I'm suggesting we need to talk about this question in another way. The other approach, the other reason why I'm concerned about this question is now let's turn to Baha'i Faith itself and what we know about the Baha'i Faith and some ideas in the Baha'i Faith and think about this question from that perspective. And in order to do that, I want to introduce an idea, a concept which is deeply embedded in the Baha'i writings though we don't often verbalize it in the way that I'm gonna verbalize it. But I think it's helpful. And the idea, the concept is the idea of social meanings. Now what's a social meaning? Very simply, I wish I had PowerPoint like last night, I could put definitions up but I'm not technically competent to do such things. A social meaning is a shared association, a shared connotation. Every act, every phenomenon has meanings associated to it. And where those meanings are shared throughout the people in a particular context or society, we can call it a social meaning. It's not an individual meaning. I might look at something and say that means that to me. I might look at a chair and say isn't that a nice fridge? Now that probably isn't the meaning all of you would associate with that thing. So that my individual meaning is not a shared meaning, that's just my individual meaning. Now social meanings, these connotations that are attached to phenomena, they might be contested meaning there's disagreement about them in society at large or they might be uncontested, in which case everybody generally shares that meaning. I'll give you some examples just to make it very easy. I could have gotten up here today and said you know, I've been doing a lot of thinking about it and I think smoking is a really good thing. I think it's healthy. I think we should encourage it. Now you're all sitting there and thinking what is he talking about? He must have gone crazy. He's speaking totally out of what is the shared meaning, the social meaning now attached to the act of smoking, which is that it's unhealthy, it's wrong, it's somewhat of a stigma associated with it, right? So I've gone, there's an uncontested, largely social meaning attached to the act of smoking. And everybody shares that. Now if I had said what I had said 50 years ago, what do you think the audience would have said? Who would have said so what? Yeah, tell us something we don't know, right? Let's take another example, an example that's the heart of the church and state issue in this country, abortion. Abortion has two contested social meanings associated with it, right? Is abortion murder? Or is it an expression of a liberty value? That is completely contested in American society. And when the Supreme Court spoke on the issue in 19, I can't remember what year Roe versus Wade was, but when they spoke on the issue, they chose one of those meanings. And in doing that, they inflamed the contest over that meaning to degrees which now are yet to even be resolved in any way whatsoever. So these are what social meanings are. Now, social meanings change gradually over time through very diffuse organic methods. You can't get up and say, that's the meaning of this thing, believe it, accept it. You can't coerce someone into adopting a social meaning. I can't tell you, you have to change the way you think. And you say, oh, okay, I'll do that, thanks, right? Social meanings are a non-coercive in their truest form to change social meanings is a longitudinal, long time, very diffuse, very organic way of changing society. It's distinct, for example, from focusing on change by changing institutions, by changing forms. I mean, we could pursue social change by going and getting elected and running the government and passing different laws. Or we could pursue social change by replacing one form of government with another form of government, right? You can all think about social movements and socialists that pursue change in that kind of way. I'll tell you a story just as a bit of an aside to illustrate the difference between these two types of meanings and how they act in different ways, sorry, two types of social change, pursuing social change. This isn't just a personal story, it's a little of an aside, but I think it illustrates it well. I was living a few years ago in Canada's High Arctic. I was very happy to see somebody from Alaska. I was in Nunavut, which is in Eastern Canada, and the population of Nunavut is 90% Inuit. And never in the history of Canada have there been any Inuit lawyers. And so I was there as part of a program of training the first group of Inuit lawyers, and I was teaching them constitutional law, Canadian constitutional law, which is kind of an awkward thing to do, because you're teaching the tools of colonization to those who are oppressed, and it gets a little sensitive at times, but so be it. And it was a wonderful experience, one of the most wonderful experiences in my life. The class was 11 women and two men, and they've now finished, and they're essentially taking over the self-government area that exists up there. While I was there, a very famous, one of the most famous political philosophers in the world, who happens to be from Balliol at Oxford, which is where Shoghi Effendi was, was there and he came to guest lecture. I mean, this is, I won't name him, but he's somebody as famous as John Rawls or these types of people. He came to guest lecture and to speak to the students. And he gave a lecture, which essentially what has happened in Nunavut is that there's a self-government arrangement so that essentially the Inuit population has control over the government institutions, and this was new at the time. And he said, isn't it wonderful, isn't, I mean, I'm just paraphrasing, aren't the problems of creating a society up here of resolving the dilemmas of your people now resolved that the institutional structure has changed and you have control over it? And that was the gist of the talk. And one student, a woman, got up. She was about 40 years old. She's considered an elder in the class. She got up and this was what she responded to him with and it was very beautiful. She said, there's five generations living inside of me. There's my grandmother who lived on the land and never saw a white person. Or she probably said it's Southerner. Everyone's a Southerner to them. So never saw Southerner, which is true. Everybody is a Southerner. There was my mother who had lived on the land and then was forced into a community to live off the land in a community. There was me who has taken away from my family, put in a residential school. There's my son who I'm raising now who knows almost nothing of what it means to be Inuit. And then there's my grandchild yet unborn who will only know the ways of the South and none of the ways of the North. And she went on to say that our problem, our challenge isn't taking over institutions. That doesn't solve anything. It might solve some material issues. It might solve some of the needs and wants so we can service our people better. Our challenge is a challenge that has to occur up here about understanding the meaning of being Inuit in a global society and being able to express that. And that's what she said to him. Now he didn't understand it. But she was saying our struggle is over the meaning attached to who we are. And we need to develop a shared meaning about that. And the rest is all the material expressions that might help us, might not, whatever. It's different concepts of how meaningful social change occurs. Now in the Baha'i faith, if you look through the writings from Baha'u'llah to Abdu'l-Bahar, I could give you examples, Shoghi Effendi, House of Justice, what you constantly see is a privileging in the writings of pursuing change through changing social meanings. When Baha'u'llah, Abdu'l-Bahar, any of them engage in discussion of issues concerning the sphere at large, the world at large, whether they're very political or not, you will see that what is being argued for is the way meanings need to change. I'll give you some examples just briefly from I chose Secret of Divine Civilization because it's one of the theme books. Now Secret of Divine Civilization is a challenging book for Baha'is. It was written in 1875, as you know by Abdu'l-Bahar, at the specific injunction of Baha'u'llah. Baha'u'llah instructed Abdu'l-Bahar to write a book on the means and the cause of development and underdevelopment of the world in order to reduce the prejudices of the dogmatic conservatives, that's Baha'u'llah's words. I mean, not an official translation, but those. So Abdu'l-Bahar writes this book, and as you know, this book is very enmeshed, very embedded in the discussions that are going on in Iranian society at that time about reform, parliamentary reform, military reform, engagement with the West, engagement with modernity. Dr. Saab, it's gonna lecture on this in a smaller session in a few days, and I would highly advise you to go and listen to that. And he engages with all of these debates, and on every single point that he emphasizes, you will see that he is telling the audience that there is a different meaning you need to attach to the phenomenon you're talking about. That is his method throughout. For example, religion. He directly tackles the meanings that are being associated with religion and religious expression in the book, and especially how the Ulamal, the clerics are propounding it. And he speaks of religion in that book in terms of utility and unity. There's many phrases in the book about if religion is not the cause of unity, then we're better off without it. He's redefining the meanings that he wants the audience to attach to religion. The learned, this is actually the vast majority of the book is redefining what it means to be learned, to be a leader and to be learned. He takes the Quranic phrase, one must guard oneself, obey the commandments, oppose one's passions, defends the faith, and he redefines the meaning attached to each of those. And that's actually about the full, vast majority of the book, about 100 pages of it is preoccupied with redefining each of these aspects of what it means to be learned. Another one obviously is civilization and democracy and this is what Bahá'u'lláh did as well. Whenever you read the writings from Bahá'u'lláh about democracy, you'll see that they shift the discussion from national to international to the universal sphere in every occasion. It's in Bahá'u'lláh's letter to Queen Victoria. He does it here, true civilization will unfurl its banner when in the midmost heart of the world if he goes on and takes it to an international level. What you see in the Bahá'u'll writings is the Bahá'í method of engaging, the privileged method of engaging with the public sphere is for Bahá'u'lláhs to engage in the process of changing social meanings towards those which are conducive to the appearance of unity and diversity in all of its aspects. That is the privileged method of engaging with society at large. That's what occurs in the peace message when peace is redefined. This is what occurs in other statements from the House of Justice when they speak out on the issue. They are engaging leaders and peoples within society about how to attach social meanings to the phenomena they're discussing that are conducive to the engendering and deepening of patterns of unity and diversity within the world. This is, in fact, the privileged political method of engagement and change within the Bahá'í faith. And it's been there since Bahá'u'lláh's time. Now, how does this all relate to questions of church and state? The way it relates is that changing social meanings has many aspects to it. First, as I've said, it's a non-coercive process. It's a non-coercive method. And in that, it's emphasized in the writings because it reflects the first words that Bahá'u'lláh uttered when he declared himself in the Garden of Reswan, which had to do with the removal of the sword, the principle of the removal of the sword. And in removing the sword, it was affirming the necessity for all of these non-coercive methods of engaging with people, engaging with others, engaging with other religions. My other says, I've removed the sword. And Bahá'u'lláh's pursued change through social meanings because it is the way that is non-coercive that reflects the principle of unity itself. Social meanings is also emphasized because it is organic. Social meanings is the expression. It is the manifestation of what Bahá'u'lláh says he wants to achieve when he says the hearts and minds of people are mine. When you change the hearts and minds of people in a certain direction over time, they're gonna end up with new shared social meanings between them. And as those social meanings deepen and evolve, then it results in formal change, institutional change, legal change in the society at large. The other aspect of changed social meanings is it not only respects the idea of unity, it also respects the ideas of diversity. Social meanings change within the context within which they're operating. Unity has universal dimensions to it, but as we know, it's expressed in diverse ways. Social meanings conducive to unity may be expressed in one way in one society and in another way in another society. And therefore the types of change that they engender in terms of law or in terms of institutions is going to be somewhat different as we look at one society as opposed to another society. In the idea of social meanings you see and the idea that social meanings is how the Bahá'í faith pursues change, we see the essence of the method that is embedded within the Bahá'í writings towards change. Now social meanings also, and this is one of the last points before I reach the end, social meanings also are the framework within which Bahá'í law itself operates. And for this I want everyone just to step back for a moment and think for a second about those early believers coming out of an Islamic context which is a highly legalistic context. In the expectation that when the Imam returns, finally a legitimate ruler would be amongst us and order could finally be established the way it was attended. And into this comes the Bob first also has a great legalistic dimension to it. And then Bahá'u'lláh comes along. And what do you think believers ask for? Well one of the things he was immediately asked for was the law and he didn't give it to them. And then go further. We know from Bahá'u'lláh's own words that he did reveal some laws prior to the Agdes and then destroyed them. And then 10 years after he declares his mission the Agdes is revealed but we know that it's held back in certain ways. And then we know that what we're familiar with that it is disseminated but disseminated to the Bahá'u'lláh world as a whole not until what I was talking about earlier, 1993, 1992. This is a very strange pattern. I mean think about it, here I am. I want to live the divine life. I want to reflect the divine intent in my world in all of my actions. Yet it seems I'm being withheld from the direction of how to do it to some degree. It seems very strange. If you read what Bahá'u'lláh says and this is in the introduction to the Agdes when he explains, and we know the House of Justice and Shogay Fanny have talked about the progressive application of the laws and we see Bahá'u'lláh's words. He says, since most people are feeble and far removed from the purpose of God, therefore one must observe tact and prudence under all conditions so that nothing might happen that could cause disturbance and dissension or raise clamor among the heedless. And further, one must guide mankind to the ocean of true understanding in a spirit of love and tolerance. What's being articulated here is that there needs to be a particular architecture of social meanings, a particular set of social meanings in place in order for that law to become operational increasingly over time without being the cause of dissension and disturbance and disunity. Without that architecture of social meanings in place, the increasing application of Bahá'u'lláh would go contrary to the purpose of those laws themselves which is to reflect the reality of unity and the construction of unity in the world itself. It would do like the Supreme Court of the United States did when it spoke out on a contested issue and inflamed that debate that will see no end. All of this is to say, and this is the last point I want to make, that the issue of how Bahá'u'lláh institutions and civil governments will relate is going to evolve as these social meanings, as this organic process of social meaning change takes place. That process is in a linear process. It's a process that has diverse expressions at diverse places on the planet. In different societies, it will evolve at a different pace in a different way. And it means that there may be multiple institutional expressions of how, in the House of Justice is its words, spiritual and civil authority might be united in different contexts in different places. The entire idea of social meanings that we see in the writings and pursuing change in organic manner speaks to a wonderful openness and progressive awareness of what might be the possibilities that occur and should caution us against setting up a question that we passionately pursue that single right answer. That's often the academics game, right? They have to find the right answer. Well, we should be cautious in doing that and cutting off the openness that we see, the vast possibilities, some of them might be very beautiful and not even what we can imagine right now. And I take this point about openness. The House of Justice has, I think, echoed this, stated this beautifully. They say the fundamental principle, this was a letter on this issue of church and state, the fundamental principle which enables us to understand the pattern towards which Baha'u'llah wishes human society to evolve is the principle of organic growth. And here's the point I wanna emphasize, which requires that detailed developments and the understanding of detailed developments become available only with the passage of time. You know, there's a passage in the Qatabi Agdas, which isn't, I haven't heard it quoted that much, but it's one of my favorite passages. Baha'u'llah says, make not your deeds make not your deeds as snares, wherewith to entrap the object of your aspiration. Now that's a statement he's making about monasticism and asceticism and certain ways of pursuing the divine, which cut you off from the divine. But I always thought of it, and it kept coming back to mind as I was preparing these thoughts, in that our method of approaching issues and our method of asking questions sometimes traps us towards conclusions and towards ways of thinking that position us in a place that we don't wanna be positioned, we don't need to be positioned and cuts us off from truly the essence of what is there and what can be found and what the possibilities are. And I always take that as a caution, and I saw it as a caution here, on this question that is so vital and is very dangerous to state and to define in a very narrow way and close off our horizons about that vast revelation relevant to this topic and to begin asserting contrary to what the House of Justice has done specific essential intended structures of relationship between church and state, no longer an appropriate term between civil authority and spiritual authority and lock us into an endpoint and a drive towards an endpoint which may not actually manifest the principles which underline the revelation as a whole. That's all I wanted to say. Thank you.