Series: Unpacking the Universal House of Justice Letter, Part 3
There’s a peculiar emptiness that follows every new “great cause.” History is littered with movements that rushed in to rescue us from the old gods only to enthrone new ones—ideologies cloaked in the language of hope, and burnished by our longing for order, justice, or progress. Each promises wholeness. Few deliver anything but a new fracture, another cycle of division and despair.
For those of us animated by the quest for truth, this burn-and-turn cycle is as familiar, and as heartbreaking, as the tide. We rise and fall, placing our trust in grand projects—a nation, a leader, an ideology, a “revolution”—only to recoil at their betrayal.
The Age of Ideological Idolatry
The Universal House of Justice is unsparing in its critique of this universal human pattern. In ages past, “false gods” were carved of wood or stone. In our own, they come in more sophisticated form. Political dogmas, economic systems, even scientific materialism—their “altars” line our social feeds, shape our debates, fill our imaginations.
As One Common Faith frames it:
“If, as the events of the twentieth century provide sad and compelling evidence, the natural expression of faith is artificially blocked, it will invent objects of worship however unworthy—or even debased—that may in some measure appease the yearning for certitude. It is an impulse that will not be denied.”
The passionate devotion—and occasionally, the violence—unleashed by totalizing ideologies in the last century is not unlike that which animated religious wars in centuries past. The “divine” is transferred, but the pattern endures. Our objects of worship shape us, whatever their name.
Fragmented Truth: When Right Becomes Wrong
The temptation of all such false gods is that they take a sliver of the truth—a principle, a grievance, a hope—and inflate it to the size of the Absolute. The search for justice dissolves into the machinery of the “people’s state.” The dream of freedom contracts into the solipsism of the market. National belonging, a deep human impulse, curdles into xenophobic exclusion. Technological optimism feeds the illusion that the right code, the right tool, or the right app will fix what ails the heart.
We are buckled with movements, left and right, that offer membership in exchange for belief. They generate real energy—sometimes even courage, community, shared sacrifice. But their truth is always partial, brittle—liable to fracture under pressure, or to morph into its opposite with a change in the weather.
Bahá’u’lláh says it plainly:
“Witness how the world is being afflicted with a fresh calamity every day ... Its sickness is approaching the stage of utter hopelessness, inasmuch as the true Physician is debarred from administering the remedy, whilst unskilled practitioners are regarded with favor, and are accorded full freedom to act.…”
—Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, XVI
The “remedy” here is not a better ideology, but a return to the Word of God—to an allegiance that transcends any one virtue, party, or platform.
Hijacked Energies, Hollow Victories
Every ideology that has claimed the moral or spiritual energies of a population—whether the grand ambitions of communism, the nationalist fever dreams of our own age, or the cold calculus of market fundamentalism—has reaped both devotion and devastation. The world is full of survivors of such projects, each carrying the wounds of promises broken and purposes betrayed.
“But these are just secular matters,” some may protest. Yet the Universal House of Justice insists that the root is spiritual:
“All things must needs have a cause, a motive power, an animating principle. These souls and symbols of detachment have provided, and will continue to provide, the supreme moving impulse in the world of being.”
—Bahá’u’lláh, Gleanings, LXXXI
Movements, whether religious or secular, succeed only in proportion to the spiritual energy they can summon. Cut off from the source, they rely on human will alone. And human will, magnificent as it is, always falls short when the stakes are largest.
A Confession and a Warning
I have stumbled, at times, into the arms of these false gods myself. From the heady excitement of being part of a “cause” to the subtle pleasure of group consensus, it is intoxicating to believe that some new system or slogan will finally do the trick. I have watched friends—good people—pour their gifts into parties, platforms, and crusades, only to become part of the underlying problem, a symptom of which they were hoping to solve.
Yet, far from dismissing the longing beneath these efforts, Bahá’í teachings affirm that FAith - belief in something bigger than ourselves is the subtlest affirmation of our true nature - a necessary and inextinguishable urge of the species—”an impulse that will not be denied.”
If faith is denied its proper channel, it will redirect itself somewhere—into politics, entertainment, family, or even the pursuit of self-perfection. But the momentum toward worship—the hunger for total meaning—remains.
Wholeness—Or More Fragmentation?
The world is not lacking energy, or commitment, or even (in some cases) vision. What it lacks is the ability to hold complexity—to refuse the seductions of partial truth and to breathe into the larger meaning.
That, as One Common Faith notes, is the work only spirit can perform:
“Through spiritual empowerment brought by Bahá’u’lláh’s revelation the Divine standards can be appreciated, not as isolated principles and laws, but as facets of a single, all-embracing vision of humanity’s future, revolutionary in purpose, intoxicating in the possibilities it opens.”
At the heart of every true revelation is the insistence: do not worship the part—seek the whole.
The big question:
Will humanity settle for partial truth, or rise to the invitation to wholeness embedded in all true religion?
Invitation: What Are Your “False Gods”?
It may be tempting to read this as a condemnation of one group or one era. But the gods and “isms” of our own hearts are often the hardest to detect. Where do you—or your community—substitute a fragment of truth for the whole? What claims your deepest loyalty? What, if anything, gets sacrificed in the name of a “greater good”?
Have you found a principle, a community, a career become “ultimate”—and then suddenly, painfully, not enough?
Share your experiences, reflections, or questions in the comments, or send them privately if you prefer. Have you seen an ideology hijack energies once devoted to faith? What did it cost? What did it teach you about your own heart?
Next week, we move from the diagnosis of partial truth to the possibility of something more: wholeness—not as an abstraction, but as a living synthesis, a unity that only spirit can achieve.
Let’s let go of the partial, and seek what’s whole.
All quotations from Bahá’u’lláh, the Universal House of Justice, and One Common Faith are presented in their exact, authorized form. The exploration continues with “Wholeness, Not Fragmentation: Why Only Spirit Can Unite.”
