While the immediate purpose of the release was to provide Bahá’í institutions and individual believers with a coherent line of discussion for their interactions with government authorities, organizations of civil society, the media and influential personalities, a collateral effect was to set in motion an intensive and ongoing education of the Bahá’í community itself in several important Bahá’í teachings. The influence of the ideas and perspectives in the document was soon making itself widely felt in conventions, publications, summer and winter schools, and the general discourse of believers everywhere.
In many respects, The Promise of World Peace may be said to have set the agenda for Bahá’í interaction with the United Nations and its attendant organizations in the years since 1985. Building on the reputation it had already won, the Bahá’í International Community became, in only a few short years, one of the most influential of the non-governmental organizations. Because it is, and is seen to be, entirely non-partisan, it has increasingly been trusted as a mediating voice in complex, and often stressful, discussions in international circles on major issues of social progress. This reputation has been strengthened by appreciation of the fact that the Community refrains, on principle, from taking advantage of such trust to press partisan agendas of its own. By 1968, a Bahá’í representative had been elected to membership on the Executive Committee of Non-Governmental Organizations affiliated with the Office of Public Information, subsequently holding the positions of chairman and vice-chairman. From this point on, representatives of the Community found themselves increasingly asked to function as convenors or chairpersons of a wide range of bodies: committees, task forces, working groups and advisory boards. During the past four years, the Community has served as executive secretary of the Conference of Non-Governmental Organizations, the central coordinating body of non-governmental groups affiliated with the United Nations.
The structure of the Bahá’í International Community reflects the principles guiding its work. It has escaped labelling as merely another special interest lobby group. While making full use of the expertise and executive resources of its United Nations Office and Office of Public Information, the Community has come to be recognized by its fellow non-governmental organizations as essentially an “association” of democratically elected national “councils”, representative of a cross-section of humankind. Bahá’í delegations to international events commonly include members appointed by various National Spiritual Assemblies who are experienced in the subject matters under discussion and who can provide regional perspectives.
This feature of the Faith’s involvement in the life of society—in which motivating principle and operating method represent two dimensions of a unified approach to issues—demonstrated its power at the series of world summits and related conferences organized by the United Nations held between 1990 and 1996. In that period of nearly six years, the political leaders of the world came together repeatedly under the aegis of the Secretary-General of the United Nations to discuss the major challenges facing humankind as the twentieth century drew to a close. No Bahá’í can review the themes of these historic gatherings without being struck by how closely the agenda mirrored major teachings of Bahá’u’lláh. It seemed befitting that the centenary of His ascension should occur at the midway point in the process, endowing the meetings, for Bahá’ís, with spiritual meaning beyond merely their stated goals.
Among those gatherings, the World Conference on Education for All in Thailand (1990), the World Summit for Children in New York (1990), the United Nations Conference on the Environment in Rio de Janeiro (1992), an anguished and chaotic World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna (1993), the International Conference on Population in Cairo (1994), the World Summit for Social Development in Copenhagen (1995), and the particularly vibrant Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing (1995),[141] stand out as highlights of this process of global discourse on the problems afflicting the world’s peoples. At the concurrent non-governmental conferences, Bahá’í delegations, made up of members from a wide range of countries, had the opportunity to place issues in a spiritual as well as social perspective. Evidence of the trust the Community enjoys among hundreds of its fellow non-governmental organizations was the fact that Bahá’í delegations were repeatedly selected by their peers for inclusion among the handful of member groups to be accorded the much prized opportunity to address the conferences from the podium, rather than merely distributing printed copies of presentations.
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During the century’s concluding years, many National Spiritual Assemblies won impressive victories of their own in the field of external affairs. Two outstanding examples suggest the character and importance of these advances. The first was achieved by the National Spiritual Assembly of Germany, where the nature of Bahá’í elected bodies had been challenged by local authorities as being technically incompatible with the requirements of German civil law. In upholding the appeal of the Local Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of Tübingen against this ruling, Germany’s constitutional High Court concluded that the Bahá’í Administrative Order is an integral feature of the Faith and as such is inseparable from Bahá’í belief. The High Court justified its taking jurisdiction in the case by adducing evidence that the Bahá’í Faith itself is a religion, a judgement with far-reaching implications in a society where church opponents have long sought to misrepresent the Cause as a “cult” or “sect”. The definitive language of the judgement merits repetition:
...the character of the Bahá’í Faith as a religion and of the Bahá’í Community as a religious community is evident, in actual every day life, in cultural tradition, and in the understanding of the general public as well as of the science of comparative religion.[142]
It was left to the Brazilian Bahá’í community to win a victory in the field of external affairs that is so far unique in Bahá’í history. On 28 May 1992, its country’s highest legislative body, the Chamber of Deputies, held a special session to pay tribute to Bahá’u’lláh on the centenary of His ascension. The Speaker read a message from the Universal House of Justice and representatives of all of the parties rose, one by one, to acknowledge the contribution to human betterment of the Faith and its Founder. A moving address by one prominent deputy described the Bahá’í teachings as “the most colossal religious work ever written by the pen of a single Man”.[143]
Such appreciations of the nature of the Cause and of the work it is trying to accomplish—coming as they did from the highest judicial and legislative levels, respectively, of two of the world’s major nations—were victories of the spirit as important in their way as those won in the teaching field. They help to open those doors through which Bahá’u’lláh’s healing influence begins to touch the life of society itself.