One Tree, Many Fruits

Baha'i writings call the oneness of humanity the principle around which all the others turn. It asserts that the human race is a single organism whose members share one nature and one home, and that the distinctive work of the present age is to make that unity real in a just and peaceful world civilization. Baha'u'llah put it in images that Baha'is return to constantly: "Ye are the fruits of one tree and the leaves of one branch," and "The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens." The principle is not a plea for tolerance between separate groups but a claim that the separateness is, at the deepest level, unreal. From it the Baha'i community derives concrete commitments: the elimination of every form of racial, national and religious prejudice, the full equality of women and men, universal education, and the building of institutions capable of holding a united world together.

'Abdu'l-Baha, Baha'u'llah's son and appointed interpreter, carried the teaching directly into a segregated United States during his 1912 tour, publicly urging interracial marriage and unity between Black and white Americans as a practical test of the principle rather than an abstract ideal, addresses historians of the American Baha'i community cite as unusually direct for the period. The Baha'i administrative order has since pressed the same principle institutionally, notably through the Baha'i International Community's advocacy at the United Nations since the organization's founding; critics outside the tradition have sometimes read the oneness teaching as a utopian universalism that understates real cultural and political difference, a charge Baha'i writers generally answer by distinguishing organic unity from imposed uniformity.