This paper examines the views of two Shi‘i voices in Lebanon on the multi-confessional state and its sectarian system. It compares the discourse of the jurist Muhammad Mahdi Shams al-Din with that of Hizbullah from the 1980s until the beginning of the twenty-first century. The late Shi‘i Lebanese jurist Muhammad Mahdi Shams la-Din was deeply engaged during his career with the sectarian system and the structural injustices that it engendered. Revisiting, during the 1990s, his earlier works on “Consultative Majority-Based Democracy” and his concept of Islamic government: wilayat al-umma, he investigated the idea of a civil government in Lebanon that goes beyond the sectarian power-sharing arrangements and introduces reforms that would divide the power between Christians and Muslims equally, while religious institutions would flourish in the realm of civil society and simultaneously be excluded from the governmental realm. Hizbullah, a Shi‘i political movement that presently wields extensive power over Shi‘ites, occupies a central role in politics, and exercises control over state institutions, has shifted its approach to the Lebanese state and the sectarian system: Since the early 1990s the party renounced its militant Islamic ideology in favor of pragmatic integration in the Lebanese system, shedding away its reservations against the perceived ‘illegitimacy’ of these institutions because of Christian hegemony. Consequently, it forged alliances with ideologically opponent Christian Maronite leaders. However, since 2005, Hizbullah has been portrayed by its critics as challenging the Lebanese state and exercising militarized political hegemony over other Lebanese confessional groups. By comparing the two discourses, the paper traces the changes within the Shi‘i political discourse and addresses questions such as why did Shams al-Din defend the war-ending agreement of Ta’if in 1989, despite its institutionalization of sectarian arrangements while Hizbullah opposed it? And how does Shams al-Din’s alliance with the state officials and call for giving political guarantees to Christians differ, in essence, from Hizbullah’s alliance with Christian leaders? How does Shams al-Din’s call for Shi‘i national integration differ from Hizbullah’s participation in political institutions? The paper aims to bring out the discursive differences between Hizbullah’s pragmatically expedient approach to the state and to Christians, which varies between co-optation and coercion, with the juristic discourse of Shams al-din, who sought to theorize – beyond a sectarian state – a government that manages sectarian tensions in a multi-confessional society without atomizing religion in the public sphere, and without disrupting the delicate balance among the various rival confessional groups.