Baptist Joint Committee Executive Director J. Brent Walker is a panelist for The Washington Post/ Newsweek online conversation, "On Faith." Each week panelists have the opportunity to answer a question posed by Jon Meacham and Sally Quinn, the moderators of the site.
This week's question was this: Given the election-related turmoil in the Islamic Republic of Iran, can democracy ever take hold in a theocracy? How should the Obama administration respond to the disputed election and to Iran's ruling clerics?
Walker responded:
It is theoretically possible for a theocracy and democracy to coexist, but it is rarely found in practice. Theocratic Iran had a day of voting, but by all appearances the election was flawed and failed to measure up to what we expect from a vibrant democracy. Perhaps it is more accurate to say a theocracy is incompatible with liberty, especially robust religious liberty.
In a theocracy the state is controlled by religious elites for sectarian purposes. When one religion is so favored, often privileged to the exclusion of others, religious liberty of everyone is diminished or eliminated — no matter how often they vote. For example, Massachusetts Bay colony arguably was a democratic theocracy, but the Puritan leaders persecuted my Baptist forebears, most famously Roger Williams. History and contemporary realities show us that a theocracy's unrestrained friendliness to one religion violates religious liberty as much as a secular state's untempered hostility to all religion.
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