{"id":545,"date":"2009-07-06T11:30:56","date_gmt":"2009-07-06T11:30:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/progressiverevival\/2009\/07\/the-clerics-of-iran-are.html"},"modified":"2009-07-06T11:30:56","modified_gmt":"2009-07-06T11:30:56","slug":"the-clerics-of-iran-are","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/2009\/07\/the-clerics-of-iran-are.html","title":{"rendered":"The Separation of Mosque and State"},"content":{"rendered":"

The clerics of Iran are not of one mind on the recent Iranian election and voter fraud.\u00a0 In fact they are deeply divided.\u00a0The New York Times reported that in the religiously important town of Qum there is a group of clergy called the Association of Researchers and Teachers of Qum\u00a0who issued a statement defying Ayatolla Ali\u00a0Khamenei<\/a> and his candidate Ahmadinejad.<\/p>\n

\n

“This crack in the clerical establishment, and the fact they are siding with the people and Moussavi, in my view is the most historic crack in the 30 years of the Islamic republic,” said Abbas Milani, director of the Iranian Studies Program at Stanford University<\/font><\/a>. “Remember, they are going against an election verified and sanctified by Khamenei.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This is good news for all of us who support the democratic process in Iran.\u00a0 It is also good for those who question whether or not religious leaders of any type should exert influence in politics.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

Those who argue for a religious absence from politics come from two camps: one religious and one political.\u00a0 The first is the religious\u00a0people who\u00a0contend that politics\u00a0are too icky for the purity of the religious endeavor\u00a0and that the two spheres of life – the religious and the political – should not touch lest the religious part be sullied.\u00a0 This partition of life is not realistic. Any authentic religious practice involves more than the just the personal realm, it also is concerned with the social and how humans relate to one another (the love your neighbor is half of fhe two\u00a0great commandments given by Jesus, the other half being love God.)\u00a0 Keeping our religion free of politics leaves one\u00a0with a small and self involved religious practice indeed.<\/p>\n

The second objection comes from those in politics who lament that religious people desire to say something in the public square that stems out of their particular religious convictions.\u00a0 This irks purely secular politicos because they are not sure that this is fair pool.\u00a0 They don’t know how to respond to someone who is making a religious claim in the public square.\u00a0 But these objections are a historical – religious people have always made claims upon how we want our politics to work – the civil rights movement is one obvious example.\u00a0 Religious people will make claims upon the political space – and that is a good thing.<\/p>\n

The only exception to the positive blending of politics and religion is when the political and the religion become so intertwined as to be indistingushable one from another and where\u00a0political and religious debate is curtailed.\u00a0 This is called a theocracy and it is bad for both politics and religion – and until recently that was the situation in Iran.\u00a0 Theocracies are hard to criticize or oppose because anyone who dares to do so is not only questioning the state, they are also said to be questioning God.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

The reality in Iran now is that dissenting voices from the clergy have\u00a0seriously weakened the theocracy of Iran.\u00a0 Let us pray that the clergy will be bold and that\u00a0by displaying disagreement among religious people that the Iranian\u00a0theocracy will fall and in its place will rise\u00a0an Iranian\u00a0democracy that welcomes poltical and religious participation from all its people.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The clerics of Iran are not of one mind on the recent Iranian election and voter fraud.\u00a0 In fact they are deeply divided.\u00a0The New York Times reported that in the religiously important town of Qum there is a group of clergy called the Association of Researchers and Teachers of Qum\u00a0who issued a statement defying Ayatolla…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-545","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-international-relations","category-religion-in-the-public-square"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Separation of Mosque and State - Progressive Revival<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/2009\/07\/the-clerics-of-iran-are.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Separation of Mosque and State - 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Paul B. Raushenbush is the moderator of the Progressive Revival blog and the Associate Dean of Religious Life at Princeton University. .An ordained American Baptist minister, Rev. Raushenbush speaks and preaches at colleges, churches and institutes around the country including the College of Preachers at the National Cathedral in Washington D.C., The Chautauqua Institute in upstate New York, and the New America Foundation. Rev. Raushenbush has served at Seattle First Baptist Church, the Presbyterian Chaplaincy at Columbia University and as College and Young Adult Minister at The Riverside Church in New York City. He has appeared on ABC World News Tonight and is a repeated guest on CNN. He has been quoted in The New York Times and The Washington Post and is a contributing editor for Beliefnet.com. His first book, Teen Spirit: One World, Many Faiths (HCI) was released in the Fall of 2004. He is the editor of the 100th Anniversary edition of Walter Rauschenbusch\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s book Christianity and the Social Crisis \u00e2\u20ac\u201c In the 21st Century (HarperOne). His work at Princeton includes strengthening the interfaith community on campus. He is the Co-Director of the Program on Religion, Diplomacy and International Relations at The Liechtenstein Institute on Self Determination at Princeton University. Rev. Raushenbush studied religion at Macalester College before attending Union Theological Seminary in New York City where he graduated with distinction.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/author\/praushenbush"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/545","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=545"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/545\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}