For years American conversation about Iraq has included a refrain about how we cannot expect to create a Jeffersonian democracy on the Euphrates. 1 The warning is true: if you think about it, America itself is not really a Jeffersonian democracy either; however, Jefferson keeps coming to mind as the events in Iran unfolds. The events there seem to be a chapter in the very Jeffersonian story of the death of theocracy, or rule by clerics, and the gradual separation of church and state. In one of the last letters of his life, in 1826, Jefferson said this of the Declaration of Independence: 2 "May it be to the world what I believe it will be, the signal of arousing men to burst the chains, under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves." However strong they may be for a time, religions authorities cannot finally survive modernity. 3 And this is because one of the key features of modernity is the shift of emphasis from the privileges and power of institutions to the rights and relative autonomy of the individual. In many ways, the modem virtues are the ones we associate with democracy: a flee flow of ideas, capital and people in an ethos in which men and women are free to form their own opinions and follow the dictates of their own consciences. 4 By their very nature, religious authorities are at risk in the face of such a world, for they are founded on an un-modern and undemocratic idea. To say that religious authorities are doomed is not to argue that religion is any less important in our age. Quite the opposite! Religious faith is an intrinsic element of human experience, and religion can be the undoing of a religious establishment, for an individual's interpretation of the applications of faith to politics may well differ from the institutional interpretation. There is a deep irony at work here. 5 Religious authorities usually command the teaching of religion, but the teaching of religion can lead not to uniform public belief but to a questioning of orthodoxy, which is always a favorite activity of a new generation. The products of one world often react against the world of their parents, and yesterday's outsiders are today's insiders. The promise of theocracy has to go unfulfilled, for no one can bring sacred order to profane chaos.