In the course of the recent 2009 election crisis in Iran, a young woman by the name of Neda Agha-Soltan was shot down by a government agent. The person who killed her fired their weapon at her from a distance. An unarmed woman in white running shoes, surrounded by loved ones and other protesting citizens, lost her life trying to change the course of her nation's history. As those around her laid her down, following the shot, you could see her eyes fixed to the right, basically staring into the path of the camera which recorded her violent and senseless death. This image of Ms. Agha-Soltan pierced the souls of many around the world, and it seems, at least in part, that her family and friends' grief now becomes the world's grief.

The speed and sophistication with which news and information travels through videos, still pictures, phone messages, and emails has meant that covering up such sad events has been impossible for those who have attempted to do so. The official death toll acknowledged by the Iranian government so far is twenty, and while Aaron Rhodes of the International Campaign for Human Rights has remarked that the number may be higher, we must all agree that even one death is one too many.

One of the striking things the world also saw in this crisis, besides the tragedy which unfolded on the streets, is who exactly in Iran holds the absolute and sovereign political power. The speech of Ayatollah Ali H. Khamene'i, the supreme leader in Iran, reminded us that there are nations in this world who continue to operate under the constitutional model of a theocracy. In a theocracy, ideally, God is supposed to be the ultimate civil authority for the people, with human functionaries carrying out God's justice on earth.

Does any reasonable person - whether agnostic, atheist, or person of faith - actually think that we can attribute responsibility to God for the violence perpetrated against the Iranian protestors? Of course, God had nothing to do with it; anyone can see it was merely the desperate act of people who claim to speak on God's behalf. Why were they desperate? It seems it may have been because they saw their own political regime threatened by the popularity of Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the more liberal of the two front running candidates. When combined with the palpable dissatisfaction many felt towards Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, such an environment may have led to the religious political leadership feeling they were being backed into the proverbial corner, and thus the impetus behind the tragic lashing-out.

Of course, Europe, it must be remembered, was also run by a brutal theocracy for over one-thousand years. The Christian Church's infamous atrocities against people, burning, torturing, and killing their way to Augustine's ethereal City of God on earth, ultimately led to the long and arduous Protestant Reformation. This, in turn, was followed by the inexorable rise of the republican state and the eventual but dilatory expansion of human rights. The seventeenth century's Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) and subsequent Peace of Westphalia (1648) signalled both the death knell for the political sovereignty of the Christian Church and the beginning of the development for the sovereign state. While the result was positive, pursuant to the slow advancement of human rights and sovereignty for the state, the process was not. The death toll which could be attributed to the Christian Church of the middle ages and early modern period would easily be in the tens of millions. All this to say that there is, truly, nothing new under the sun.

What seems clear from a brief consideration of these historically-separated realities is that the violence, in both cases, was a result of religious functionaries executing sovereign political power. The recent tragedy in Iran reminds us of just how wrong a confluence of politics and religion can go. While we grieve the loss of those who died, we are also reminded how chillingly awry any society can go when religious leaders are allowed to steer the political machine. One can only hope that Iran's religious leaders will one day be subject to the political will of the Iranian people. The latter, in aggregate, are the only justifiable sovereign voice in Iran, or any other country for that matter.