Iran is pretty much the only country on the planet that can be described as Islamically theocratic. Even a country as fundamentally Islamic as Saudi Arabia doesn't have a theocracy. I also find attempts by American Protestants to paint Shi'ites as "the more dangerous Muslims" rather ironic. When I read Hodgson's The Venture of Islam , it definitely seemed to me that over the course of history Catholicism:Protestantism::Sunni:Shiite. It seems to me that Shi'a, like Protestantism, tends to be more doctrinally firm and thus prone to schism, and schism again, and schism again, so that today it is smaller but less unified than Sunni. Sunni is much more small-c catholic, more accomodating to different cultures and personalities, so it's got a lot of the amoeba-like quality of Roman Catholicism. I have the impression that Shi'a is also like Protestantism in being more apocalyptic than Sunni (or Catholicism). In this analogy, the Wahhabis would be Opus Dei, I guess, but that may be a metaphor too far. and as far as separation of church and state is concerned, it's a pretty recent idea, not terribly popular with Christians until centuries of religious wars had persuaded most of us that we should be killing people for purely secular reasons Separation of church and state was popular with Christians around 2000 years ago and Christianity was a non-violent religion for quite a while after that time. The decision by church leaders to pervert that stance in order to become more powerful and the