Pretty interesting:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/17/magazine/17IRAN.html?pagewanted=1&th&emc=th
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"Many young Iranians I talked to were so hostile to clerical rule that I found myself cautioning them against going too far in the other direction. Many seemed in favor of a secular republicanism in which religion was excluded from politics altogether, as it was in Turkey during the rule of that country’s modernizing dictator, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. As Isaiah Berlin warned, however, if you bend the twig too far, it will snap back in your face. In Turkey, the reaction against the extremes of Ataturk’s secularism has brought an Islamic government, though admittedly a moderate one, to power. Secularism, I argued, doesn’t mean crushing religion, it just means creating a neutral space in which arguments between religious and secular people are settled by evidence, not dogma.
‘‘Like in the United States?’’ a bright female student asked me with a coy smile. In the United States, I said, God is never out of the public sphere. The furor over the end of Terri Schiavo’s life and the Bush administration’s restrictions on federal financing for stem cell research, among other things, make that obvious. From their vantage point inside a theocracy, young Iranians long for ‘‘a wall of separation’’ between religion and government, as Thomas Jefferson called it, and they told me they found it puzzling, even disappointing, that religion and politics are not actually separate in the United States. I tried to explain that keeping God in his place in a democracy is work that never ends."