Authoritarianism does not always arrive as a sudden, unmistakable scream. Sometimes it arrives as a gasp of disbelief — the moment when people realize that what they assumed could not happen here is already underway.
In Iran, the scream began decades ago. Today, state power is openly fused with religious authority: protest is treated as heresy, dissent as treason, and death as the cost of defiance. The regime kills not only to suppress opposition but to reaffirm a moral order grounded in religious extremism. Sovereignty is justified through divine sanction, and power is rendered absolute because it claims sacred legitimacy. Against this, the courage of Iranian protesters is not abstract. It is visible in shopkeepers closing their stalls, in families marching together, in young women and men demanding a future they have never been permitted. Peaceful dissent has become a last resort under conditions of severe repression and the profound corruption of both state and religion. Thousands have been killed, many more injured or imprisoned, yet resistance persists even as the regime clings to power through violence and plunder.
The United States is not Iran. And while it is not possible to claim equivalence of suffering between the United States and Iran it is necessary to conduct a structural comparison of how moral authority and state power converge to legitimize repression at different stages of authoritarian emergence. But this distinction increasingly conceals more than it clarifies.
What separates these contexts is not the presence or absence of religious extremism, but how explicitly it is named. Iran’s authoritarianism is theocratic by admission. In the United States, religiously inflected ideas shape moral and political claims while the state maintains a formal separation of church and state. Religious extremism in the U.S. does not rule through clerical decree. Instead, its influence flows through cultural communication and elite behavior: pastors, politicians, media figures, and institutional leaders frame flag, nationhood, borders, punishment, and hierarchy as morally sanctioned. These narratives circulate through sermons, policy debates, campaign rhetoric, media ecosystems, and social norms, shaping which policies feel legitimate, which populations are cast as threats, and which uses of force are publicly tolerated. By translating mainstream religious narratives into political common sense, extremism gains practical power without ever declaring a theocracy.
This structure is not unique to Christianity or Islam. Hindu nationalism in India, Buddhist extremism in Myanmar, Jewish religious nationalism in Israel, and biblical literalism in Western politics all demonstrate the same pattern: religious identity fused with state power, diversity recoded as danger, and violence framed as moral necessity. The theologies differ. The logic does not. In each case, politically moralized authority is used to decide whose rights count and whose do not.
The U.S.–Iran comparison is unsettling because it reveals the same underlying structure at different stages. State violence is not ethically measured by body count. This is not about equivalence of scale or suffering. Rather, what matters is intent, precedent, and direction of travel. A threshold is crossed when lethal force is framed not as a tragic political failure but as a justified necessity — when violence becomes morally defensible rather than politically accountable.
Iran’s violence is explicit. America’s is procedural. In Iran, sovereignty announces itself through religious law and overt coercion. In the United States, force is administered through broad statutory authority, executive orders, and agency discretion, often operating ahead of meaningful judicial review. Violence appears not as ideology but as enforcement: lawful, authorized, necessary. Yet this procedural framing does not restrain power; it legitimates it. By dispersing responsibility across institutions and insulating action through legality, repression becomes harder to name. This is not a gentler logic than Iran’s — it is the same logic translated into administrative form, where harm is justified not by God but by law.
Liberal defenses point to courts, elections, and protest rights. But authoritarianism rarely begins by abolishing these forms; it works by hollowing them out. Law becomes a tool for moral discrimination and exclusion. Accountability remains formal while eroding in practice. Pluralism — the recognition that diverse beliefs and identities are entitled to equal protection — is affirmed rhetorically while selectively suspended in enforcement. Some people, typically those with recognized status, majority identity, or social privilege, remain fully protected by law and institutional accountability. Others are rendered conditional, their safety dependent on compliance, documentation, or political usefulness. Others become precarious — detainable, deportable, even killable with impunity or plausible deniability — guided by narratives of purity and threat that religious extremism produces everywhere. Different gods, same logic: sacred or moralized authority deciding whose lives matter.
Across both contexts — in Tehran and on U.S. streets — people mobilize not because dissent is easy, but because there is nowhere else to go. Protesters are the living measure of what is at stake. Their courage marks the points at which power reveals itself most clearly: the moments when the state learns it can harm, justify, and proceed without consequence.
Here lies the brutal irony. The United States condemns Islamic extremism abroad while refusing to name the Christian-inflected moral absolutism that shapes its own governance. One form of religious power is recognized, feared, and monitored. The other is normalized, reframed as law, order, or national interest, allowing moral authority to operate without accountability as theology.
The final test is simple and unforgiving. If the killing and suppression of protesters is rightly understood as evidence of authoritarian consolidation in Iran, then similar acts carried out by U.S. authorities under executive and statutory power must be judged by the same ethical standard. To excuse or minimize them because the theology is Christian, nationalist, or unspoken is to fail the test.
For the United States, the lesson is immediate. Look to the courage of Iranians who have protested for decades under bullets, prisons, and executions. Their resistance was not reckless; it was necessary. Democratic survival demands vigilance now — before rights are stripped through procedure, dissent is criminalized through policy, and emergency powers normalize repression in the name of order.
References
Abrahamian, Ervand. Iran: A Modern History. Yale University Press, 2008.
Human Rights Watch. World Report 2025: Iran.
United Nations Human Rights Council. Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran, 2025.
Pew Research Center. Global Restrictions on Religion, 2024.
Sager, Emily. “Christian Nationalism and American Governance.” Journal of Religion and Politics, 2024.
United States Congress. Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), 1952.
U.S. Department of Homeland Security. ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations Overview, 2025.
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