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Theocracy kills religion

By TaxedBrass · 2026-09-17 17:35:43

It has become popular among certain circles of the authoritarian right to advocate for the merging of church and state. This is certainly not a new inclination, as, the observant will have long now noticed, very few of the popular inclinations of the authoritarian right are, but it is regardless a position which increasingly finds itself in no shortage of advocates. It seems, then, pertinent to offer, for the consideration of all adherents to the broader right-wing, the arguments raised in this essay against the formation of theocratic governance, which I will define, for the purposes of this argument, as meaning the political order in which religious authority and coercive political authority are institutionally fused, or in which religious doctrine receives coercive legal authority because of its standing as religious doctrine.

It must firstly be stated plainly that, while one can compel religious behavior, one will never succeed in compelling religious belief. The state can force any manner of attendance, prayer, dress, or ritual, all at gunpoint or under threat of fine or imprisonment, or any other form of duress, but it cannot ever force authentic faith, awe, repentance, or love of God, just as a kidnapper may force thoughtless physical actions out of their victim, but cannot, through any degree of violence, succeed in directly forcing any form of mental labor. The kidnapper may attempt to coerce his victim towards some mental labor through his physical actions, he may persist in unrelentingly torturing his hostage until he extracts whatever particular fruit of their mind that he had sought, but it ultimately remains the exclusive ability of his victim to grant him that access. A mind is a locked chest, and only its owner may ever hold the key. The result of theocratic law, then, tends to be outward conformity contrasted with inward unbelief. A society of actors performing false reverence, not unlike what was seen in Soviet Moscow, wherein Politburo members would clap for minutes on end after a speech by Stalin, not due to some reverence for him, but out of fear of being labeled a dissident.

So it becomes evident that coercion turns worship into obedience. Voluntary submission to a believed divine being indeed holds great spiritual meaning. In contrast, however, submission because a government threatens punishment is then only compliance like any other, of the same spiritual significance as adhering to a speed limit, which is to say an action of zero spiritual significance whatsoever. The theocratic state, then, in some ways, neuters reverence to only truly permit reverence of the state, making impossible reverence of the Deity. The outward act may in fact still be identical, while its moral and spiritual character becomes radically different, and the ceiling of what the spiritual character can be is correspondingly lowered greatly.

The sacred consequently also becomes associated with the police power of the state. Instead of "God commands this!", the practical experience of the hostage worshipper becomes "the Government commands this in God's name!" Religion consequently becomes psychologically associated with fines, prisons, bureaucrats, and political authority, again lowering what the divine is to be earthly in nature; people do not act out of fear of damnation, but out of fear of judgement by their fellow man. It turns government from an institution spelled with a lowercase to one spelled with a hard uppercase, and spoken about with a mandated reverence. Consequently, this means that theocracy kills the god-fearing man, and replaces him with the man-fearing man, which is a man for whom true reverence is an impossibility.

I expect one may, fairly, ask for a concrete case, since the claim is abstract. Consider the Islamic Republic of Iran, whose morality police have for decades patrolled the streets enforcing religious dress. The veil, meant to be an act of modesty before God, under patrol became instead an act of caution before the patrol. During the protests of 2022, then, women removing and burning their headscarves were not, broadly, making a theological statement about modesty; they were instead making a political statement about the state, because the state had already made the scarf a political object. Anonymous surveys (which are the only honest surveys one can conduct in that sort of place) suggest that sincere religiosity in Iran sits far below what official figures and public behavior would imply. That is the neutering in practice, the ritual persisting while the devotion it was meant to express has long since died.

Some will object to the example of Iran. It will be said by these individuals in objection that most who today wish to join church and state have no desire to force anyone into a pew. That they wish only that their officials be Christian and that the people not be permitted to do evil. This is an initially gentler proposal, but ultimately not substantively different in kind. The first half of it, that officials ought be Christian, is either a voluntary preference of the citizenry, in which case it requires no fusion of church and state at all, and requires merely persuasion, or instead it is a legal requirement, in which case it is a religious test for office, which converts profession of faith into a job qualification, and job qualifications are the sort of thing men learn to fake. The second half hinges entirely on the word "evil." If evil means violent impositions upon other men, then any just government already forbids it, Christian or not, and nothing theocratic is being proposed. If evil means sin as such, including those sins which harm no one but the sinner, then the state is indeed compelling religious behavior, only by prohibition rather than prescription. Forbidding a man to do what his faith forbids is of the same substance as ordering him to do what his faith commands, and it carries the same consequence: the abstention is no longer his!

Some will concede all of this and still insist that the trade is worth it, that a society of outwardly moral men, whatever their inward state, is preferable to the present one. But weigh carefully what is being purchased and with what currency. If the goal is outward order, there are secular means to it. If the goal is a more religious people, then the trade is ruinous, because it spends the very thing it seeks to acquire. One pays in faith to buy the appearance of faith. This has never been a profitable trade. The nations of Northern Europe kept established state churches for centuries, with the clergy salaried and the membership nearly universal by default, and today those same nations have some of the emptiest pews in Christendom. Meanwhile, the United States, which forbade a national establishment, became for most of its history, and remains today, one of the most devout nations in the developed world, precisely because its churches had to earn every congregant they kept. The reward of theocracy is then not a more Christian society, but at most a more Christian looking society concealing an increasingly irreligious interior.

A more careful objection, then, might hold that the danger lies not in establishment but in monopoly. The early American states, after all, did keep their own established churches, with the First Amendment then restraining only Congress, and a man who disliked his state's church could simply move to a state with a different one or with none. But look at what those limited arrangements still produced! In Massachusetts and Connecticut, Baptists and other dissenters were taxed to support ministers whose doctrine they rejected, and some had goods seized or were jailed for refusing to pay. Exit was possible, but certainly not free, costing a man his home, livelihood, and often his family. A freedom purchased at the price of one's entire life is only a freedom in a thin sense. More tellingly, the Massachusetts establishment fell prey to exactly the capture I describe in this essay. When Unitarians came to dominate many of the tax-supported parishes, the courts ruled in Baker v. Fales (1820) that church property belonged to the parish as a civil body rather than to the gathered church, and Congregationalists watched their own meetinghouses, built with their own money, handed to a theology they considered heretical. The orthodox, who had defended establishment for two centuries, soon became supporters of ending it, and Massachusetts disestablished in 1833. The established church was undone by the state's own machinery.

At any rate, note the direction of the objection's logic itself. Its entire appeal rests on the ability to leave. The more exit there is, the better the arrangement! Follow that principle to its end and you arrive not at a patchwork of state churches, but at churches as fully voluntary associations which a man may join or leave without moving at all. The argument from competing establishments is, at its end, an argument for my conclusion.

The extent of the foolishness of the theocratic transaction stated thus far, while perhaps already fatal, is still yet nowhere near the exhausted critique. It must be understood that the theocratic state, simultaneously with its establishment, will witness the priestly class transforming into a ruling class. Once clerics possess coercive political power, they acquire incentives to preserve their institutional power, suppress their rivals, manage those political factions friendly and hostile to them, and constantly maintain their legitimacy. Their authority necessarily must become difficult to distinguish from ordinary political authority, because to maintain power they necessarily must act as political actors. To put it plainly, sleep with dogs and catch fleas, lay with politicians and catch something much worse.

At the same time as the priests become reduced to politicians, God becomes reduced to a political football. The divine is no longer an object of reverence; God instead becomes a justification for human authority. There is a leap from "God is authoritative" to "this particular human institution therefore possesses coercive authority" which risks making obedience to priests or politicians the practical substitute for obedience to God, almost an Egyptian sort of religiosity which results in the worship of man and king in place of the worship of the divine. You will see this begin to emerge in every political system wherein the state begins to claim an inherent moral right to power, and begins to pass moral laws (which is to say, not laws that are moral, but laws which mandate morality).

Religious dissent also becomes a form of political dissent, wherein disputing doctrine becomes a challenge to the state, which makes theological inquiry materially dangerous and therefore encourages people to conform publicly rather than investigate their beliefs sincerely. So you have a stagnation of the religious doctrine, which does nobody any good. It is healthy for any ideology, religious or not, to have immense and vigorous debate within it, which may be referred to by the later generations as a library of knowledge and reason, for resolving disputes and questions that later emerge. Simultaneous to this, and as illustrated in the earlier Iranian example, heresy will become attractive as a form of political rebellion. As a consequence of having a theocracy, you unavoidably make the religion psychologically intertwined with the state, and so when the state blunders, which states always, unfailingly do, the religion ends up blamed as well. This will end with people opposing the religion for the crimes of the government; a sort of guilt by association emerges. Imagine that the latest ostensibly Catholic American head of state, President Biden, had declared, at the beginning of his presidency, that his actions were made at the direction of the Catholic Church, and that he was following Church doctrine, and had filled his cabinet with only Catholic officials. There would be no plausible reality in which the blunders of his administration would not then also become considered failings of Catholicism.

One might ask: considered failings by whom? Whether a religion truly deserves blame for a regime's conduct is, after all, a question men will argue forever, and rightly so. But my claim does not depend on the blame being deserved, nor on everyone assigning it. It depends only on enough people assigning it, and history demonstrates they reliably do. Spain after Franco, whose regime had wrapped itself in the Church, secularized with remarkable speed. Quebec, where church and provincial power had been deeply entangled, saw its pews empty within a generation of the Quiet Revolution. In Ireland, where Church and state had long been intertwined in schools, hospitals, and institutions, the revelations of abuse within those institutions struck at the faith with a force they might not have carried had the Church been merely a private body. In each case, one can argue the faith itself was innocent, and they're likely correct. The point, though, is that the argument was lost regardless, because the faith had lent its name to the state, and a name once lent is spent along with the reputation of the borrower.

One will find this issue worsened by the fact that compulsion itself destroys the incentive of the church to convince its members of its dogma, insofar as a voluntary religion requires truly committed adherents by the fact that it cannot force people to come to its church without their consent, and in contrast a state religion can function with people who merely perform the expected rituals; the pews are filled with hostages, so to speak. As a result, you get a population that is formally religious but privately indifferent. And there is no incentive to actually convert these nonbelieving, compelled peoples either. Whereas a voluntary church has to convince people through theology or philosophy or community or charity or culture or art, or some other form of persuasion, in contrast a politically privileged church uses legal compulsion instead, which tends to eliminate the institutional incentive to produce true conviction. There is no motivation to convince believers, to preach to the choir (and the choir is precisely the most important demographic to preach to!), when the choir is compelled to attendance. Instead the efforts of the church tend to go to aggrandization of its properties and assets, or external expansion to where it cannot compel people at present. You end up with a church that is as a dying oak, which looks tall and wide and mighty, but is entirely hollowed out by rot and totally lacking a strong internal structure.

Religious virtue becomes indistinguishable from legal compliance in a theocracy as well. If charity, prayer, sexual morality, and all other forms of piety become mandated by law, then the people can satisfy the external requirement without acquiring the corresponding virtue. You only motivate the behavior, not the character which is meant to drive it, because character is no longer the motivating factor. The actions that tend to be considered pious, in the bulk of religious doctrines, are not considered pious because of the acts themselves, but because generally only a pious man will be motivated to take those actions. When you require the actions, they no longer serve as benchmarks of piety. To phrase it more straightforwardly, most religions are in some way teleological (the Greek word telos literally means purpose, and the bulk of religions deal primarily with ascertaining the divine purpose, hoping to achieve some divine goal, whether that be the deliverance of a Messiah or some eventual ascension to a Heaven or Nirvana); the metric of primary importance is belief. The state, however, is broadly deontological, rule oriented, in the enforcement of its legal systems, and so what was once a sign of piety becomes instead a sign of compliance, or at most a sign of good citizenry.

Here a serious objection arises, and it has roots with Aristotle, as most serious things do. Action does shape character. A man who performs good deeds, even reluctantly and without feeling, may find that his heart gradually follows his hands. Consider a man of little natural sympathy who is counselled by his priest to give generously and often, not because he does feel compassion, but so that the practice might make room in him for it. That counsel is wise, habit is indeed a wonderful teacher.

But observe who is acting in that example. The priest advised, he did not compel. The man chose to take the advice, chose to discipline himself, chose to give, and continues to choose each time he opens his hand to beggars. The habit forms precisely because the will is engaged, because each act is itself a small decision of his own to become a different sort of man. Remove the choice and you remove the teacher. A man whose wages are taxed for the poor has never grown in generosity, he only grows in the habit of being taxed. If compelled contributions to the needy indeed could make a people into a nation of humanitarians, then we ought to see in modern Europe the most generous people in all of history. Instead, the rich and highly taxed Nordic States consistently exhibit charitability below the global average. It is, then, evident that the discipline that transforms is self-discipline, and self-discipline can definitionally not be administered by another, any more than one can exercise for another man and expect him to grow stronger.

One may instead offer an analogy of a parent disciplining a thieving child. However, first, theft is a violation of another person's rights, and forbidding it is simply justice, which a secular society owes its citizens as much as any Christian one, and so there is nothing theocratic about a law against stealing. Second, a parent should not seek that their child avoids theft out of fear of punishment. A parent should seek that their child avoids theft out of a developed moral aversion to it. Otherwise, the child will learn to avoid theft only in circumstances where he believes he will be caught and punished. Third, a parent's authority over a child is a guardianship over one who is not yet a fully rational agent, exercised in order to raise him into one, with the explicit aim of eventually releasing him. A state that treats grown men this way has not become a loving parent, it has only declared its citizens permanent children, and permanent children are exactly the consequence of poor parenting.

Further, at the same time as it begins to flex its influence in the realm of lawfare, and in so doing kill the ability for piety in man, the sacred itself also loses the ability for standing above political power. Religions generally provide a standard by which human beings can judge their rulers: "The king is unjust before God." The concept of losing some mandate of heaven, or favor of God, or some other equivalent sentiment to that effect, is established. If the religious institution and the state become one, then the institution loses much of its ability to condemn political authority from an independent moral position, because it no longer is separate from the political authority. It becomes subject to its influence, like a compass influenced by a magnet on the necklace of the man using it; its no longer reliably pointing to north. And similarly, you will not be able to trust your priests, as the control over state power then enjoyed by the church will make religious office materially valuable. Political factions therefore will have enormous incentive to capture clerical institutions and affect succession, and eventually to influence doctrine in their favor. Put another way, it is a popular misconception that the separation between the church and governance serves to protect the government from religious domination, whereas in reality separation equally serves to spare the church from political domination. This principle was perhaps most well demonstrated, as claimed by a great many modern biblical scholars, under the theocratic rule of King Josiah of ancient Israel, who had an addition to the Bible penned (which was then claimed to have been discovered by his High Priest), which served to support his political and religious reforms. His addition later formed the foundation for the Book of Deuteronomy, which is arguably the book that most plagues modern Jews in its establishment of much of the religion’s more seemingly arbitrary laws, and the importance they place on the establishment of a holy land centered around Jerusalem.

One will further find that theocracy corrupts not only the religious doctrine, but also kills the religious conscience. A true religious commitment ought to require the individual to confront questions of truth and morality personally. If "what is right" ends up meaning "what the religious authority commands," moral judgment becomes, again, obedience, and so you end up with not a principled moral or ethical system, but effectively a legal positivist one where what the state ordains is good and true by virtue of the state having ordained it, as the state can only ordain good and true things because it holds the favor of God. Even granting that premise, though, mankind as a whole is said to be favored by the Christian God. It does not follow from this that man is infallible, and that God must endorse all his actions. To tie the actions of the state to the will of God makes precisely this fatal conflation!

There is a final objection I often see raised, which runs as follows: we outlaw murder and compel submission to that law, yet no one thinks this cheapens our respect for human life; indeed, the law is an expression of that respect. So too, the argument goes, a nation that writes Christian morals into law thereby shows that it honors God. The comparison is instructive but really cuts the opposite way. The law against murder does not ask man to revere life, it asks only that he refrain from destroying someone else's. A man may hold human life in contempt in his heart and remain perfectly lawful, and the law is content with that, because its purpose is to protect the victim, not to perfect the would-be murderer. The law's legitimacy, then, comes from the rights of the person it shields, not from any reverence it demands. A law against a sin that injures no one but the sinner has no victim to shield, and so it can justify itself only by the reverence it aims to produce, which is precisely the thing force cannot ever succeed in producing.

As for the nation showing honor to God, who is doing the honoring? A nation is not one single mind. People are not like some species of insects living in a hive, sharing a collective conscious. Human society consists of millions of individual minds. When a legislature writes its convictions into statute, the legislators have expressed their reverence, and perhaps in some way the voters behind them have expressed theirs too. The citizen who obeys under threat, however, has expressed nothing but his desire to stay out of prison. A statute from the Church declaring that the people love God is no more an act of love than a press release from PepsiCo declaring Americans love Pepsi. The honor such laws pay is paid by the few in the currency of the many, and what God receives from the many is not honor at all, but the recorded compliance of hostages. If a nation truly wishes to show that it holds God in high regard, it can do no better than to leave every man free to reach that regard himself, for only then does his arrival mean anything.

The only conclusion one can reach is that theocracy inherently degrades both sides of its relationship. It reduces man from a rational moral agent who volitionally worships that which he exalts, to instead an obedient subject acting under duress, and simultaneously it reduces God from a transcendent object of worship to instead an ideological justification for the authority of men, whose interpretation becomes politically motivated. This ends up resulting in a bit of a paradoxical outcome, wherein the regime established to make society more religious in reality produces more religious law but less religiosity, more ritual but less faith, more clerical authority but less spiritual authority, and more outward reverence but less inward reverence. In effect, it kills that which gives a religion a claim to the divine. One must then come to reason that religion requires the freedom to persuade because true belief cannot be produced through force, that reverence has value only when it arises from one's own judgment rather than submission to another person's authority.

The irony of theocracy, then, is that it mistakes the outward signs of religion for religion itself. It sees the church full, the law obeyed, the rituals performed, the cleric respected, and concludes that God must have been honored. But to have a man kneel by another man’s orders only demonstrates the power of the man who gave the order, not the greatness of the God before whom he kneels. Theocracy therefore attempts to accomplish by political power that which can exist only by the free exercise of the human mind. The theocratic state can compel prayer, but never the faith behind it, can mandate obedience to religious law, but never loyalty to God. Worse still, by placing the authority of the state behind the authority of the Church, it gives man every reason to confuse the two. The priest is lowered to a politician, the church doctrine becomes legislation subject to the same sort of revision as all others, and God becomes, in the way of interpretation of His word, subordinate to a human institution.

The proper separation of religion from political power is therefore not merely a concession to irreligious men, but a defense of religion itself. It is only the church that cannot persuade that finds itself wishing to coerce. The church that coerces then eventually becomes political, and the church that becomes political will eventually find itself judged by the failures of politics. The free church, by contrast, possesses something the established church never can. The free church may earn a following by assent.

The religious man must be permitted to say no as much as he ought be encouraged to say yes. Absent the possibility of saying no, his yes means nothing. The man who is free to reject God but chooses to worship Him has made a religious act. The man who is forbidden to reject Him has merely obeyed the law. If religion is to preserve reverence, it must therefore preserve freedom. The state may command the body, but it cannot manufacture a soul's devotion, and whenever it attempts to do so it risks sacrificing the worship of God in favor of a mundane obedience to men who claim to speak in God’s name.