There are different levels of theocracy

The argument

From Bhutan to Britain, there are many states in the world in which the clergy play a formal role in politics. In others, explicitly religious political ideologies are increasingly important but the country does not meet the purist definition of a theocracy. That is the point of the argument: theocracy is not a category a state either falls into or escapes, but a matter of degree along which states are distributed. At one end sit states with an official religion. Many middle eastern countries have Islam as their state religion; Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Laos and Thailand have Buddhism as their state religion; and Malta and Liechtenstein have Catholicism. Further along the range are arrangements that are formally religious but politically light. The British monarch is the titular Supreme Governor of the Church of England and is crowned by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the 26 most senior bishops have seats in the House of Lords, although their actual political power is negligible. The forms of establishment are fully in place there, and yet the practical effect on legislation is small — which is precisely why a single yes-or-no test misdescribes such a state. At the other end are countries that do not mention religion in their constitution at all, and even there religion can still have an undue influence upon society: structurally, through tax exemptions, and functionally, through grants and privileges. Australia and New Zealand, for example, have been called soft theocracies, where the church-state relationship in both countries is mostly about access to taxpayers' money. Influence of that kind is easy to overlook because it runs through fiscal machinery rather than through offices of state, but it is a real channel from religion into public life. Ranged together, these cases show that religion enters government through several independent routes — official status, reserved seats, and public money — and that a state may occupy any combination of them. Because there are these different levels of theocracy, theocracies can be implemented in different ways.

Premises

Counter-arguments

A critic replies that stretching "theocracy" to cover Britain's titular bishops or tax exemptions in avowedly secular states dilutes the term until it stops distinguishing anything. If almost every state counts as a "soft theocracy," the category can no longer separate genuine rule by clergy — as in Iran — from secular governments that retain vestigial religious symbolism. The argument itself concedes the political power of the Lords Spiritual is "negligible," which undercuts using them as evidence of theocratic gradation. Recognising that religion's public role varies is uncontroversial; the disputed move is calling that gradient "different levels of theocracy," which is a category error rather than a finding about how theocracies are implemented.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Titular roles the argument admits have "negligible" power are not theocracy in any governing sense, so listing them stretches the term past its meaning. [Rejecting P2] Tax exemptions and grants are how most secular states treat civil-society bodies; calling that "soft theocracy" dilutes the concept until it no longer distinguishes clerical rule from secular governance.