A theocracy encourages stability

The argument

A theocracy is a state whose governing authority is derived from religion. Proponents of this argument contend that the record outside Europe is largely one of political stability. They point to the Aztec civilisation, based upon theocracy and able to sustain vast populations until it was destroyed by the Spanish conquistadors, a collapse they attribute to external conquest rather than to any internal failure of the arrangement. They suggest, more tentatively, that Native American culture may have entailed a type of theocracy, one under which communities lived in harmony with their environment and did not hunt animals to depletion, so that religious authority regulated not only conduct between people but the use of the resources on which continued settlement depended. The European counter-examples are met not by denying them but by explaining them. On this view Christian theocracies in Europe were unsuccessful for a reason specific to the religion rather than to theocracy as such: Christianity contains no political instructions. A ruler claiming religious sanction while having no religious instruction to rule by must supply the content of government himself, and a western theocracy of that kind is therefore tantamount to arbitrary rule. What made it unstable was not that religion governed, but that religion in that case had nothing determinate to say about governing. This supplies the mechanism the argument rests on. Stability follows where the religion furnishes a political framework as well as spiritual solace, because rulers and ruled alike are then bound by rules neither party invented and neither can rewrite at will. Islam, proponents argue, aims to provide both, which is why Muslim theocracies have persisted in numbers. The general claim is accordingly a conditional one: theocracy encourages stability wherever the faith in question actually supplies political guidance, and that is offered as one of the good points of theocracies.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics reply that the historical examples are cherry-picked and shaky. The Aztec state rested on large-scale human sacrifice and did not endure, while 'living in harmony with the environment' is an unevidenced romanticisation. More fundamentally, stability under theocracy is frequently the stability of enforced conformity and suppressed dissent rather than genuine order. They add that modern theocracies are widely associated with the repression of women, minorities and free expression, and that secular states have achieved far greater — and freer — stability. Persistence or order, even where real, is not the same as good governance.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The examples are selective and unflattering on inspection — the Aztec state rested on mass human sacrifice and did not endure, and 'harmony with the environment' is an unevidenced romanticisation. [Rejecting P2] Attributing European theocracy's failure solely to Christianity 'lacking political instructions' ignores that theocratic rule of any creed tends toward arbitrary, unaccountable power. [Rejecting P3] That Muslim theocracies persist speaks to durability, not goodness; persistence is compatible with the suppression of dissent, women's rights and minorities.