Abstract
This chapter is devoted to theocracy, a type of a political system defined by its supernatural legitimation, not the rule of religious functionaries. It presents religion as a resource used to sanction political power on normative, institutional and personal levels—to sacralise it—in order to explain the existing social and political order with its unequal distribution of valuable assets, to uphold its institutional structure, and to justify the religious status the rulers claim. The origins and conditions of stability of theocratic regimes are explained with a transactional model derived from theory of social exchange. Thus conceived, theocracy can be incorporated into a three-dimensional typology of political systems—with mode of succession, scope of political control and the source of power’s legitimation as the leading variables—thereby gaining usefulness in political analysis.
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Notes
- 1.
For a particularly striking example of such a conceptual confusion, see Perl 2008, who classifies theocracy alongside communism, socialism, democracy, dictatorship and monarchy (134–135).
- 2.
Censuses applied, to be sure: only male members of Congregational churches were eligible to vote.
- 3.
- 4.
Similarly, Stark and Bainbridge (1980, 119), in developing their transactional theory of religion, define power as “the degree of control over one’s exchange ratio”.
- 5.
A religious functionary can be defined as priest, sorcerer, shaman, prophet or any other person possessing, in a particular community, a privileged relation to the sacred, and administering religious goods. This last clause is crucial: the fact that the religious goods, which are believed to be of divine origin, are administered (distributed) by religious functionaries makes it possible to talk of theocracy in sociological or political, and not theological terms.
- 6.
Which is by no means certain—the debate about the precedence of religion vs. non-religious traits of human culture is ongoing (see, e.g. de Waal 2013).
- 7.
It is thus too simplistic to treat salvation as virtually the only valuable product religious organizations sell (as, for instance, Ekelund et al. 1996, 21, imply in relation to the Catholic Church).
- 8.
The existence of some Buddhist theocracies (including Tibetan, discussed in more detail in Chap. 4) makes this assertion questionable. Part of the answer lies in the false impression of Buddhism as a highly individualistic, virtuoso religion which does not hold for ordinary believers (see note 4, Chap. 2). Moreover, the Buddhist rulers might actually be forced to violate the religion’s ethical principles, something Karen Armstrong refers to as the Aśoka’s dilemma (Armstrong 2015, 68–71).
- 9.
This is not to imply that the stability of a political system depends solely on the power relations within it. There may also be other, external factors which I do not consider here.
- 10.
A host of historical instances of the strategies postulated by the above model could be adduced. For one such empirical application, see Potz 2013.
- 11.
The discussion here is restricted to hierocratic states. But of course political systems of religious organizations, such as churches, sects, religious orders etc. are essentially hierocratic; on their power mechanisms, see Chap. 4.
- 12.
A different, but no less intriguing example of an adaptive function of supernatural beliefs (in this case magical rather than religious) comes from the Innu of Canada. Each year, before setting off for the caribou hunt, a divination ritual including the burning of an animal scapula is performed by a shaman to determine the direction in which the hunters should depart. This serves, functionally, as a randomizing procedure, ensuring that the hunters will not yield to the natural inclination of looking for game where they found it the previous year, since caribou do not usually return to the place where they were ambushed before (Henrich 2016, chap. 7).
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Potz, M. (2020). Religious Legitimation of Power and the Concept of Theocracy. In: Political Science of Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20169-2_3
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