When ol' Lizzie died, the Archbishop of Canterbury let us all know that God dropped him a message to say the King Charles should succeed to the throne, which worked out awfully lucky with what was already being planned. The Head of State of the United Kingdom is claiming to derive their authority from God (aka Divine Right of Kings), state and church are officially unified and clerics are a required part of the legislature, does that not make it a Theocracy by any reasonable definition?
Christian nations can’t be theocracies because Christianity is a dead religion with a dead god. The only live abrahamic religion currently is Islam.
By this, I mean that only practitioners of Islam have a widespread living religious community of deeply felt spirituality. Christian and Jewish faiths are cynical, commercial or cultural vestiges that everyone knows deep down are not spiritually true
Thus, any Christian or Jewish “theocracy” is a mask for a more pragmatic and cynical political force, such as a bourgeois dictatorship hiding behind a cross or Star of David. Muslims are capable of creating a theocratic social order because they actually believe it is true, but they are following in the same capitalist developmental footsteps as the Christian nations and Islam there will die and become cynical and hollowed out soon as well (one could argue this is already well underway in the gulf states).
Well, this is certainly a take, especially when Salafism/Wahhabism is dominant in Sunni ideology.
See my last paragraph, Wahhabism is the synthesis of Islam and cynical capitalism and imperialism. It is a tumor growing on Islam and will kill it if left untreated
Yeah, Islam is really spiritual and not cynical/commercial at all
See my last paragraph, I specifically mentioned that the gulf states are already underway in the process of their religion dying and becoming hollowed out
Isn't your first paragraph fundamentally disproven by the very existence of like half of subsuharan africa? Like there are explicitly theocratic christian rebelliosn, who fight for the creation of a "christian" state on par with the islamic theocracies of the MENA.
All of the "theocracies" of subsaharan Africa are neo-colonial comprador (bourgeois) dictatorships, Christianity in this context is used extremely cynically to divide and manipulate its population against its own interest and keep it subservient to international capital and their comprador agents. Whereas Iran is not ruled by neo-colonial compradors but has a national bourgeois component (the "Republic") and a theocratic component (the will of the religious body, truly believed to be holy by a portion of the population)
Pardon my ignorance, but if I'm understanding you right, then for any government to be described as a theocracy, it needs to have it's neo-colonial compradors removed from power? And some sort of religious buy-in from the resident population? Given these parameters, then your argument makes slightly more sense. Still don't really know how many of the rebel groups that claim to want theocracy are actually supported by neo-colonial interests, but I guess that's the fun part of imperialism still having so much sway over multiple continents.
My point is that capitalism desecrates and denatures everything it touches into transactional and exploitative mechanisms. It has already killed the Christian god and the Jewish god. Predominantly Muslim areas have historically developed much later and been exposed to full capitalist forces much more recently, so their god is merely dying instead of dead.
This is a necessary step in the dialectical journey to communism though, as the true worship of god is eradicated by capitalism and then must be re-kindled again by communism, but instead in the form of worshipping humanity as a whole as sacred, and worshipping our ecology as sacred
Doesn't capitalism require the populace to actually benefit from the "profaning" of the sacred? Like a population in a historically underdeveloped place, which is now being exposed to capitalism, is not going to abandon faith in god, if capitalism doesn't actually deliver material gains to the population group. For the islamic world specifically, I sort of think that the profaning of the sacred has already happened / begun happening, which is why you see so much weird shit being made in the Gulf States. But in places without massive bounties of exploitable natural ressources, like Indonesia, Pakistan, Egypt, or Morocco, you don't see quite the same level of "disregard" (for lack of a better and more neutral term) for the old traditions that you see in the Gulf.