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Theocracy: Somebody’s Heaven is Someone Else’s Hell
Theocracy, that form of government in which God governs a nation directly through divine command, is hot again. Think for instance of Iran, al-Qaeda or ISIS. Closer to home, American evangelicals are busy using the White House to get a firm grip on politics and legislation. For them, Trump is God’s man who will ensure that the US will be governed again according to the moral values once established by God.
No wonder, then, that the current administration, aware of its indebtedness to the evangelical vote and seeing its usefulness, refers to God left and right. To give one example, just recently, Jeff Sessions, the US Attorney General, asserted that the separation of children from their asylum-seeking parents was justified. Want to know why? Because the Bible says (Romans 13) that the government’s laws need to be obeyed. Sessions’ move was classic theocracy: calling upon an alleged divine order.
Theocracies, however, are marked by a strong inner inconsistency. Its proponents will argue that it is God who wills something. The knowledge of that will is remarkably always derived from the proponents themselves who have determined in advance what the divine will is. The theocratic elites determine, interpret, declare, and eventually enforce the will of God for the nation.
