Comment by bigfudge

9 days ago

The uk is a lot of things, but theocratic really isn’t one of them. If you’re referring to the House of Lords then you don’t really understand our government. The general population is as atheist as anywhere outside of Scandi countries.

2 comments

bigfudge

ben_w 8 days ago

> The general population is as atheist as anywhere outside of Scandi countries.

I appreciate the proximity of the two sentences made it unclear, but the general population isn't what I'm critical of in this case. I briefly had an Iranian project manager, that nation is almost as high as you can get on the theocracy scale (IIRC it would be beaten by Afghanistan), but he absolutely was not and had tattoos of video game characters.

Also, I should say that the use of "theocracy" in the modern sense is somewhat looser than the historical, and therefore ask if we're actually disagreeing? Certainly I don't mean in the sense of the deification of the Pharaohs.

Re the rest:

Given my focus is the rulers and not the people, I think the Lords Spiritual remain relevant (the attempt to replace the HoL with an elected one being promised by the HoC in 1911, still waiting).

Likewise that the head of state is also the head of the national church and there being a religious requirement for being crowned monarch, and that there is no desire to reform away the monarchy as an institution, likewise the Establishment nature of the CoE, making this the only non-meta conversation I've ever had where I can legitimately use the longest (recognised, non-systematic) word in the English language by saying that the UK political system is one of antidisestablishmentarianism.

I don't think I'd count the coins, even though this is about the ruling classes who are much more likely than anyone else to speak Latin and thus recognise the abbreviation printed on them. "FID DEF" has an ironic history, but so does the much easier to read "In God We Trust" and I'm not (yet) going to describe the USA in this way.

Aside from all of that, there's also the requirement of schools that:

  All maintained schools must provide religious education and daily collective worship for all registered pupils and promote their spiritual, moral and cultural development.

…

  Collective worship in county schools and equivalent grant-maintained schools must be wholly or mainly of a broadly Christian character, though not distinctive of any particular Christian denomination.

- https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/collective-worshi...

bigfudge 6 days ago

Even in the loosest sense, I struggle to see how the uk is any more theocratic than any other European country. The lords spiritual have minimal practical influence over policy. And while I’m a republican, I don’t think the monarch has much influence over public policy. I guess you could argue they have soft power but that seems like it might also be true of religious leaders in any country. Is Israel a theocracy in your view?