The Hobby Horses of Belief (and assorted hazards)

It was inevitable the Austrian corporal's regime was going to be brought up… Godwin was right 😉

Incidentally they never mentioned in history class in my Catholic school that the parliamentary votes of the Catholic Centre Party (led by a priest) were essential in order to give Mr Moustache absolute power. 🤔

A theocracy could be a democracy (of sorts) also, Iran is described as a theocracy but also as a "limited democracy" - they do have elections, but who you can vote for is rather restricted… but we had similar here by other means. For many years, if you were read out from the pulpit your electoral chances were near zero.

In 1950s Ireland voters had a choice between de Valera as Taoiseach, and John A. Costello "I am a Catholic first, I am an Irishman second." Anything that didn't conform to the RCC's desires was derided as either indecent, communist, or worst of all, English… it wasn't a theocracy but the church got its way nonetheless - even the rare slight challenges like the Mother and Child scheme were crushed. The first law enacted in Ireland which the RCC opposed was probably the introduction of "unmarried mothers' allowance" in ~1973

Sadly we don't need to look too hard for democracies which actively undermine human rights, the current regimes in Israel and the USA for instance, and yes people did knowingly vote for this.

Sadly the Nazis found many very enthusiastic collaborators in the countries they occupied. The RCC had been peddling the most vile abuse against Jews for centuries, so it's hardly a surprise when the 'means' arrived to annihilate them the motive was already there.

The most obvious form of theocracy is where religious institutions have a formal role in the state — smacl points to the Vatican and Iran. Technically the UK falls into this category, because it has an established church, some of whose bishops hold seats in the legislature. You could argue that any state that has an officially established church or an officially established religion is, to that extent, theocratic, in which case we can add Greece, Denmark, Norway, Malta, Iceland, Egypt and many others. But we need to be a bit careful here — to a significant extent, the point of establishing a religion is not to subject the state to the church, but to subject the church to the state. Is that really theocracy?

You also have countries in which religious institutions play no formal role in public affairs, but religious principles are explicitly recognised by or incorporated into the law - Saudi Arabia, Pakistan. Afghanistan is included in this category because, although sharia is expressly incorporated into the law of the state, so far as the state is concerned the authoritative interpreters of sharia are not clerics or scholars, but the leadership of the Taliban. Ireland should also be included here because of pietistic language in the preamble to the Constitution, and religious language included in the oaths that certain public officials are required to take, although this is perhaps a fairly token form of theocracy.

Then you have countries where they have theocratic politics — religious institutions have no role in the state, and the law is formally secular, but explicit religious rhetoric and explicit religious motivations are common in politics. The US is an obvious example.

Finally, and this overlaps with the last category, you’ve got countries where religious institutions have no constitutional role or powers, and religious principles are not explicitly recognised, but nevertheless religious values or beliefs do influence the law. If you consider this to be theocracy, then most democracies are to some extent theocratic, since in a democracy — if it is functioning properly — law and policy will reflect and be influenced by the values, beliefs and culture of citizens, and in most societies values, beliefs and culture are to a significant extent shaped by religion.

We tend to be more sensitive to theocratic influences of this kind when they advance causes that we object to. We might argue that a ban on abortion is evidence of theocratic influence on the state, even if the arguments used to support the ban are explicitly secular, but do we denounce, say, the leadership role played by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in the struggle for civil rights in the US, or the involvement of religious movements in campaigns against the death penalty, or for gun control?

Religiously-motivated political action and democratic politics are not incompatible, and it’s probably not particularly helpful to categorise them as inherently theocratic. In a democracy you have to advance your views by democratic means, and through democratic arguments — arguing that we should ban widgets because holy scripture condemns them is not democratic. But arguing that we should ban widgets because of their harmful societal impact is democratic, and the argument is not invalidated merely because the person advancing it has a religious objection to widgets.

I don't think it is a reasonable comparison, in terms of the degree that religious doctrine constrains the actions and freedoms of the individual, to consider Iran and the United Kingdom to be similar theocracies.

Oh, sure. Theocracy (like democracy) is a spectrum; countries can be more or less theocratic. I think the most you could say about the UK is that it’s constitution has some theocratic elements and, honestly, they're pretty token elements. The UK and Iran are not similar theocracies. They do both exemplify a particular form of theocracy, where religious institutions are given a formal constitiutional role in public affairs. But that's not the only, or even necessarily the most significant, way in which a country can be theocratic.

While organised religion exerts a varying degree of influence in many democracies, I would only consider that society to be a theocracy where that influence was somewhere between dominant and exclusive to the point of being inescapable. Perhaps the comparison between Iran today and the influence of the Catholic church in Ireland in the 1950s might be a bit closer to the mark ;)

Perhaps. But, notably, constitutionally not much has changed in Ireland since the 1950s. We’ve eliminate the constitutional provision which recognised the Catholic church as “the guardian of the Faith professed by the great majority of the citizens” and also recognised the Anglican, Presbyterian, Methodist, Quaker and Jewish communities. But we have retained provisions acknowledging that public worship is due to God, committing the state to reverence the name of God and to respect and honour religion, and requiring religious oaths for certain public offices. And while the influence of the Church in Ireland today is a shadow of what it was in the 1950s, this isn’t really a consequence of the amendment of Art 44.

Nothing wrong with religion having an influence in any democratic society once that influence is proportional to its active membership and representative of the preferences of those people. To my mind, the litmus test for a democracy is whether it actively and directly involves its citizenship in the more important decisions that directly affect them. The same-sex marriage and abortion referenda are good local examples of this.

That’s kind of the point. The influence of the Catholic church in the 1950s wasn’t really the outcome of including those pietistic constitutional provisions; it was a representation of the views and values of an overwhelming Catholic citizenry. It was democratically sustained. We can’t argue, can we, that the referendum which adopted a constitutional ban on abortion was less democratic than the later referendum which removed it? Or that the referendum which affirmed a ban on divorce was less democratic than the later referendum which removed it?

Arguably the most powerful form of theocracy is the one which rests on popular support, and which is democratically endorsed. But it’s also the one which is most easily displaced, if you can win the democratic argument.

I think we can distinguish between two separate, but often overlapping, problems:

First, democracy versus pseudo-democracy: a country may have the appearance of democratic institutions and processes, but they may not actually work. This could be because they are subverted unlawfully (e.g. faked election results) or because they are intentionally degraded (gerrymandered constituencies, legal or practical restrictions on voting) or because they’re just not very well-designed to begin with (the UK and US voting systems) or because their efficacy is undermined by external factors like e.g. state control/oligarchic control of the media.or of social media.

The second problem is genuinely democratic mechanisms being used to enact antidemocratic measures. Democracy is generally understood to involve more than just free and fair elections; it involves upholding the rule of law, and upholding fundamental rights and liberties, especially political liberties. For example, a law stripping Jews of citizenship and voting rights, or banning an opposition political party, or restricting the freedom of the press, would clearly be antidemocratic; it doesn’t become democratic merely because it is enacted by a democratically elected parliament or endorsed in a democratic referendum.

The two problems will frequently overlap, because a government or a party that is seeking to undermine the principles that sustain democracy — say, free speech, or the right of access to the courts — is not going to have any compunction about directly undermining democracy. And then you have a vicious circle — democratic processes and mechanisms are degraded in order to secure the passage of measures which themselves further degrade democracy.

Right — back to theocracy in Ireland. I don’t think democratic processes and mechanisms were degraded in Ireland in order to secure the passage of socially illiberal legislation on censorship, contraception, divorce, abortion, etc or to secure church control of schools or hospitals. It wasn’t necessary to do so because these measures did in fact enjoy broad popular support. And I don’t think the measures adopted, offensive as them may have been on other grounds, were themselves measures that degraded democracy. (Censorship can be a tool used to degrade democracy. but I don’t think it was so used in Ireland; family planning manuals may have been banned but Das Kapital was not.) It may be deplorable to live in a country that won't grant you a divorce, but it doesn't make your country not a democracy.

So, yeah, to the extent that Ireland was affected by theocracy, I don't think it was an antidemocratic or undemocratic theocracy to any significant extent.

You don't see a problem with people being told which way to vote from the pulpit, by an organisation which claims that defiance of its doctrines leads to eternal punishment?

I do see a problem with that, but not a problem that amounts to an impairment of democracy. In a democracy, people vote on the basis of the considerations that seem best to them, and a decision to vote in a way that they think will maximise their chances of wings, harps and fluffy white clouds in the next life doesn't become undemocratic just because you disagree with their views about wings, harps and fluffy white clouds.

I come back to the point I made earlier — does it impair democracy if people vote against the death penalty, or for tougher gun control, or against racial discrimination, because their religious beliefs suggest that these policies are good and desirable? Is democracy only impaired if their religious beliefs lead them to support policies that Hotblack opposes?

I'd suggest that democracy will be impaired where the information on which the voting population bases their decisions is severely restricted and deeply biased in favour of a single side of the argument. If a persons morality is solely informed by religious doctrine from a young age for example, and arguments against that doctrine are strongly discouraged, the status quo favouring the church's position of power will tend to be maintained through demoratic process.

It's clearly not true to say that in 1950s Ireland a person's morality was solely informed by religious doctrine. Your morality is conditioned by the totality of your formative experiences; nobody learns to share their toys or not to bite their little brother or to take their turn through listening to homilies in church or seeing holy pictures in the classroom, but these are foundational moral lessons. And, while I agree that social and cultural conditions can sustain and reinforce particular moral views and marginalise others, this certainly isn't something that only happens, or particularly happens, with religously-grounded moral views.

In order to make an informed decision, we need to be able to openly and critically examine both sides of the argument equally. I would argue that this was not the case in Ireland in the 1950s.

Granted. But, again, this isn't something that only happens under the influence of religion. It's often the case that people offering moral or political perspectives that are challenging to the currently dominant consensus find themselves marginalised, and we don't get to hear their voices, or we only get to hear what they say mediated through people who disagree with it, or we are ourselves conditioned by the dominant consensus not to hear, or not to accept, what they say.

Currently, I would also be concerned that having the much larger part of our traditional and social media controlled by a tiny minority of powerful people who do not have a popular mandate constitutes a serious impairment to the proper functioning of a democracy.

You mean one smug consensus to which we must all conform has been replaced with another, and our democracy is as impaired as it ever was, just in a different way or in a different direction? Yeah, that's strongly arguable. And you could argue that domination by a church is actually the lesser of two evils; a church at least puts forward a framework of beliefs and values with which you can engage, which you can criticise and which you can reject in whole or in part. But an oligarchy is motivated solely by the desire to maintain its own power and wealth; that's actually much harder to defeeat through argument over beliefs and values, since it's not a position that depends on any particular beliefs or values.

This is bizarre

https://www.irishtimes.com/crime-law/2025/08/15/sophie-toscan-du-plantier-gardai-awaiting-results-of-tests-using-advanced-dna-collection-method/

Jared Bradley, M Vac Systems president and chief executive, travelled to Ireland last month and spent a week examining various exhibits gathered by gardaí as part of the original investigation into the French film producer’s murder.

Posting on Instagram in advance of his trip, Mr Bradley said: “Praying for a fantastic outcome. If what I believe will happen actually does, it will be MASSIVE for us in a whole host of ways. Please pray for us.”

Pray for what, exactly, though? That his company gets lots of publicity out of this and hits the big time?