Ditch Doc

Theocracy is the wrong word. We call Australia a democracy because we think the people rule, we used to call Iraq a cleptocracy because we thought a thief ruled, and sometimes we take a sardonic poke at Canada and call it a bureaucracy when it seems like the desks rule. But who ever thought God ruled Taliban-era Afghanistan? Not Christians. Not atheists. And here’s the kicker: not the Taliban. Theocracy means God is the head of state, and gives day to day instruction on everything from criminal justice to strategy in war.* Unless I’m mistaken, not even the Taliban claimed to be acting out God’s contemporaneous commands. So why use a word that no one thinks is accurate? I don’t want to see Richard Dawkins behind every tree, but I think I catch a whiff of the same sarcasm perfuming phrases like “God fighting on both sides.” ‘Well, yes, they treat their women like cattle, and yes, the penalty for apostasy is death, but what do you expect? They let God run things.’ If we’re to have a fruitful discussion of the relationship between religion and politics, let’s restrict the word to the only nation it truly describes: the people of Isreal in the period from Moses to Saul. And find a new word for the Taliban.

*Countries ruled by God’s deputies based on earlier divine commandments don’t count. That’s why we don’t call Vatican City a theocracy.

“I also asked him for coffee, and as he refused it I took him
to be a heretic and went down the road making up verses against all
such, and singing them loudly through the forest that now arched over
me and grew deeper as I descended.”

Hilaire Belloc, The Path to Rome

Any blog with philological pretensions has to put in an indignant note on this story. It appears that the Oxford University Press, of all presses, no longer includes words related to Christianity, Empire or the countryside in its Junior Dictionary. Of course there’s only limited room in a children’s dictionary, and something had to go to make room for ‘blog’ and ‘EU’. The modern British tyke no longer has time to pursue the ‘ferret’, the ‘goblin’, the ‘boar’ or the ‘cheetah’ through the ‘brambles’ and ‘buttercups’ beneath the ‘chestnut’, but at least now he knows that the former are ‘endangered’, and the latter may dry up any day now in a ‘drought’. Chesterton would have a FIT.