Despite the accusation that the Christian Right wishes to impose a “theocracy”, only the theonomists/Christian Reconstructionists plan seriously to bring this about. So what if a theonomic society actually occurred? What would it look like? Would it be economically efficient, will it maintain social order?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theonomy
http://theonomyresources.blogspot.com/
It depends on the christians enforcing it. One led by Jim Wallis types will be totally different than one run by Pat Robertson types because the priorities are different. Some christians are concerned about social work and poverty, others about social issues, others about evangelicism, etc. But for the most part it seems socially conservative christians concerned with concepts like the moral decay of society and social issues are the ones pushing for the concept.
Will it maintain social order? No. For the most part the christians who seem to want a theocracy seem to support a heirarchical social order with white male christian heterosexual conservatives at the pinnacle. That is going to create a lot of unrest for non-whites, women, non-christians, gays, liberals, etc. It will make the social order more unstable the same way the social order was heavily unstable during the civil rights movement when those higher up the socioeconomic totem pole wanted to deny rights to those lower on the pole. But even worse, the peopel who would feel oppressed have tasted equality and freedom, then they would have it taken away (vs the civil rights movement which wasn’t a movement to reclaim dignity and freedom, but a movement towards them for the first time). Laws that would make it legal to fire someone for being a non-christian would cause all the non-christians to get pretty pissed off. Laws restricting a woman’s rights would enrage many of them. The social order would have a lot of problems, people don’t like being given freedoms then having them taken away. I think people like that are more dangerous than those who have never had freedoms in the first place.
Economically efficient? I doubt it. The reason for that is that I don’t think most theocrats would follow pragmatic economic policy and instead go for ideological purity rather than economic pragmatism. Communism is a failure for the same reason, people are more concerned with ideological purity than whether the ideas actually work.
China would eat us alive if we were a theocracy.
SF writer Ben Bova, in his Grand Tour series, imagines a future in which most nations on Earth, following a devastating global-warming crisis, come under the control of the international “New Morality” organization (it has Christian and Islamic and Buddhist branches – seriously), who are seen as willing and able to restore some social order. They do, but they also enforce a rigorous scientific obscurantism that kills government exploration of Mars even after fossils of intelligent beings have been found there (something the NM vigorously denies), and so on. (Bova vividly describes the changing social atmosphere, too – e.g., a schoolboy whose interest in Mars is suddenly getting him bullied, not as a nerd, but as a heretic if the kids knew the word). Fortunately, by this time humanity has spread throughout the Solar System and the NM does not control it all, and original scientific research continues – off Earth.
The closest thing to a theocracy/theonomy that has been observed in the modern world is Iran since the 1979 Revolution. Economic performance ain’t too shabby, and there . . . is social order. OTOH, the Revolutionary Guard Corps is a corrupt state-within-the-state (like organizations of that kind tend to become, and I doubt the Reconstructionist Host would be immune); and so far as we can judge the state of popular opinion, the people would dearly love a little chaos for a change, thank you very much.
Based on what I’ve read from Reconstructionist authors themselves over the years:
Economically, probably laissez-faire with a strong dose of crackpot. Not much “burdensome economic regulations” but probably also no labor unions or other worker protections, maybe attempts to use the gold standard. Economically, this could result in anything from a kind of exploitative go-go capitalism to an economic basket case. (I really don’t know what an attempt by a modern society to use the gold standard would look like. And if a faction came to power that tried to impliment Old Testament Sabbath laws on a modern society–even “Scary Gary” North though that would be a really, really bad idea.) A factor hampering the development of the go-go capitalism model would be fears by would-be investors and entrepreneurs of being put up against the wall and shot (or stoned to death) for ideological reasons. Which brings us to…
Politically and socially very repressive. Maybe not to Saudi or Taliban levels with respect to women’s rights, but at least as bad on that score as Iran under the mullahs. (Homosexuals are obviously up against the wall.) Probably fewer rights for religious minorities than in Iran, where (except for Bahais) religious minorities have an officially recognized status and a (highly circumscribed) place in the political system. In a Christian Reconstructionist state, non-Christians would likely have no rights to participate in the political system (with “Christian” and “non-Christian” being subject to definition in a highly politicized process in the framework of a theocratic state, likely a dictatorship or oligarchy). There would be a laundry list of capital crimes (apostasy, adultery, blasphemy, idolatry, sodomy, witchcraft, along with murder, rape, and kidnapping) which would produce a repressive effect, but the one to watch out for would likely turn out to be “idolatry”, which can be defined as anything from pretty literal worship of statues, to a quite flexible idea of putting anything before God. Even mainstream Christians tend to define idolatry fairly expansively; the problem with the theonomists is that they combine this with wanting to make idolatry a capital crime. In that event, idolatry would run the risk of becoming the Christian Reconstructionist equivalent of a Soviet state’s “counter-revolutionary”.
All of this could lead to a repressive police-state-style theocratic republic; or, if things went in a slightly different direction, you could wind up with more of a Mao-style “Cultural Revolution”, with local cell groups or neighborhood committees (based on Old Testament notions of rulers or elders over small groups of families., e.g. Exodus 18:21) running amok in an attempt to purify society of all traces of “idolatry”.
Exactly what would happen would depend, obviously, on the specific personalities of the rulers in this hypothetical Christian commonwealth, but also on the circumstances by which it came into being (because, honestly, it’s really hard to see how a Christian theocracy ruled on a late 20th century interpretation of Mosaic law is going to gain power anywhere on Earth).
There is a fundamental fact about Christian Reconstructionists: They want to criminalize disagreements about theology; to make them capital crimes, in fact. And they have that expansive view of theology that dates back to at least the 1980’s and the American Religious Right–competing religions to Christianity are defined not just as the obvious (Hinduism, Islam), and potentially segments of Christianity that are considered to be not true Christianity, but every sort of “ism” from Marxism to Secular Humanism to “Evolutionism” gets branded a “non-Christian religion”, hence idolatrous. This sort of thing is bad enough if you’re talking about school curriculums and textbooks, but if you set up a society where non-Christians can’t vote, and face the death penalty for publicly propagating their faiths (or “faiths” in the case of things like evolutionary biology), it’s not going to end well. Either a police state, a Christian version of the Cultural Revolution, or both (together or in sequence).
The U.S. would seem to be the country where it has the best chance, if only because nowhere else in Christendom are such things even being discussed seriously if you can call it that.
But, even in America, I doubt there is a single county with a potential Reconstructionist majority or even plurality.
Yeah–true Reconstructionists are all postmillenialists, but I think there’s a reason why Gary North has predicted three of the last zero collapses of Western Civilization–the aftermath of some sort of Zombie Apocalypse is probably the only way Reconstructionists could ever achieve power anywhere.
one such society was called the Massachusetts Bay Colony under the Puritans. It worked pretty well, but sure enough they sought to minimize numbers of all those gays, liberals or “non whites”. They also kept the women busy with useful work, child rearing and church attendance instead of “empowering” them with washing machines, birth control and sinecure bureaucratic jobs.
A society of normal, intelligent, productive people works well enough under “theo” laws as well as under any other sort of laws. You can run excellent societies like that, as long as you have the power and the will to keep out or minimize all those liberal State constituencies mentioned upthread.
What do non-whites have anything to do with theocracy?
But, it didn’t last. Experiments of that kind never do; the younger generations just don’t seem to catch their parents’ zeal in quite equal measure. No cite at the moment, but I’ve heard historians argue that the Salem Witch Trials were a symptom of social anxiety – young people were no longer joining the Church in the same numbers as before. Massachusetts went on, but grew less and less Puritan over time. And, BTW, all through the 18th Century, Boston was famous (not infamous) for its whores. (Source: America’s Undeclared War: What’s Killing Our Cities and How We Can Stop It, by Daniel Lazare.)
This is a favorite speculation ground for writers.
e.g.
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Revolt in 2100 by Robert Heinlein (also includes significant content about things happening after the theocracy falls)
They aren’t white.
The Puritans killed a servant woman (an Irish slave or whatever the term was) for speaking Gaelic & Latin rather than English. Called her a witch.
I think the telling thing about a lot of these movements is that they are often more culturally defined than anything. They latch onto theonomical rhetoric, but they enshrine local cultural ideas of order, including ideas of privilege.
Saudi Arabia
Pakistan
the Islamic Republic of Iran
various other “Islamist” regimes to varying degrees
the Byzantine period of the Roman Empire
sundry Calvinists
and so forth
Now, someone trying to seek the will of God while also seeking to transcend cultural hang-ups, that person might be laudable.
Probably, just my guess, an Indian in colonial Massachusetts would be accepted as (provisionally) Christian if he converted, but that didn’t make him a member of the community. The Puritan colony was an in-group to whom even Europeans were rather barbarous, if Catholic or not the right sort of Protestant; non-whites would be beyond the pale.
Might I suggest a companion question-“What would happen if a person were elected President”
In other words, without knowing the nature of the theocracy in power, we cannot make predictions.
According to scriptures we can’t live by the OT law because that leads to unseen sin which we have no defense over which leads to death.
It would be a society with laws just as we have now.
Your assumption is that a theonomic society would be based on your particular beliefs?
That proves my point-they wouldn’t accept other whites for not being Reformed, not for not being the right race.
Nor, I think, would they accept Reformed Christian “Praying Indians,” not even in a come-live-in-town sense, let alone a marry-my-daughter* sense. (There were such things as “Praying Towns” for Indians.)
*Probably a lot of white-passing Bay Staters today are descended from Praying (or from pagan) Indians; some things can’t be stopped. But there were norms.