History
Autocratic theocracy is old, but the part worth noticing is that it has been quietly forced to argue with itself in modern terms even where its doctrine officially refuses to. The medieval Catholic confessional state, Calvin's Geneva regime (1541-1564), the brief Anabaptist Münster Rebellion (1534-1535), the Puritan colonies of seventeenth-century New England, and the Dalai Lamas' Tibetan government before the 1959 Chinese annexation all rested on a premise the contemporary versions can no longer assume: that the population being governed already accepted the religious framework being imposed. Strip that premise away and a single problem moves to the center, namely how religious authority handles subjects who dissent. The contemporary cases (Iran since 1979, Saudi Arabia since 1932, Taliban Afghanistan in two stretches) are mostly improvisations on it.
Iran is where the doctrine got most fully worked out. The Islamic Republic was founded under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in the 1979 revolution, and its intellectual architecture rests on his doctrine of wilayat al-faqih, the Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist. He set it out in Islamic Government (Hokumat-e Eslami), lectures delivered in Najaf in 1970 and published as a book the same year. The argument runs like this: in the absence of the Hidden Twelfth Imam (the Mahdi whose return Shia Muslims await), political authority should be exercised by the most learned and most just Islamic jurist, who holds guardianship over the political order on the absent Imam's behalf. That broke sharply with the dominant Shia tradition, which had long held that direct political authority by Islamic jurists was inappropriate during the Imam's occultation, and that clerical authority belonged in advisory and judicial channels rather than executive ones. The doctrine has stayed contested inside Shia clerical life ever since. The Najaf-based tradition under Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani has held the older quietist line, and that quietism has shaped post-2003 Iraqi Shia politics in ways that distinguish it sharply from the Iranian model. The structural parallel inside Western intellectual life is the Catholic-integralist project, where Adrian Vermeule's Common Good Constitutionalism (2022) runs nearly the same argument in a different vocabulary [see the Integralism dossier section on Vermeule's revival], reaching the same conclusion that revealed truth has priority over procedural legitimacy.
The Iranian regime layers the clerical authority on top of an electoral apparatus, which is the source of much of its peculiar tension. The Supreme Leader is the highest political authority; the office has been held by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei since 1989, after Khomeini's death, and Khamenei is in his late eighties as of 2026. Succession is the live question for the regime's future. He is selected by the Assembly of Experts, an 88-member body of Islamic jurists themselves elected by the Iranian electorate from clerically-vetted candidates. The president is directly elected by the public from candidates vetted by the Guardian Council, a 12-member body of clerics and jurists half appointed by the Supreme Leader and half nominated by the Chief Justice, who is himself appointed by the Supreme Leader. (The circular logic is the point.) The Majlis, the parliament, is elected the same way: voters choose, but the Guardian Council chooses who voters can choose. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, a 150,000-strong military-and-intelligence body separate from the regular armed forces, reports directly to the Supreme Leader and has accumulated autonomous authority over military, intelligence, and increasingly economic policy. The result is a hybrid: theocratic-clerical authority at the top, popular-electoral institutions beneath, with the vetting infrastructure ensuring the second cannot meaningfully challenge the first.
Sustained popular resistance has been a recurring feature of the regime. The 1999 student protests, the 2009 Green Movement against the contested presidential election, the 2017-2018 protests against economic conditions, the 2019 fuel-price protests, and most consequentially the 2022-2023 Mahsa Amini protests after her death in police custody in September 2022. The Mahsa Amini protests were the most threatening sustained challenge to the regime since 1979, and they have reshaped the contemporary Iranian political environment in ways that have not yet settled. The 2024 Israeli-Iranian military exchanges and the 2025 regional shifts have compounded the pressure: the December 2024 fall of the Assad regime in Syria removed one of Iran's principal allies, the 2024 Israeli-Lebanese conflict degraded Hezbollah's military capabilities, and the cumulative damage to Iranian regional influence has been substantial. How the regime metabolises all of this remains unresolved.
The Saudi case is structurally different and worth reading as the longest-running natural experiment in clerical-monarchical partnership. The Wahhabist political-religious compact dates to the 1744 agreement between Muhammad ibn Saud, founder of the first Saudi state, and Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, founder of the Wahhabist Sunni reform movement. The deal was a division of labor: the House of Saud would exercise political authority, the Wahhabist clerical establishment would exercise religious authority over doctrine, religious law, religious education, and parts of the legal-judicial system. That compact survived the collapse of the first and second Saudi states. It was institutionalised in the third Saudi state under King Abdulaziz Ibn Saud (reigned 1902-1953), the founder of the contemporary Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (1932). For the entire post-1932 period it governed Saudi political life: a distinctive Wahhabist-Hanbali interpretation of Islamic law as the legal framework, the Mutawa'a religious police (the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice) wielding autonomous authority over social behavior, clerical control of religious education, and clerical advisory authority over policy. Mohammed bin Salman's Vision 2030 program since 2017 has been renegotiating all of this. He has constrained clerical political authority across multiple dimensions, reduced the religious police, taken back parts of the educational and judicial systems, and shifted legitimacy infrastructure toward more quietist clerical figures. Whether Saudi Arabia is still meaningfully a theocracy at this point is genuinely contested. The case looks increasingly like an absolute monarchy with residual religious-political features rather than a true theocratic-political compact [see the Absolute Monarchy dossier section on Saudi institutional drift]. The trajectory is worth watching because it suggests that monarchical authority, once it has consolidated, may not need the clerical partner that helped it consolidate.
The Taliban-era Afghan emirate is the third contemporary case, and operationally the most restrictive. The Taliban's political infrastructure rests on a distinctive Deobandi-Pashtun interpretation of Sunni Islamic political authority, with the Supreme Leader (as of 2026 Hibatullah Akhundzada, in office since 2016) exercising ultimate authority. International isolation has shaped almost everything about the contemporary regime: only a small number of states have diplomatically recognized the Taliban government since 2021. Humanitarian-economic crisis is constant, social-policy controversies (the systematic restriction of women's education and employment is the principal point of international contention) are continual, and internal disagreement between more pragmatic Kabul-based factions and more doctrinally-strict Kandahar-based factions runs through everything. On the social-policy axis, this is the most institutionally restrictive autocratic theocracy operating today.
Beyond these three governing cases, three smaller intellectual currents carry autocratic-theocratic content into contemporary Western argument. The American Christian Reconstructionist or Dominionist current, anchored in Rousas John Rushdoony's Institutes of Biblical Law (1973) and developed through figures like Gary North and Greg Bahnsen, holds that civil law should be grounded in Old Testament biblical law. The Catholic integralist current, principally Adrian Vermeule's Common Good Constitutionalism (2022) along with the Josias collective, Patrick Deneen, and Sohrab Ahmari, holds that the political order should be constituted as the temporal expression of Catholic religious truth. The Religious Zionist current in contemporary Israeli politics (the Religious Zionist Party under Bezalel Smotrich and Otzma Yehudit under Itamar Ben-Gvir) holds that the Israeli political infrastructure should be grounded in religious-Zionist commitments rather than secular-liberal Zionist ones. Smotrich, Ben-Gvir, and the broader Hindutva project under Modi's BJP show how autocratic-theocratic content lives inside electoral politics by fusing with ethno-national mobilisation [see the Right-Wing Nationalism dossier section on religious-national fusion]. These three are intellectually serious; none is, as of 2026, in a position to govern at the scale Tehran, Riyadh, and Kabul do.
Key Thinkers
Iranian Shia cleric who led the 1979 revolution and founded the Islamic Republic. His wilayat al-faqih doctrine is the blueprint behind the most institutionally weighty theocracy now operating.
Founder of the Wahhabist Sunni reform movement. His 1744 pact with Muhammad ibn Saud laid both the doctrine and the institutions on which the Saudi religious-political order was built.
Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood thinker whose Milestones (1964) became the defining Sunni Islamist argument for building Islamic political institutions. Nasser's regime executed him in 1966, and his hold over later Sunni Islamist movements only deepened afterward.
American Calvinist theologian. The Institutes of Biblical Law (1973) is the defining text of Christian Reconstructionism and the source the whole American theonomic tradition traces back to.
American legal scholar at Harvard Law School. Common Good Constitutionalism (2022) gave Catholic integralism its fullest modern statement, and he has become the figure American integralists organize around.
Key Texts
Where wilayat al-faqih gets its definitive statement. This is the doctrinal scaffolding under the most institutionally weighty theocracy now operating.
The defining Sunni Islamist argument for building Islamic political institutions. Start here if you want to follow how the wider Sunni Islamist intellectual world thinks.
The founding document of American Christian Reconstructionism, and the root the country's whole theonomic tradition grows from.
Catholic integralism's fullest modern statement, and the book the American integralist scene reads and reacts to first.
Niesel's study of how Calvin's theology and politics fit together. Scholars still reach for it to make sense of Reformation Geneva and the Reformed tradition that grew out of it.
Naipaul's travels through post-1979 Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia. If you want the lived texture of Islamic political life rather than the doctrine, this is the easiest way in.
Modern Manifestations
Three states govern by some version of this tradition today, and three intellectual currents keep arguing for it without holding power.
Iran carries the most institutional weight. Its 2025-2026 politics still run on the aftershocks of the 2022-2023 Mahsa Amini protests, the 2024 Israeli-Iranian military exchanges, and a Middle East that shifted hard underneath it: the Assad regime fell in Syria in December 2024, the 2024 Israeli-Lebanese conflict gutted Hezbollah's military capabilities, and Iranian regional influence took damage across the board. Hanging over all of it is succession. Ayatollah Khamenei is in his late eighties; the machinery runs through the Assembly of Experts, whose deliberations outsiders cannot see; and the candidate field is itself a map of the regime's anxieties. Mojtaba Khamenei, the current Supreme Leader's son, would raise hereditary-succession concerns inside a Shia clerical tradition that is not supposed to work that way. Hassan Khomeini, the founder's grandson, sits with the reformist current. Behind them stand senior clerics like Ayatollah Alireza Arafi and Ayatollah Sadeq Larijani.
Saudi Arabia is the second case, though Mohammed bin Salman's Vision 2030 program has been dismantling the old arrangement since 2017. What was a Wahhabist political-religious compact is now somewhere between that compact and a straightforwardly monarchical state with the clerics demoted. The drift is toward absolute monarchy rather than theocracy, even if religious-political infrastructure still counts for more in Riyadh than in any comparable monarchy.
Afghanistan under the Taliban is the third, and the harshest. International isolation, a grinding humanitarian and economic crisis, and a running fight between the more pragmatic Kabul faction and the doctrinally strict Kandahar faction define the regime. On social policy, above all women's education and employment, no operating theocracy today is more restrictive.
Outside those three, the argument lives on in print. American Christian Reconstructionism (the Rushdoony ecosystem) touches parts of Reformed-Protestant intellectual life and almost nothing electoral. Catholic integralism (Vermeule and the wider post-liberal scene) holds real standing in Catholic political-theological academic life and a foothold inside the American conservative coalition. Religious Zionism, through Smotrich's Religious Zionist Party and Ben-Gvir's Otzma Yehudit, actually governs as part of the Israeli coalition and shapes policy on West Bank settlement, religious-secular relations, and Israeli political identity.
Two more cases sit in modified form. Pakistan runs a constitutional Islamic-Republic framework in which the military and the clerical establishment both reach into policy, and Sudan carried Islamist content through the Bashir years (1989-2019) and into parts of the transitions that followed.
Real-World Debates
Nothing else hanging over the tradition matters as much as who replaces Khamenei. He is in his late eighties. The decision runs through the Assembly of Experts, a body whose deliberations no outsider gets to watch, and the names in contention split between continuity and reform. Whoever wins inherits the wilayat al-faqih apparatus and sets its direction for a generation. The deeper question the case poses is whether a succession can carry the theocratic order intact while popular resistance at home and pressure across the region both keep rising.
Can you reform a theocratic compact from the inside without breaking the regime that rests on it? Saudi Arabia under Vision 2030 is the experiment in progress. Since 2017 the results have pointed in different directions at once: social and cultural life has loosened a great deal, clerical political authority has been clipped without being killed off, and power inside the royal family has grown more concentrated, not less. What stays unsettled is transferability. The Saudi move may be a template other theocracies could follow, or it may turn on petroleum revenue that those other cases simply do not have.
Vermeule, Deneen, Ahmari, and the Josias collective put Catholic political theology forward as a genuine rival to liberal democracy rather than a supplement to it. Their case reaches back to foundations that predate the liberal tradition and claims priority over it. The objection that keeps landing is a practical one: integralism never quite says how Catholic commitments would actually be enforced across a pluralist society without rebuilding the coercive apparatus of the old confessional states. That argument is alive in Catholic academic theology and carries a small but real charge inside the American conservative coalition.
What happens when theocratic content has to operate through a working democracy? Israeli Religious Zionism is where you can watch it. The Religious Zionist Party and Otzma Yehudit have sat in the coalition government and pushed Israeli policy on West Bank settlement, religious-secular relations, and the question of what kind of state Israel is. The open question cuts both ways. Either these parties smuggle theocratic commitments into democratic institutions, or those institutions bend the commitments enough that the result looks nothing like Tehran or Kandahar.
Criticisms & Blind Spots
Strongest Critique
Give the tradition its due first: it has done serious intellectual work on religious authority and political legitimacy, and Khomeini's wilayat al-faqih jurisprudence, the Catholic integralist legal lineage, and the scholarship on religious-political institutional design all still feed comparative political theory. The killing objection comes from inside liberalism, and it has not aged. Locke's A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), Mill's On Liberty (1859), and the constitutional philosophy downstream of them make a plain charge. Theocracy hands political power to clerics who answer to no electorate, forces doctrine onto people who never signed up for it, and falls back on coercion the moment that population pushes back. The contemporary cases bear the charge out. Human-rights abuses, the systematic stripping of women's and minority rights, religious police enforcing doctrine in the streets: no serious observer disputes any of it. The sharper version of the critique concedes a point the easy version skips. These regimes do command real popular support in parts of their populations, and waving that away as false consciousness is lazy. So the live question is not whether religious-political commitments are legitimate but whether autocratic theocracy is the right vehicle for them at all. Turkey under Erdogan's AKP is the alternative the tradition has to reckon with, fusing Islamist-aligned politics with elections and parties. And here the evidence forks. Maybe the AKP marks a genuinely different road for religious politics, or maybe its record since 2007 shows that road bending back toward the theocratic form regardless. Honest readers land on opposite sides.
Blind Spots
Start with the costliest mistake: assuming a religion speaks with one doctrinal voice. None of them do. The Shia clergy has been split over wilayat al-faqih since Khomeini first stated it in 1970. The Sunni world argues across its schools and its rival Islamist currents. Catholicism carries deep internal disagreement about how faith should relate to political power, and Protestantism carries more. A theocratic state needs determinate commitments to produce determinate policy, but the demand for determinacy crashes straight into how religions actually behave, which is to argue with themselves without end. The usual fix is to crown one faction's reading and brand the rest deficient. That holds right up until it doesn't. Then there is everyone who falls outside the favored faith. Theocratic authority imposes its commitments on minorities and unbelievers whether or not they consent, and every modern version has leaned on the same machinery to do it: religious police, doctrine written into law, social pressure on anyone outside the privileged tradition. The 1929 Lateran Treaty between Mussolini and the Vatican, the template Franco later adapted through the 1937 Decree of Unification [see the Falangism dossier section on Catholic-traditionalist absorption], shows the pattern once it gets absorbed into a fascist state: the coercion spreads across the whole apparatus instead of sitting in clerical hands, but the people on the receiving end fare no better. Can religious-political authority work without that machinery at all? The tradition has not solved this, and the historical record points to no. Last, doctrine itself moves. Religions shift over generations as culture, economics, politics, and technology shift around them; the record leaves no doubt about that. Theocracy bets on commitments fixed firmly enough to be cast into permanent institutions, and the plain fact of doctrinal drift undercuts the bet in a way the tradition has barely confronted. When the doctrine moves, does the regime move with it? That deserves an answer the tradition has not given.
Internal Tensions
Doctrine and the daily work of running a modern state pull against each other constantly. Iran has felt it on nearly every front since 1979: economic policy, foreign policy, social policy, and above all the technologies and cultural shifts the founders never saw coming. Tehran's habit is to reinterpret doctrine until it fits the situation. The honest worry is whether that reinterpretation keeps the founding commitments or just quietly swaps in new ones under the old name. Saudi Arabia has wrestled with the identical problem since 1744, and the Mohammed bin Salman renegotiation is the loudest contemporary chapter in that long argument. Underneath that sits the matter of consent. Theocratic authority leans on religious legitimacy, and religious legitimacy assumes the governed actually accept the framework. Iran tests the assumption directly: resistance has flared in cycles since 1999 and broke open in 2022-2023. So can a regime like this absorb sustained opposition without reaching for so much coercion that the legitimacy claim collapses under its own weight? The record so far suggests it cannot, at least not without costs the tradition would rather not name out loud. The third fault line is internal to the Shia world, and it is the one that runs deepest. Before 1979 the consensus position held that jurists had no business wielding direct political power while the Twelfth Imam remained hidden. Wilayat al-faqih tore up that consensus and handed sovereignty to the most learned and just among them. Sistani and the Najaf school have kept faith with the older quietist line, and the quarrel over whether Khomeini's doctrine is a legitimate development or a rupture has never closed. It comes down to one question the whole tradition has to answer: what, exactly, should the relationship be between doctrinal authority and clerical political authority? Almost everything else follows from how you answer it.
Reading List
Khomeini's 1970 lectures in Najaf, given to seminary students before the revolution he had no obvious means to deliver. The doctrinal text behind the 1979 Iranian constitution; the argument that during the occultation of the Twelfth Imam, qualified jurists must exercise political authority is the move that distinguished Iran's revolution from every other twentieth-century Shia movement.
Cleveland and Bunton's standard university textbook, now in its sixth edition. The reason it appears on this list rather than a more partisan history: you need the institutional context before you can understand what is actually distinctive about contemporary theocratic regimes, and this is the textbook used to teach exactly that.
Commins's 2009 history of the 1744 alliance between Muhammad ibn Saud and Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab that founded the Saudi religious-political compact. No book makes a clearer case for why Saudi state authority and Wahhabi doctrine will not come apart as neatly as Vision 2030 would like.
Vermeule's 2022 argument that American constitutional law should be reinterpreted through pre-liberal natural-law categories. The most fully developed contemporary statement of Catholic integralist constitutional thought; provocative, often criticized as evasive about its institutional prescriptions, and required for understanding the contemporary intellectual revival of confessional-state political theory.
Rushdoony's 1973 massive treatise founding American Christian Reconstructionism, arguing for the contemporary applicability of Mosaic civil law including stoning penalties for various offenses. Read for the unembarrassed totality of the position; the Christian-nationalist movements that descend from Rushdoony almost never claim him by name.
Locke's 1689 essay, written from Dutch exile during the English religious settlements. Liberal religious toleration starts here, and its claim that the state cannot legitimately enforce religious truth because belief cannot be coerced into sincerity is still the answer the rest of this list has to get past.
Frequently Asked Questions
An autocratic theocracy is a regime that grounds political authority in revealed religious truth rather than in popular consent, and designs its institutions to keep clerical or religiously-credentialed judgment above the reach of electoral correction. The contemporary canonical case is the Iranian Islamic Republic founded in 1979 under Ayatollah Khomeini, whose doctrine of wilayat al-faqih (Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist) places the Supreme Leader above the elected president and parliament. Saudi Arabia's Wahhabist political-religious compact, dating to the 1744 agreement between Muhammad ibn Saud and Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, is the longer-running variant.
Theocracy is the broader category for any political order grounded in religious authority; autocratic theocracy is the specific subset where that authority is also unaccountable to popular vote. Medieval Catholic confessional states, Calvin's Geneva (1541-1564), and the Puritan New England colonies all counted as theocracies, but their populations broadly accepted the religious framework. Iran is autocratic because the Guardian Council vets candidates and the Supreme Leader sits above the electoral apparatus; the regime has had to use force to maintain religious-political authority through the 1999 student protests, the 2009 Green Movement, and the 2022-2023 Mahsa Amini protests.
Yes, and it is the cleanest contemporary case. The Supreme Leader (Ayatollah Khamenei since 1989) sits above the elected president and Majlis; the Assembly of Experts that selects him is itself elected from clerically-vetted candidates; the Guardian Council vets all electoral candidates and is half-appointed by the Supreme Leader. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps reports directly to him and has accumulated autonomous military, intelligence, and economic authority. The circular legitimating logic, where voters choose only who the clerics let them choose, is the distinctive architecture Khomeini built in his Najaf lectures and the 1979 constitution.
Less so than it used to be. The 1744 Wahhabist compact survived the rise of the modern Saudi state in 1932 and shaped Saudi political life through 2017: Hanbali Islamic law as the legal framework, the Mutawa'a religious police, clerical control of religious education. Mohammed bin Salman's Vision 2030 has constrained clerical political authority, reduced the religious police, and centralised power in the royal family. The contemporary case looks increasingly like an absolute monarchy with residual religious-political features rather than a true theocratic compact, which is why the academic classification has become contested over the past decade.
Iran is Shia, Saudi Arabia is Sunni, and the institutional architectures are different. Iran layers clerical authority over an electoral apparatus through Khomeini's wilayat al-faqih doctrine, which was itself a departure from the older Shia quietist tradition that Ayatollah Sistani in Najaf still holds. Saudi Arabia ran a division of labor between House of Saud political authority and Wahhabist clerical authority through the 1744 compact, with no electoral component at all. Iran is doctrinally activist; Saudi Arabia was structurally conservative. Both have been renegotiating their founding bargains since 2017 (Vision 2030) and since 2022 (the Mahsa Amini protests).
Not at the governing scale of Tehran, Riyadh, or Taliban Kabul. Three Christian-political currents carry autocratic-theocratic content into contemporary Western argument: the American Christian Reconstructionist tradition anchored in Rousas Rushdoony's Institutes of Biblical Law (1973); the Catholic integralist current built around Adrian Vermeule's Common Good Constitutionalism (2022) and the Josias collective; and parts of the Religious Zionist political current in Israel under Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir. All three are intellectually serious, none governs at scale, and all three insist their version of the tradition is legitimate while the others would be tyranny.
Wilayat al-faqih, the 'Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist', is Ayatollah Khomeini's doctrine that in the absence of the Hidden Twelfth Imam, political authority should be exercised by the most learned and just Islamic jurist on the Imam's behalf. He articulated it in lectures delivered in Najaf in 1970 and published as Islamic Government the same year. The doctrine was a real departure from the dominant Shia tradition, which had long held that direct clerical political authority was inappropriate during the Imam's occultation. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in Iraq holds the older quietist line, which is why post-2003 Iraqi Shia politics looks structurally different from Iran's.
It depends what 'democracy' is doing in the question. If you mean competitive multiparty elections with universal suffrage, then the cases get hard fast: Iran has elections but vetted candidates and a Supreme Leader above the vote, Israel has democracy but the Religious Zionist coalition has been pushing autocratic-theocratic content into governing policy. Turkey under the early AKP looked like the cleanest case of Islamist commitments inside democratic-electoral infrastructure, and what happened to the AKP after 2007 is exactly the question the academic literature has not resolved. The structural answer in the Lockean tradition (A Letter Concerning Toleration, 1689) is no: enforcing religious truth requires coercion that erodes the electoral consent democracy presupposes.
Related Ideologies
Within Western political philosophy, the American Catholic-integralist current is the natural ally. It is arguing for the same priority of revealed truth over procedure, just in a Catholic vocabulary instead of a Shia one.
Where right-wing nationalism prizes religious-cultural identity, it converges with theocracy on the shape of religious-political institutions. The catch is that nationalism puts the nation first and reins in the theocratic content at the point where faith and flag part ways, a limit the theocratic tradition refuses to accept.
On social policy the two travel together: traditional conservatism wants religion and inherited custom to hold their place, and so does theocracy. They split over the machinery. Traditional conservatives want the culture to keep faith alive and generally balk at handing the state the clerical sovereignty theocracy demands.
Where Autocratic Theocracy sits on the map
The quiz places Autocratic Theocracy in the Authoritarian Center region, one of the nine on its map. The region page covers what those traditions share and who tends to land there.
See all 81 ideologiesAutocratic Theocracy compared
Side-by-side comparisons of Autocratic Theocracy with the traditions it is most often confused with or argued against.
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