I think this is where you get into de facto and de jure arguments. The UK is a de jure theocracy, sure. But the reality is that the Church of England specifically - and religion more generally - afaik doesn’t seem to have any real political power. It seems like capital doesn’t really need them to help wield political power.

Now in the US, I’d argue it’s the opposite: separation of church and state on paper but in many ways it is a de facto theocracy. The religious - white evangelicals in particular - have tremendous soft power as well as social power in a lot of places (try having much of a social life outside of church in the south outside of Atlanta, for example). Of course, this is because the religious in the US are particularly valuable to capital.

So sure, the UK may be a “theocracy” on paper but I don’t think it means much.

:us-foreign-policy:

This is like how the UK isn’t really a monarchy because the monarch rarely exercises their near absolute power. Strangely, the degree of nuance afforded to the arrangement of power in the UK is not only not afforded to many other countries, but their actual nuanced distribution of powers is outright ignored in favor of calling them absolutist dictatorships.

I wanted to gulag my comparative politics professor multiple times.

Parliamentary theocracy.

No, the role of the First Estate is to affirm God’s approval of the divine right of the monarch to rule. The Second Estate still keeps order and bears arms to do just war against the enemies of the realm.

You, in the Third Estate, need to get back to tilling the fields