Sample sentences for THEOCRACY

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Definition

a society governed by religious officials

Disillusionment with forms of theocratic government, such as practiced in Iran, can lead people to question the legitimacy of any religious beliefs used to justify non-secular government.
Religious belief - Wikipedia -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_belief (retrieved 05/20/06)

Although church and state were officially separate, they cooperated so closely that Geneva was virtually a theocracy.
Reformation - MSN Encarta -- http://encarta.msn.com/text_761562628___0/Reformation.html (retrieved 05/21/06)
The Dalai Lamas ruled Tibet as a theocracy from the middle of the 17th century until the seizure of Tibet by China in 1950.
Buddhism - MSN Encarta -- http://encarta.msn.com/text_761552895___0/Buddhism.html (retrieved 05/21/06)
For example, Roger Williams found it necessary to found a new colony in Rhode Island to escape persecution in the theocratically dominated colony of Massachusetts.
Freedom of religion - Wikipedia -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_religion (retrieved 05/20/06)
It is an intense irony that the citizens of Geneva, a people who were so determined to be free from an oppressive church hierarchy, who held as an article of faith the priesthood of all believers, and who were fanatical about the liberty to study and interpret the scriptures for themselves, should end up establishing a theocracy where the Kingdom of God was so rigidly enforced that staying up after 9 o'clock in a public inn was a crime.
The Reformation - lepg.org -- http://www.lepg.org/religion.htm (retrieved 05/20/06)
...Puritans in colonial America, who were among the most radical Puritans and whose social experiment took the form of a Calvinist theocracy.
Puritan - Wikipedia -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puritan (retrieved 05/20/06)
In the case of Judaism, it came in the form of the Pharisees, who imposed a rigid legalistic theocracy on the Hebrews.
Neal Stephenson -- Snow Crash
They are the hieroglyphics of feudalism, succeeding those of theocracy.
Victor Hugo -- The Hunchback of Notre Dame
The notion of this strange culture pocket, hidden amongst unknown ranges, and ruled over by some vague kind of theocracy, interested him as a student of history, apart from the curious though perhaps related secrets of the lamasery.
James Hilton -- Lost Horizon
Alessandro lost himself for a moment in the great hall where bookshelves rose to a vaulted ceiling five storeys high, and stained glass windows at either end made the scholars feel both that they were submerged in a tropical sea and that they would be prepared were scholasticism subsumed in theocracy.
Mark Helprin -- A Soldier of the Great War
Simply, it was this: for good purposes, even high purposes, the people of Salem developed a theocracy, a combine of state and religious power whose function was to keep the community together, and to prevent any kind of disunity that might open it to destruction by material or ideological enemies.
Arthur Miller -- The Crucible
The humans are often puzzled to understand the range of his opinions—why he is one day almost a Communist and the next not far from some kind of theocratic Fascism—one day a scholastic, and the next prepared to deny human reason altogether—one day immersed in politics, and, the day after, declaring that all states of us world are equally "under judgment".
C.S. Lewis -- The Screwtape Letters
People who were used to the rigid theocracy of the Pharisees couldn't handle the idea of a popular, nonhierarchical church.
Neal Stephenson -- Snow Crash
It was the prognostication of the philosopher who sees human thought, volatilized by the press, evaporating from the theocratic recipient.
Victor Hugo -- The Hunchback of Notre Dame
All civilization begins in theocracy and ends in democracy.
Victor Hugo -- The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Feudalism demands to share with theocracy, while awaiting the inevitable arrival of the people, who will assume the part of the lion: ~Quia nominor leo~.
Victor Hugo -- The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Between theocratic architecture and this there is the difference that lies between a sacred language and a vulgar language, between hieroglyphics and art, between Solomon and Phidias.
Victor Hugo -- The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Some theories which he may meet in modern Christian circles may here prove helpful; theories, I mean, that place the hope of society in some inner ring of "clerks", some trained minority of theocrats.
C.S. Lewis -- The Screwtape Letters
In this new version of the gospels, Jesus came back to earth and organized a church, which later became the Church of the Eastern and Western Roman Em. pire-another rigid, brutal, and irrational theocracy.
Neal Stephenson -- Snow Crash
The general characteristics of all theocratic architecture are immutability, horror of progress, the preservation of traditional lines, the consecration of the primitive types, the constant bending of all the forms of men and of nature to the incomprehensible caprices of the symbol.
Victor Hugo -- The Hunchback of Notre Dame

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