On Declaring a Theocracy in America, Particularly in Utah?

Lord Acton said it best, “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Theocracies, absolute monarchies, dictatorships are not necessarily in and of themselves, evil; there are numerous examples where a good king, a good bishop, a good tyrant have been just and fair rulers who took the obligations and responsibilities of absolute rule seriously.

The inherent problem with this form of governance is that predecessors or successors were not always wise or just. In such a system, there is no real remedy to the misrule of tyrants, short of patience (hoping they will pass on) or revolt.

While democracies can, due to the power of propaganda and popular angst, elect poor leaders, the remedy always is that democracies have the ability to change leadership. Thus, a poor leader can eventually be replaced via the ballot box.

Theocracies, as they are essentially dictatorships, have no such ability. The ONLY good and just theocracy will ultimately be the one Christ establishes at his SECOND coming. Anything else will fall well short, even by His ordained leaders, who after all, are only mere mortals who have the attendant flaws of mere mortals. One needs only witness the recent pedophile scandals to understand this concept, or the Vatopaidi scandal in Greece, or the unfolding Paisios scandal, on the heels of the Katinas debacle, to understand this.

This is precisely WHY the statement by the unelected, and hand-picked parish council in their recent FAQs that “It is a hierarchical religion and a theocracy.”, is utterly DANGEROUS!!!

We here, more than any other religious minority in this country, should understand this concept only too well, considering that we LIVE in what is a de facto theocracy. Yet we have an engineered Parish Council that blithely tells us we are a theocracy! Do we REALLY want to emulate the larger Utah population, or follow the example of a papal governance?