Citations:atheocracy

Noun: "an atheist or irreligious state"

 * 1867, "Persecution", The Saturday Review, Volume 23, Number 594, 16 March 1867, page 328:
 * One of the latest religious sects, based on negation of the supernatural, aspires to found a theocracy—we should rather have said an atheocracy—which will realize the Platonic ideal of the rule of philosophers by suppressing, in the interests of of "humanity," whatever its philosophy condemns.
 * 1907, Thomas Whittaker, The Liberal State: A Speculation, Watts & Co. (1907), page 14:
 * An atheocracy is not a practicable form of government.
 * 1950, William Pepperell Montague, Great Visions of Philosophy: Varieties of Speculative Thought in the West from the Greeks to Bergson, The Open Court Publishing Company (1950), page 32:
 * An atheocracy of the Marxian type is as intolerant of liberty of thought as any Holy Roman Empire or Bible-ridden company of Puritans.
 * 1956, Meeting the Russians: American Quakers Visit the Soviet Union: A Report, page 9:
 * Within the confines of any society based on the "one true faith" — whether it be a theocracy or an "atheocracy" — elections can have little purpose except to determine how large a part of the population has accepted the faith and to encourage the remainder to turn from the error of their ways.
 * 2012, Robert Joustra, "Beware the secular atheocracy", The Globe and Mail, 22 February 2012:
 * More than a few thinkers have noted the irony of secularism as itself constituting a de facto “religious” system of thought, which defines how and why we can believe things, and where we can talk about them. As some might put it: a secular atheocracy.
 * 2015, Lois Lee, Recognizing the Nonreligious: Reimagining the Secular, Oxford University Press (2015), ISBN 9780198736844, page 191:
 * For example, scholars sometimes classify Soviet state anti-theism or 'forced secularization' as an extreme form of secularism; at other times, they classify it as a weak form— as an 'atheocracy' with a non-religious ideology and culture at its heart and working at odds with a pluralist ideal of secularist governance.