In Europe the concept of “political Islam” is often used to refer to forms of Islam that want to create a theocracy of one degree of stringency or another. This concept is currently fairly well established in official and academic usage.
But it always bothers me. Particularly because I’m aware how intensely some of the most militantly democratic leaders in American history were inspired to some significant degree by their religious faith. Civil rights movements from Abolitionism to the 20th and 21st century defense of voting rights and opposition to racial and religious discrimination have been influenced in major ways by religious leaders and beliefs without being theocratic.
Gary Dorrien provides some insight into one current version in this in a look at the theology advocated by Baptist Minister and current Senator from George, Rafael Warnock:
What is needed is to integrate the liberationist faith, founding, movement, and theology of the Black church. Warnock stressed that it cannot happen without organic leaders who build organic institutional infrastructure. Theological professors must be rooted in the church. Church pastors must ground their congregations in good theology. Movement activists must build new organizations that bridge the divide between “Sanctified Churches and human rights marches,” and between “ivory towers and ebony trenches.” The Black church, he argued, for all its liberationist history, has never bloomed into a self-critical liberationist community. It takes pride in Martin Luther King Jr. but does not follow him in conceiving the church as a vehicle of social revolution. King regarded the transformation of society as central to the mission of the church. He took for granted that the mission of the church must be founded on a strong doctrine of social salvation. Warnock judged that Black churches are reasonably good at reacting to “glaring episodes of insult” but not so good at being the oppositional body of Christ in the world. Constantly opposing the dominant culture is exhausting, and so Black churches prefer to look for opportunities for conciliation and compensation. Warnock said the church needs to cultivate a fundamentally oppositional spirituality, and this requires taking seriously “the pietistic dimensions of black faith.”1 [my emphasis in bold]
This doesn’t mean that some forms of liberation theology don’t have a theocratic element. But many of them don’t. That’s why I’ve never been entirely comfortable with the use of “political Islam” to describe specifically theocratic views.
Dorrien, Gary (2022):The Making of Raphael Warnock. Commonweal <12/06/2022 https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/making-raphael-warnock> (Accessed: 2022-11-12).