A country can have an official faith without being run by priests
Denmark, England, Iceland and Greece all keep an established church, yet their citizens face no religious pressure from the state at all. Saudi Arabia and Iran sit at the opposite end. An official religion is a spectrum of privilege, and it is not the same thing as a theocracy.
A state religion is a creed that a sovereign government formally endorses. That endorsement can mean public money for clergy and church buildings, or official encouragement to worship, but it does not require clerics to write the laws. A country with such a faith is called confessional: not secular, yet not necessarily a theocracy either.
The arrangement is ancient, stretching back into the Ancient Near East and prehistory. The Roman scholar Marcus Terentius Varro even had a name for the link between cult and government: theologia civilis, or civic theology. The first Christian body to win state sponsorship was the Armenian Apostolic Church, in 301 CE. Centuries later, Catholic and Protestant rivalry in Europe produced a blunt rule, cuius regio, eius religio, meaning a territory follows its ruler's faith, written into the Peace of Augsburg of 1555. In England, Henry VIII split from Rome in 1534 and became Supreme Head of the Church.
A subtle distinction separates a state church from a state religion. With a state church, the government controls the institution outright. With a state religion, an outside body may govern it; Catholicism, for instance, answers to the Vatican. Undoing the link is called disestablishment, and resisting that undoing gave English its famously long word, antidisestablishmentarianism. Oddities survive too: Alsace-Moselle in France still funds several denominations under a local law inherited from the system France used before 1905.
In the Middle East most Muslim-majority states name Islam as official, though daily restrictions differ widely. Since the 1979 revolution, Iran's elected presidents are meant to defer to religious authorities. Turkey took another path, turning secular through the reforms of Atatürk without embracing state atheism. Bhutan's constitution, meanwhile, calls Tibetan Buddhism the country's spiritual heritage and has the king appoint the Je Khenpo along with a commission for monastic affairs.
Source: State religion
