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.
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, 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.