Cultural Mandate

I was musing on the term 'Cultural Mandate' recently. Like the phrase 'Cultural Revolution', it has a completely different sense from its normal semantic burden when placed in context. In the context to which I am referring, it is the idea that there is an explicit religious directive or 'permission' to engage the world of secular culture from the viewpoint of a specific religion.

I think that this particular idea is relatively meaningless except when contrasted against another idea. This would be the idea that religion is a private thing to be kept out of the mainstream and out of other people's faces as much as possible.

The point I'd make is that no interpretation of religion should assert a 'Cultural Mandate'. Religion is a social phenomenon, and automatically engages culture. It should automatically engage present-day issues and current affairs. This is not to say that it should have the dominant say, but that it will always have some say. Let me show you why I say this.

(I will use the term 'Church' to represent any organised religion in the following points.) Societies that demand the separation of spiritual and secular tend to fall into four logical areas:

1. You can have the 'Church vs State' model in which you do not let churchmen into the state or statesmen into the church. This makes the country effectively a bipartite state. Historically, this idea could be seen in countries like Andorra, which was ruled by a French duke and a Spanish bishop.
2. You can have the 'Church above State' model in which the churchmen are statesmen but first churchmen (often called a theocracy). In such cases, since the Church makes almost everything its business, the secular state is very small in scope.
3. You can have the 'Church below State' model in which the State has all the powers and the Church is tolerated but is not allowed to express itself in all ways, since some of these ways might be detrimental to public order. This is the case for modern France, for example, which protects religious practice as long as it doesn't interfere with public order.
4. You can have the 'neither Church nor State, or whichever is more advantageous' model in which the State professes to also have an official Church. Historically, England and many other European states were like this; you will still find that the ruler of England has the title Fidei Defensor ('Defender of the Faith').

What I am saying with these four cases is that there is no case in which you can take the Church out of the State completely, and there will always be scope for the religious to place their views on offer in the marketplace of ideas.

But hold on, you say, what about those states which actively suppress religious activity?

Well, that is not the separation of spiritual and secular, but the separation of spiritual from secular, with the intent of abolishing the former entirely. In such states, even secular culture suffers and takes on near-religious mythological significance.

My point is that the only reason one might claim to have a 'Cultural Mandate' is that there is actually some force (possibly even from within, such as religious conservatism) that says that people of a certain religion should not act as cultural agents in the secular world. The acts of such a cultural agent would possibly include singing in a nightclub, posting sensual (but not obscene, speaking with cultural relativity) music videos, writing philosophy textbooks, teaching history, or running a wine shop (or coffee house) without posting the relevant scriptural justifications all over the place.

If these activities are seen as inappropriate for practising religionists, I'd probably add being a lawyer (in some religions, it is said that 'the strength of sin is the law'), being a banker or working in many financial organisations (in some religions, it is a sin to charge usurious rates), or trading in any tainted (by religious definition) goods — such as images, foodstuffs, books, or education (depending on what religion it is, and with specifics different for each).

Does a religionist need a 'Commercial Mandate' too? Apparently, it is not so popular a topic, and in fact I've noticed that movements who make noise about cultural sinfulness tend to be very happy and make big justifications for commercial sinfulness (although the reverse is not normally so true).

Well, these are some of my thoughts. There's no solid, meaty, whack-on-the-head conclusion here, except that I don't think a cultural phenomenon needs a cultural mandate.