Fantasies of Sovereignty: Civic Secularism in Canada

• Published in: Critical Research on Religion
• Main Author: Klassen, Pamela E
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: SAGE Publications 2015
• Subjects: British Columbia; Canada; Prince Rupert; Rupert; Tsimshian; Tsimshian*
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/2050303215584230; http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2050303215584230; http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full-xml/10.1177/2050303215584230

To ask whether the postcolonial is postsecular demands asking for whom, where, and when? To that end, what follows is a reflection situated in two Canadian contexts, separated by time and place, but both connected to the ‘colonial secular’. Engaged in the public deliberation and storytelling of civic secularism, through which political legitimacy is achieved through comparing religions, these two contexts are twenty-first century Québec and early-twentieth-century British Columbia. More specifically, I consider two moments in which the state (or its agents) exerted its authority in order to reshape bodily practice and stories of place: the debate over the ‘secular charter’ in Québec and the founding of the railway town of Prince Rupert on Tsimshian land. These acts of negotiation and law-making turned to religious forms of legitimation in a way that was at once ambivalent, comparative, and forgetful of the historical founding of the state’s own power. That is, in forming their ‘natural sovereignty’ over others, states often forget that their claims to power are, in part, acts of pretending.