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  • Moments of Faith
  • Thomas Allen (bio)

"Liberalism, in eliminating God from public life, has killed the Catholic states" (Mélanges 55).1 This heated statement, penned from Québec in 1883 by the American expatriate writer Jules-Paul Tardivel, captures the sense of crisis among Catholics in North America in the late nineteenth century. For Tardivel and other conservative Catholics, political liberalism, with its formulation of citizenship and national identity within the framework of a secular public sphere, was antagonistic to the freedom and identity of Catholics. Despite the fact that rights-based liberal democracies such as the US professed official respect for religious freedom, Tardivel and many other members of religious minority groups recognized that the nominal secularism of the public sphere inevitably promoted a sectarian world view. As an American living in Canada, Tardivel's understanding of secularism was based upon the dominance of certain traditions of Protestant thought in North America. As Tardivel clearly perceived, secularism as theorized and practiced in America was both a development and an expression of the history of Protestantism. Thus, Catholic conservatives such as Tardivel concluded that the ostensibly neutral public sphere effectively excluded non-Protestants from full participation while allowing Protestants to express religious views that they defined as universal and nonsectarian.2

Tardivel's lament for the decline of Catholic states in Europe appropriates the complex history of secularization in many different nations on that continent into a warning regarding the progress of the Protestant/secular project in North America. As Jenny Franchot has demonstrated, over the course of the nineteenth century American Protestants engaged in a protracted campaign to define themselves in opposition to Catholicism. In this world view, Protestantism was associated with progress, enlightenment, and [End Page 766] political liberty, while Protestant writers and speakers portrayed Catholicism through associations "with the fabulous, with the world of fiction instead of fact, with stasis instead of progress"; hence, Franchot concludes, for many Americans "Catholicism represented the false narrative of Western culture" (14). Within this context, Tardivel's claim that religion should play a central role in the public life of modern, democratic nation-states amounts to a counterclaim on behalf of a denigrated minority. Having lived his life in two countries where mainstream Protestants had established their faith as the apparently natural foundation of modern politics, Tardivel responded by asserting the viability of Catholicism as a resource for political theory and practice.

Tardivel was only one among many voices to comment on these issues in the period, but his ideas are of particular interest for two reasons. First, as an immigrant to Québec and the child of two immigrants to the US, Tardivel was drawn to inclusive conceptions of citizenship that challenged the nativist views promulgated by many of his contemporaries. Even though his religious ideas were strictly orthodox, Tardivel imagined a radically open version of citizenship that defied the genealogical model of national identity popularized by American writers from Irving and Cooper to Hawthorne and Stowe. Tardivel's vision of a more open citizenship is expressed most fully in his only novel, Pour la patrie (1895), whose plot rejects the possibility of founding an independent Québec on the basis of family history and proffers instead the conversion of an outsider to both religious and political belonging as the revolutionary moment of national emergence.3

A second reason for looking at Tardivel's work is that his metaphor of citizenship as conversion offers the possibility of reevaluating academic constructions of the roles of religion, secularism, and politics in the public sphere. Academic specialists in American literature are themselves implicated in a long, ideological narrative of emergence from a religious past into an ostensibly more rational, secular modernity. By insisting on conversion as a political, rather than a private, act, Tardivel prompts us to rethink our own relationship to secularism, liberalism, and religion—concepts that continue to structure our scholarly endeavors in ways we seldom acknowledge. Perhaps it is time for academics to rethink our commitment to the notion that secular reason is the only legitimate object of public belief.

Tardivel's metaphor of citizenship as conversion may offer a new way forward. Paradoxically, by consecrating an act of...

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