The Secular in a 'Sheet of Scattered Sand': Conservative Cantonese Protestants and 'Postsecular' Publics on the Pacific Rim

The recent political engagements of Cantonese-speaking Protestant Christians in the purportedly secular civil societies of Pacific Rim metropolises like Vancouver, San Francisco, and Hong Kong have usually been taken to challenge the norms of secularity in the public sphere. Ostensibly stemming from conservative ideologies about sexuality, the activities of Cantonese Protestants are said to have invigorated right-wing parties that seem to have reversed course on democratization in a region between Asia and the Americas where economic, political, and social integration is being pursued. These challenges are usually described as ‘postsecular,’  opening up the question of what secularization is as a social and political process through the introduction of theological practice in politics. In this presentation, I hope to show that postsecularism does not only describe unsettling conditions in a civil society that has been construed as secular, but also the enactment of contestation within religious congregations like those of Cantonese Protestants about what the meaning of secularity is and how to engage it. The term that links civil society and community in this case is ‘publics,’ the mediated channels of communications that render secularism as an open question at various levels of society. Borrowing from Sun Yatsen’s phrase ‘a sheet of scattered sand’ to describe the cacophony of Chinese political agency, I argue that the recent conservative politics of Cantonese Protestants are public enactments of the postsecular because they ask about the meaning of the secular as the basic political question. By offering this talk, I seek to contribute to the study of how the operation of postsecular publics at local community scales have broader implications for Pacific Rim civil societies that are said to be ‘global’ in scope, with the questioning of the secular as close to the heart of contemporary political, economic, and social re-organization in this region.