34 - Religion and Myths of Nationhood in Canada and Mexico in the Twenty-First Century

Summary

The religious situations in Canada and Mexico at the start of the twenty-first century are shaped in profound ways by these countries’ long and often fraught relationships to the United States. Put most starkly, the main points of direct intersection across their religious landscapes are the following: the flow, illegal and legal, of people, money, and commodities across their increasingly fortified borders; the ongoing legacies of the history of colonial violence and dispossession of land that marked the birth of all three nations as either “revolutionary” or “commonwealth” nations; the increasingly global and/or transnational varieties of religious experience and organization that are becoming options for belonging and practice in both Canada and Mexico; and, finally, the changing salience of religion as a category at play in the public sphere. All three countries consider themselves democracies, and they are joined by the 1992 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which liberalized the flow of goods and capital (if not always people) among the three countries. The trade between Canada and the United States alone encompasses the largest bilateral exchange of goods, services, and income in the world. After Canada, Mexico is the second-largest trading partner of the United States, and Canada and Mexico are also very important trading partners for each other. Long before the neoliberal economic policies of NAFTA, however, religion flowed abundantly across these borders, via symbols, stories, media, and people.