Re-Configuring Our Social Imaginary:
A Rightful Place for “God-talk” in the Filipino Public sphere
By Romel Regalado Bagares1
__________________________________________________________________
The Separation of Church and State shall be inviolable.
-Art II. Section 6, 1987 Constitution
No law shall be made respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the
free exercise thereof. The free exercise and enjoyment of religious profession and
worship, without discrimination or preference, shall forever be allowed. No
religious test shall be required for the exercise of political rights.
-Art. III, Section 5, 1987 Constitution
Religious denominations and sects shall not be registered (as a political party,
organization or coalition, by the Comelec)
-Art. IX, C, Section 2(5)
One-half of the seats allocated to the party-list representatives shall be filled, as
provided by law, by selection or election from labor, peasant, urban poor,
indigenous cultural communities, women, youth, and such other sectors as may be
provided by law, except the religious sector.
-Art. VI, sec. 5(2).
S
hould a Roman Catholic Bishop ever concern himself with the impeachment
of a President accused of a host of unconstitutional misdeeds in office? In
other words, is it proper for a man of the cloth to join the political fray and
demand that the highest official of the land be tried in an impeachment court for
violating her oath of office?
A lawyer, Mr. Bagares, 32, is a junior fellow at an evangelical think-tank, the Institute for Studies in
Asian Church and Culture (ISACC). He holds degrees in communication research and law from the
University of the Philippines. An associate at the Roque and Butuyan Law Offices, he is a member of the
legal team supporting the citizen-led impeachment complaint against President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.
In 2003, the UP College of Law Faculty awarded him with the inaugural Myres S. McDougal Prize for
Excellence in Legal Writing in the field of International Law and Jurisprudence and the Justice Irene
Cortes Prize for Excellence in Legal Writing in the field of Constitutional Law.
1
1
That such a concern is being raised at all in a country that, for many years,
has been under the spell of someone like the late Manila Archbishop Jaime
Cardinal Sin exhibiting a most public involvement in sundry political issues seems
so odd now, not to mention the explicit pronouncement in the present Philippine
constitution that “no religious test shall be required for the exercise of political
rights.”
But placed in the expanded context of a country with a predominantly
Roman Catholic populace and a three hundred year-history under Spanish
ecclesiastical supremacy, the question is really directed at the proper place of faith
as a source of stability as well as renewal in the public square.
The issues the question draws unto itself come into a sharper focus when
we realize that there too is a growing segment of the Filipino population drawn
into New Religious Movements (NRM) – Roman Catholic-based and otherwise –
which are also beginning to flex their political muscle in the Philippine political
landscape.
Freedom of Religion as Preferred Right
The religion clauses in the Constitution are not meant to throw the baby
out, along with the bathwater, so to speak. They are not a repudiation of religion;
they are in fact, a recognition of the important role religion plays in the democratic
polity. They are fundamentally only a restriction, indeed, a prohibition, on any
governmental act that tends to promote one religion over the others, or
discriminate against one in favor of the others. It is also a protection against any
state-sponsored move coercing people to act against their religious consciences.
It should be well noted that the 1987 Charter itself carries a preamble that,
for all intents and purposes, acknowledges the primordial role of religion in
society: “We, the sovereign Filipino people, imploring the aid of Almighty God...”2
[emphasis mine]
In Philippine jurisprudence, the freedom of religion, along with the freedom
of expression, occupies a “preferred” position;3 that is, it occupies the top rung in
the ladder of rights guaranteed by the Constitution. Hence in a constitutional
adjudication involving the freedom of religion versus another freedom, the former
The present preamble is in stark contrast to the one found in the 1973 charter, which invoked, in a rather
impersonal tone, the aid of “Divine Providence.” The records of the 1987 Constitution show that the
constitutional commissioners precisely adopted the change in recognition of the importance of spirituality
to Filipinos as well as the idea of God as having a personal, and direct hand, in the shaping of a country’s
history. It should also be noted that not even the American Constitution carries a preamble with such an
express and personal invocation of God in the ordination and promulgation of the fundamental law of the
land.
3
Philippine Blooming Mills Employees Organization v. Philippine Blooming Mills, G.R. No. L-65366,
November 9, 1983; 125 SCRA 553 (1983).
2
2
should be privileged over the latter. The “preferred” position approach to
Constitutional adjudication of rights is borrowed from American jurisprudence,
and was first broached in a well-known footnote by Justice Stone in the case of
United States v. Carolene Products Co: [t]here may be a narrower scope for
operation of the presumption of constitutionality when legislation appears on its
face to be within a specific prohibition of the Constitutionality, such as those of
the first ten amendments…”4 The American Supreme Court later on fully
expressed this in the 1943 case of Murdock v. Pennyslvania: “Freedom of the
press, freedom of speech, freedom of religion are in a preferred position.”5
Intellectual and Historical Roots
Often referred in American constitutional literature as the NonEstablishment Clause, Section 5, Article III of the 1987 Charter, finds historical
moorings in the American experience, our constitutional history being closely
linked with an American colonial heritage. 6
In American constitutional history, the clause has an interesting progeny
because as any astute student of history knows, the American colonies were
established by people who had had enough of the religious persecution in the Old
World and wanted to put up a New World where the freedom of conscience is
respected.
In fact, recent reexaminations of intellectual influences on American
constitutionalism places squarely a tradition of dissent against any State-imposed
religious dogma as falling within the confines of Calvinism, which drew
inspiration from the writings of the great Genevan Protestant Reformer. Along this
line of scholarship, the great liberal idea of the “liberty of conscience” propounded
by the philosopher John Locke has been traced to Calvinist influences.7 Locke, is
of course, often identified in the literature as the great inspiration of the American
Revolution against England.
304 U.S. 144, 152 (1938).
Quoted in Miriam Defensor Santiago, The Supreme Court Applies “Clear and Present Danger”: But
Which One? 60 PHIL. L.J 57.
6
The original, American version, reads thus: “ Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of
religion or abridging the Free Exercise thereof.” U.S. Const. Amend. I. Many Filipino constitutional law
scholars trace the beginnings of Constitutionalism in the Philippines to the annexation by the Americans of
the Philippines from Spain in 1898. New scholarship pushes it back to the Malolos Constitution. See Mona
Francesca Katigbak, Historical Transcendence: The Significance of the Bill of Rights of the Malolos
Constitution 73 PHIL. L. J (1998). The Malolos Charter also contains a Non-Establishment Clause.
Nevertheless, such work as Katigbak’s still traces a common root for both the Malolos and American
constitution in the ideas of the Liberal tradition born in the wake of the Enlightenment.
7
See for instance the work of Peter Judson Richards, “The Law Written in Their Hearts?”: Rutherford and
Locke on Nature, Government and Resistance, 18 J. LAW & RELIG. 155-189 (2002). The article
discusses the influence of Calvinist thought on John Locke, and compares his writings with another
Calvinist political theorist, Samuel Rutherford.
4
5
3
Certainly, it is not specious to say that such a constitutional idea – that of
the freedom of conscience as expressed in the exercise of one’s religion – finds
some root in a particularly religious grounding8 although it is also argued that the
influence is not entirely religious, or biblical, but also involves some philosophical
sources.
A recent work, by constitutional law scholar Noel Feldman, offers a
revision of much of the scholarship on the First Amendment with respect to
religion. On the one hand, he provides a history that debunks those who portray
the Framers as secularists on the model of the French secularist philosophes,
protecting rational government from supposedly irrational religion.
In fact, the constitutional scholar shows that The Framers' Lockean view
was grounded in a set of ideas with both religious and philosophical roots. On the
other hand, he also argues against those who claim that the Non-Establishment
Clause was motivated by an evangelical Christian impulse to keep religion free
from the corruption of worldly affairs. In Feldman’s historiography, “the
evangelical supporters of separation, as much as the rationalists, argued for
separation on the basis of the twin Lockean views that the temporal power lacked
authority to coerce in matters of religion and that individual reason and choice
must be paramount in religious belief.”9
Feldman’s work is in stark contrast to those of other scholars who wish to
deny faith-based initiatives any position of integrity at all in the public sphere by
erecting a rigid, artificial and unrealistic “wall of separation” between Church and
State.
The Clause and Its Nuances in Philippine Law and Jurisprudence
The ban on ecclesiastics in municipal office
The classic case in Church-State relations in Philippine jurisprudence is that
of Pamil v. Teleron,10 where the eligibility of a priest to assume an elective
municipal position was questioned before the Supreme Court in a certiorari
proceeding.
The respondent, Fr. Margarito R. Gonzaga, was elected in 1971 as
municipal mayor of Alburqueque, Bohol. A petition was filed to disqualify him
from his post because of the Administrative Code provision which states that: “In
no case shall there be elected or appointed to a municipal office ecclesiastics,
Id., at 184, citing W.M. SPELLMAN, JOHN LOCKE AND THE PROBLEM OF DEPRAVITY (1988).
Noah Feldman, The Intellectual Origins of the Establishment Clause, 77 N.Y.U. L.Rev. 346, 427 (2002).
10
86 SCRA 423 (1978).
8
9
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soldiers in active service, persons receiving salaries or compensation from
provincial or national funds, or contractors for public works of the municipality.”11
The ruling, as characterized by the ponente,
Justice Fernando, an eminent scholar of constitutional law, is “indecisive,”
mainly because “while five members of the Court constitute a minority, the vote of
the remaining seven does not suffice to render the challenged provision
ineffective.”12 Still Fernando, noting that the law in question was enacted in 1917,
both the 1935 and the 1973 Constitutions have provisions that clearly stress that
“no religious test shall be required for the exercise of civil or political rights.”
“The principle of the paramount character of the fundamental law of the
land thus comes into play,” wrote Fernando. “There are previous rulings to that
effect. The ban on the Administrative Code cannot survive. So the writer of this
opinion would hold.” But the Court was divided and it could not muster enough
votes – eight – to overturn the law.
Given the reasoning by the ponente in this case, and under the 1987
Constitution, which also prohibits religious tests, the legal effect of Pamil v.
Teleron remains in doubt. The present Charter is clear enough. As justice Palma,
in her dissent, put it:
But then, it is strongly argued that the election or appointment
of priests or even nuns to municipal office will be violative of
the separation of church and state. I strongly believe it is not
so. An eminent Constitutionalist puts it: what is sought to be
achieved under the principle of separation of church and state
is that the political process is insulated from religion and
religion from politics. In other words, government neutrality
in religious matters. Thus, our constitution provides that no
law shall be made respecting an establishment of religion .
Having an ecclesiastic or priest in a local government office
such as that of the municipal mayor will not necessarily mean
the involvement of politics in religion or vice-versa. Of
course the religion of the man cannot be separated from his
personality; in truth, this religion influences his conduct, his
moral values, the fairness of his judgment, his outlook on
social problems, etc. As stated in the Hysong decision,
inevitably, in popular government by the majority, public
institutions will be tinged more or less by the religious
proclivities of the majority, but in all cases where a discretion
is reposed by the law, it is to be assumed in the absence of
11
12
Section 2175 of the Revised Administrative Code (1917).
Feldman, supra note 9, at 424.
5
evidence to the contrary, that the public officer will perform
his duty in the manner the law requires. I may add that there
are legal remedies available to the citizenry against official
action violative of any existing law or constitutional
mandate.13
In any case, the prohibition has been limited to a municipal office, there
being no similar law banning ecclesiastics from seeking public offices higher than
a municipal office.
It is recognized that the line separating Church from State is difficult to
draw. In Victoriano Rope Workers’ Union v. Elizalde, the Court held valid a law
exempting members of the Iglesia ni Kristo from the requirement that all
employees must join a union as a condition for continued employment in
accordance with the closed shop agreement in the Collective Bargaining
Agreement. Interpreting the Non-Establishment Clause, the High Court held thus:
The constitutional provision only prohibits legislation for the
support of any religious tenets or the modes of worship of any
sect, thus forestalling compulsion by law of the acceptance of
any creed or the practice of any form of worship, but also
assures the free exercise of one's chosen form of religion
within limits of utmost amplitude. It has been said that the
religion clauses of the Constitution are all designed to
protect the broadest possible liberty of conscience, to allow
each man to believe as his conscience directs, to profess his
beliefs, and to live as he believes he ought to live, consistent
with the liberty of others and with the common good. Any
legislation whose effect or purpose is to impede the
observance of one or all religions, or to discriminate
invidiously between the religions, is invalid, even though the
burden may be characterized as being only indirect. But if the
stage regulates conduct by enacting, within its power, a
general law which has for its purpose and effect to advance
the state's secular goals, the statute is valid despite its indirect
burden on religious observance, unless the state can
accomplish its purpose without imposing such burden. 14
[emphasis mine].
Supra note 9, at 503.
G.R. No. L-25246 September 12, 1974
13
14
6
There is a long line of cases illustrating the various permutations of this
constitutional problematique. But in all this, the principal holding remains that the
Non-Establishment Clause means that government must remain neutral in matters
of faith; it must not privilege one faith over the others. It cannot promote one at
the expense of the others. It supports the cause of freedom best when it takes its
hands off religion, when it lets religious adherents be, free to express in public
their self-understanding of their self-identities as defined by their faith – of course,
“within limits of utmost amplitude.”
Incidental benefits not a violation
But the Non-Establishment Clause is not violated if the benefit derived by a
religion from the expenditure of public funds is merely incidental to a public
purpose. This was held in the case of Aglipay v. Ruiz,15 where the Court said that
the commemorative stamps put out by the government to mark the 33 rd
International Eucharistic Congress in Manila did not violate the separation of
church and state because its principal aim was to promote the city as a seat of the
Congress and hence, to attract tourists to it. Not having been inspired by any
sectarian motivation to favor a denomination or to benefit the Roman Catholic
Church, whatever religious character the stamp had (it showed a map of the
Philippines, not a chalice), was only incidental, said the High Court.
Other parameters in Constitutional Law
While it is true that the Constitution mandates the separation of church and
state through the clauses of Non-Establishment, Free Exercise, No-Religious Test
and the Disallowance of the Religious Sector (from being appointed or elected as
party-list representatives), other provisions of the Charter outline some exceptions.
The exemption of religious institutions from taxation, for instance.16
Public funds, while generally prohibited from being spent for religious
purposes as an application of the Non-Establishment Clause, may be applied to
priests working as chaplains in the armed forces, a government orphanage, or a
penal institution.17
64 Phil. 201
Art. VI, Section 28 (3), 1987 Charter provides: “Charitable institutions, churches and parsonages or
convent appurtenant thereto, mosques, non-profit cemeteries, and all lands, buildings, and improvements,
actually, directly and exclusively used for religious, charitable or educational purposes shall be exempt
from taxation.
17
Art. VI, Section 29 (2) 1987 Charter provides: “No public money or property shall be appropriated ,
applied, paid, or employed directly or indirectly, for the use, benefits or support of any sect, church,
denomination, sectarian institution, or system of religion, or of any priest, preacher, minister or other
religious teacher or dignitary as such, except when such priest, preacher, minister or dignitary is assigned to
15
16
7
Also, the 1987 Charter contains a new provision allowing optional religious
instruction during regular class hours upon written request by the parent or
guardian, to be taught by a teacher approved by authorities by the religion of
which the child is a member, provided it is without cost to the government. 18
Under the old Administrative Code, the instruction could not be within regular
class hours. Under Art. 359 of the Civil Code, religious instruction may even be
made part of the curriculum as a graded subject, so long as the parents ask for it.
Except sectarian schools, all schools most be owned by citizens or
corporations 60-percent owned by Filipinos. Furthermore, they cannot be
established exclusively for aliens, and the alien population in the school should not
exceed 1/3 of the total population of the school.19
And so, the question: If a priest may run for public office in the
Philippines under the 1987 Constitution, why may not a Roman Catholic Bishop
file an impeachment complaint against a President accused of a host of
unconstitutional misdeeds in office?
A man of the cloth may not be barred from exercising his political rights on
the ground that he is a member of the clergy; that is the essence of the
constitutional proscription on any religious test imposed on the exercise of
political rights.
Given this constitutional history, any present-day challenge raised against a
cleric running for public office will not stand up in court under the 1987 Charter.
In the same vein, objections on the ground of the Non-Establishment Clause to the
involvement of Roman Catholic Bishop Deogracias Iñiguez in the move to
impeach the President is at best, a misinformed campaign, and at worst, a
deplorable exercise in desperate political spin-doctoring.
Towards a postmodern sociology of faith in the public sphere
Of course, in the Philippines, when it comes to politics, anything, in fact,
everything, is fair game. So, what usually happens is “selective separation.”
Otherwise, politicians, or the President’s apologists, dismiss counter-cultural faithbased political initiatives as so much blather.
When it is convenient to them (especially during the election period),
politicians court churches for their support. In this way, a people’s faith is
caricatured and denied of an integrity that otherwise should serve as a deep moral
resource for citizens in their conduct of public life. Even the so-called progressive
the AFP, or to any penal institution, or government orphanage or leprosarium.”
18
See Art. XIV, Section 3(3) of the 1987 Charter.
19
See Art. XIV, Section 4(2) of the 1987 Charter.
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groups could be guilty of this when they dismiss objections by religious groups to
say, artificial contraception, or sex education in the public schools on the ground
of religious or faith-based reasoning as sheer moralism or irrational meanderings
of medieval thinking.
Thus they call such objections a violation of the separation of Church and
State. In this, they harken to secular, modernist aspirations. But when it tallies
with their own political agenda, they will not hesitate to link up with church
groups to advance their favored revolution and here, they suddenly transform into
postmodern accommodationists.
As Yale Law School’s Prof. Stephen L. Carter would put it in his book The
Culture of Disbelief (BasicBooks,1993) a faith pushed into the private sphere is no
faith at all. If faith is an important aspect of self-identity, then under the
Constitution, it must be protected and allowed to flower, because self-identity and
its public aspect, self-expression, as an embodiment of the freedom of religion and
of conscience, are a protected constitutional right. For the legal theorist Michael
Perry, forcing religious arguments to be restated in other, secular-sounding ways,
requires a citizen to “bracket” the convictions of her faith from the rest of her
personality, as if it were at all possible to split her personality between the secular
and the sacred: “To bracket them would be to bracket –indeed to annihilate –
herself. And doing that would preclude her – the particular person she is – from
engaging in moral discourse with other members of society.”20
But the best example of manipulative political duplicity is Gloria
Macapagal-Arroyo herself. She has become quite adept at harnessing the language
of faith, or religion, for her cause, as can be seen in her most recent trip to the
Vatican to present the newly-signed law abolishing capital punishment to Pope
Benedict.
Strict separationists will right away raise flags of alarm over this as a
needless expenditure of public funds – she flew with an entourage of 150 or so
hangers-on, remember? For all intents and purposes, she was using public money
to curry favor from the Vatican. If that wasn’t enough, the visit to the Vatican was
also meant to lobby for the canonization into Roman Catholic saints of dead
relatives of the First Gentleman! If there ever was a violation of the constitutional
Non-Establishment Clause, this is it.
Her spinmeisters were also quick to claim support from the Pope himself
for her government, which has been under steady assault from many quarters
because of charges of electoral fraud, among other unconstitutional misdeeds. One
need not be a strict separationist to see how Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo musters her
religious capital where it suits her political ends.
Michael J. Perry, MORALITY, POLITICS, AND LAW: A BICENTENNIAL ESSAY, 72-73 (1988), as
cited in STEPHEN L. CARTER, THE CULTURE OF DISBELIEF, 56 (1993).
20
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So now, look whose talking?
Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s apologists, believing they are on high moral
ground, lashed out at the Catholic Bishop for allegedly violating that “wall of
separation” by signing the impeachment complaint against her; yet in the same
breath, they made a fool of themselves by calling for an investigation on whether
the bishop had violated any church doctrine. In case they forgot their catechism,
doctrine is the province of the Church, not the State. The tack they have taken has
backfired, as the Catholic Bishop’s Conference of the Philippines (CBCP), instead
of disowning their fellow cleric, closed ranks behind him.
The American neo-pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty has remarked
somewhere that all “God-talk” in the public sphere is really nothing more than a
“mere conversation-stopper.” Rorty, one of the most talked-about thinkers of the
contemporary intellectual scene, has most certainly spoken dismissively of
religion in reference to his own country’s multi-cultural scene.
Other contemporary thinkers, at least, in the American scene, will disagree,
of course; (there’s Jeffrey Stout, for example, a Princeton professor of religion
who, though not a religious man, has argued for a key place for religion in the
democratic public square). Well, if he were alive, Alexis de Toqueville, who had
said that religion provided Americans with the strong character without which
democracy in their day will not have flourished, will have certainly raised a pother
over Rorty’s remark (although to be fair, when the French political philosopher
wrote his book Democracy in America in the mid-1830s, Christian language still
very much dominated political discourse in the United States).
Here in the Philippines, if he were still alive, Prof. Mario Bolasco, in his
time, arguably one of the finest scholars of religion this country has ever had –
yes, he who had systematically studied the dynamics of liberation theology in the
Philippine setting – will have vigorously objected to the suggestion.
Fr. Robert Reyes, will definitely have something important to say about that
too, considering that all the running he has been doing in the name of his
progressive causes he attributes to his being, first and foremost, a Christian who
believes that it is his duty to God to serve his country well and to fight for what is
moral and what is right in this day and age dominated by a discourse of
contingencies, to borrow from Rorty. (At least, Rorty speaks from sincere belief
and strong conviction; but the same cannot be said of someone like Michael
Defensor or Ignacio Bunye Jr , who only speaks from the comfortable confines of
political convenience).
And yet, in the run-up to the last Presidential elections, with the emergence
of Bro. Eddie Villanueva as a serious contender, even someone as esteemed a
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scholar of political sociology as Prof. Randolf S. David would take exception to it
as yet another symptom of the regrettable dissolution of modern civic culture. In
his April 18, 2004 Public Lives column in the Inquirer, Prof. David wrote (on
Religion and Democracy):
I have grave reservations about churches playing a dominant
role in the governance of a society. I believe it goes against
the ethos of a modern democracy. To mix churches with
politics is to move closer to the kind of religious
fundamentalism that has bred the militant religious warriors
of the present period. The use of religion as an instrument of
political goals is precisely what religious fundamentalism is
about.
Perhaps, Prof. David, who is now one of the lead complainants in the new
impeachment case against Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, was only expressing some
concern about the political ambiguities that seem to attach to the rise of NRMs
such as the Protestant charismatic group led by Bro. Eddie (or perhaps, of Bro.
Mike’s Roman Catholic-based El Shaddai, for that matter); but his objection to
what, according to him, is the erosion of modern civic culture – that is, the
dissolution of the church-state dichotomy – by the advance of religiouslymotivated or faith-based politics exemplified by Bro. Eddie’s presidential
aspirations may be assuaged by the philosopher Charles Taylor’s idea of the
social imaginary. (Let it be said that I have my own questions about the
theological underpinnings of Bro. Eddie’s candidacy and their practical
implications on governance but that’s another story altogether).
Drawing from Jurgen Habermas, Benedict Anderson and Michael Warner,
among other contemporary theorists, Taylor argues in an interview with
Christianity Today that every society has an implicit deeper order—a set of taken
for granted understandings out of which its members make sense of their practices
(Books & Culture Section, July/August 2002).
On the level of theory, liberal democracies may seem to share a common
set of practices when it comes to the relationship between the individual citizen
and the state but in reality, in the particular historical contexts of such democratic
polities, divergences do exist.
For the social imaginary of the Middle Ages, God was “inescapable.” It
was taken for granted that both moral and political order were ultimately founded
upon the divine order, as the natural law theology of St. Thomas Aquinas would
put it. However, the rise of modernity demolished that notion. A secular system
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took over in the course of many centuries, one where the moral order exists only to
promote the mutual benefit of individuals and defend their rights.
“In such a society, the notion that moral order is ultimately grounded in
God may appear to threaten to upset the kind of polite sociability and tolerance
that ideally characterize the modern public sphere,” says Taylor, a noted Hegel
scholar who is also best known for his work Sources of the Self: The Making of
Modern Identity (Harvard University Press, 1989). “From this perspective,
Christianity becomes not only something that you don’t need but it actually
becomes a danger.” But is this decidedly modern social imaginary still valid or
tenable? In a multi-cultural world, or if you will, the postmodern era, the modern,
secular idea has become only one explanation of political reality. If it is any
consolation to the secularists, “there are competing understandings, mutually
contradictory, but none is capable of a knockout blow against all the others,”
argues the philosopher.
That, says Taylor, is the meaning of living in a secular civilization. And he
is dismissive of fears that the revival of the religious imagination, perhaps, at least
in liberal democracies, would result in a kind of “unanimity” that existed in preRevolutionary France, the great bete noire of the philosophes of the Age of
Enlightenment. (But the fear, let it be said, has remained deeply ingrained in
contemporary French politics, where an anti-clericalism bordering on the irrational
continues to hold government authorities in a tight grip, as can be seen in their
harsh actions against the wearing by Muslim women of the veil in public schools).
Taylor argues:
…That will never exist again in human history unless we
catastrophically destroy modern civilization and go back to
the caves. And any attempt to impose such unanimity,
whether of an atheist or a theist kind, will come to a terrible
end as Communism did.
In this new scheme of things, there is a new space for God in the secular
world, where “religion occupies a different place,” and is “compatible with the
sense that all social action takes place in profane time.”
He explains thus:
Just as in personal life the dissolution of the enchanted world
can be compensated for by devotion, by a strong sense of the
involvement of God in my life, so in the public world the loss
of sacred time and an unquestioned transcendent order can be
replaced by a strong sense of God in our political identity.
God’s will can still be very present to us in the design of
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things, in the cosmos, in both social and individual life. God
can still be the source of our power to impart order to our
lives.
The alternative, he says, is the kind of reading of the social imaginary
where “more and more the consensus will be around an unbelieving variant of the
modern social imaginary.” But to him this really is “just a dream”, wholly
embraced by those who are “convinced as a matter of faith” that religion, as Freud
had wanted it to be, will disappear and everyone else will hold fast to the
forbidding belief in the non-existence of God. “That's an impossible scenario, and
the more they think like that, the worse it's going to be,” says Taylor in the
interview with America’s top-of-the-mind evangelical journal.
The challenge, then, is how to cope with this new epoch where diversity
could sometimes be “frightening.” It is one where on the deepest level, we would
be disagreeing with our fellow citizens on many points. But under the
circumstances, we couldn’t be more happy, counsels Taylor, because we have
worked so hard over the centuries to get to where we are now, which, as yet, is the
best political order there could be (at least, in his own estimation of the North
American situation).
Taylor’s arguments should even have a greater cogency in the Philippine
setting, a country peopled by a religious citizenry , though blessed with a
government that – irony of ironies – is plagued by so much graft and corruption.
God and the postmodern civic space
The philosopher Thomas Bridges, in his book The Culture of Citizenship:
Inventing a Postmodern Civic Culture (SUNY Press, 1994) has noted that civic
life in the postmodern era is no longer defined exclusively by the essentialism and
universalism that liberal thought had espoused.
Where once, the ideas associated with thinkers like Locke, Rousseau,
Bentham, Kant and Mill held sway, providing the dominant interpretation of the
basic liberal democratic ideals of individual freedom and equality, today, such
ideas no longer provide a “rhetoric that appealed to notions of popular
sovereignty, social contract, natural human rights, and to related ideas of authentic
individuality and autonomous personhood” with an “immediate intelligibility and
validity.”
He calls this demise a crisis of “civic culture” – a culture defined as a “body
of narratives, representations, and discourses that serve to render intelligible and
support the effective internationalization of the norms proper to liberal democratic
citizenship.” Such a crisis is the problem of developing citizens who somehow
believe in the primacy of the role of the citizen in relation to the idea of liberal
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democratic polity over their specific ethnic, religious, or familiar contexts and
allegiances.
But where the secular idea of citizenship once reigned, today’s societies
now face a situation where citizens do not necessarily privilege their membership
in the democratic polity over their membership in a church, or an ethnic group. Of
course, others may even find it highly arguable whether the Philippines ever
reached that point where a majority of citizens were able to totally shed off their
commitments to faith in exchange for their membership in the political sphere – or
what Prof. David calls a “modern civic culture.”
Liberal democracy, as a political arrangement, is supposedly built upon free
and equal citizens who, in Bridges’ words, “are ruled in their own name: they rule
themselves.” Yet in a “developmental sense” they are not free and equal first; they
are produced through the influence of a particular kind of culture – one shaped by
a public education that encourages and produces forms of culture able to sustain
identities consistent with citizenship. Modernity has failed to produce that kind of
culture because it in itself is a rhetoric, or language, of exclusion. Such failure has
tremendous implications on any project of nationhood.
For to build a nation, in a certain sense, is to build first of all, a community;
the project of nationhood or the narrative of nationhood must be one of inclusion –
of a greater community where people from various ethnic backgrounds, faiths, and
economic classes find a common meaning in existing as a democratic polity.
But how do we now achieve a nation at a time when the secular idea of
citizenship – a crucial concept in the discourse of nationhood – has been
undermined? How do we sustain a democratic polity in the on-going project of
nationhood when the fundamental philosophical premises upon which such polity
has been built have come to question in the postmodern onslaught?
Locating God in the Overlapping of Consensus
Bridges goes farther than Taylor by proposing the creation of a
“postmodern civic culture.” For Bridges, the development of a postmodern civic
culture, or in Taylor’s words, a new social imaginary, able to transcend the
limitations of a modernist liberal ethic must depend upon an “overlapping
consensus” on the part of particularistic cultural communities that now
characterize many societies.
He argues that in order to contribute to this consensus in support of liberal
moral ideals, adherents of particularistic cultural traditions must identify or
develop resources within those traditions that encourage the pursuit of civic justice
and civic freedom. The task of citizens and government is to discover and to
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capitalize on those religious or faith-based tendencies that will support a civic
culture that promotes the liberal idea of the common good.
In contrast to Rorty, who dismisses all “God-talk” in the public sphere as
nothing more than a mere “conversation-stopper,” Bridges sees the potential of
faith communities, in particular, of Christianity, to contribute to the development
of a postmodern civic culture.
And where Prof. David notes a potential slide into religious
fundamentalism, Bridges builds a case for the Christian ethical principle of loving
one’s enemies as a parallel to the liberal idea of the search for the common good.
To my mind, the challenge is specifically directed to the Christians, who constitute
a majority in the Philippines but it is directed as well to other faiths that have a
rightful claim to being a religion of truth, justice and peace.
American history teaches us an important lesson now largely forgotten by
such secularist groups as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU): the Civil
Rights movement, for example, was first and foremost, a movement ennobled and
empowered by the Christian religious ideal.21 Martin Luther King, until he learned
to draw from the deep resources of the faith of the ordinary blacks of his time
(African-Americans, in today’s PC language), was a religious liberal who had
doubts about his own capacities, even about his own faith. Yes, he was a religious
skeptic; that is, until he rediscovered the inexhaustible resources of what the old
hymn writers called “that Old Time Religion.”
Our own history shows that it was mainline Protestant churches, some
evangelicals, and the progressive ranks in the Roman Catholic Church that took up
the cudgels for victims of the human rights violations committed by the Marcos
Regime. Yes, it was the Church that became a haven of refuge for those escaping
from the minions of Martial Law; yes, it was that Church that had the moral
strength to stand up to the abuses of the agents of the State. And yes, it was the
Church that protected Messrs. Ramos and Enrile in what is now known as the
February 1986 Edsa Revolution. Or to go back farther into the past, the first
progressive labor unions in the country where established by churchmen like
Isabelo De los Reyes, who was one of the founders of the nationalist Iglesia
Filipina Independiente.
Well, today, one can also talk about the Couples for Christ’s Gawad
Kalinga, a highly admirable community-building initiative that is decidedly faithbased. Yet many politicians and local governments endorse and support its
ambitious project, and even provide it with government resources, in certain
instances. So much then, for the separation of Church and State. Which also says
so much of Marx’s dictum that religion is the opium of the masses. It simply does
21
CARTER, supra note 20 at 227-229.
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not help to dismiss religion altogether as a bulwark of political conservatism. Such
a blanket rejection of religion betrays an ignorance of the nuances of faith as an
important source of political and societal renewal.
Prof. David himself has written, in a more academic setting, about the
power of religious symbols to draw people together in a common cause of
freedom – as what the world witnessed in Edsa 1986, or in the tearing down of the
Berlin Wall, which started really as a prayer movement of citizens in East German
churches, the only places were public gatherings were allowed by the Communist
regime.22
Today, we are in a crisis of civic culture, where our political leaders – and
even some of our spiritual leaders – refuse to take up the demands of truth, so that
…justice is driven back,
and righteousness stands at a distance;
truth has stumbled in the streets,
honesty cannot enter.23
Y
et, I too, would like to believe that by working hand-in-hand with Bishop
Yñiguez (and of course, with Bro. Eddie, who is also a complainant!) in
the new impeachment case against his kabalen, Prof. David reaffirms the
important place in the public sphere of the kind of religion the prophets had
spoken of in the Old Testament: that religion whose unceasing prayer it is to
Yahweh to let “justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing
stream.”24
On this latter point, see Glenn H. Stassen, Just Peacemaking: A New Paradigm for a New World, in
CHRISTIANS & POLITICS BEYOND THE CULTURE WARS, 205-227 (David P. Gushee, ed., 2000)
23
Isaiah 59: 14 (NIV).
24
Amos 5: 24 (NIV)
22
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