Now, everything is in the open. Now, we know.
What the witnesses say in the Quad Com at the House of Representatives — that there is a reward system in the Drug War killing — is something that the victims know all along. This reward process goes all the way to the highest government officials in the country at that time, which is something new. Corruption and murder are willing companions. It is corruption all the way to the top. It is corruption all the way down from the father to the daughter. They refuse to be accountable.
Then comes Quiboloy, which brings me to the question of the relationship between corruption and religion. Did not many Catholic priests and religious support the Duterte regime? Did not many Protestant and evangelical pastors actively campaign for Digong and Sara?
One journalist asked me these questions.
1. Why do Christian (all faiths) groups tolerate such corruption?
If there is an impression that most faith groups, and I am referring not only to Christians, do tolerate corruption, the dominant reason is that they have learned it from the culture itself. Corruption has been ingrained in the Filipino psyche and its structures — from the highest political officials to the barangay level. What corrupt structures and their accompanying impunity tell us is that “corruption pays” and “honest life is inconvenient”.
Though family or church upbringing tries its best to inculcate honesty, our social structures reinforce the opposite. There is an observation that most Filipinos are honest in other foreign countries but not on their own. Why? Beyond seeing it as an individual vice, corruption is in fact structural.
2. How to explain why not enough believers and their pastors/priests/elders not acting more against it?
The reason: it has not been emphasized in the level of teaching in the churches. For a long time now, at least in the Catholic Church, the emphasis has been on the orthodoxy of doctrines (right believing) not on orthopraxis (right living). Megachurches also preach about the “prosperity gospel”, not social transformation. In recent years, religious authorities have been more concerned with “right rituals”, not with works of justice.
Yet, there is a whole body of Christian social tradition that has been neglected: justice, human rights, social transformation, peace, etc. This is the central message of the prophets. But this is also the main message of Jesus: the Kingdom of God. In fact, he did not preach about doctrines. Nor did he preach about himself. He came to preach about the Kingdom: he healed the sick, liberated the captives, and proclaimed a time of justice and equality.
You seldom hear a priest or pastor say these things in their Sunday homilies. Thus, the lay people think these are not important at all. We have forgotten that this is central to the message of Jesus himself (Luke 4: 16-21).
3. What is the relationship between faith and power?
Faith and power have such a complex and ambivalent relationship. Faith and religion do not exist in a vacuum. Faith structures are enmeshed in power relations.
First, religious groupings are located in a space of power. Some religions dominate the social space; others are dominated. This already produces social tensions. This explains the conflicts in Mindanao or the Middle East. Violence does not so much come from religious teachings as from uneven power relations.
Second, religious leaders possess and exercise power over their constituents. Religious language is used to mystify and legitimize unjust structural arrangements and uneven social structures. Through it, people are trained into subservience. However, it is also through religious language that people subvert the oppressive social structures. Thus, religion is both oppressive and transformative.
Examples abound in social and religious fields. For instance, while the recitation of the “Pasyon” was used by the colonizers to indoctrinate the Filipinos to obedience like Jesus silently being led to the slaughter, it was also used by the first revolutionaries to fight for a new world like what happened to Jesus in the resurrection (cf. Reynaldo Ileto). While many religious people were numbed to the injustices during Martial Law, there were also well-meaning Christians who left their complacent lives to fight for liberation in the revolutionary movements. Religion’s role in social transformation contains double truth.
4. Are there more, material reasons for church elders to foster close ties even with abusive secular leaders?
As explained above, church leaders do not exist in a vacuum; they do not live in the skies. Even those who think they do are in fact complicit with power. Power is structural; it is psychological and spiritual. But it is also material.
According to the French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, what makes religions more dangerous is that religious language “mystifies” unjust power relations, making people accept them as normal. Religion “misrecognizes” oppressive situations and brainwashes people to think these situations are divinely sanctioned.
When a priest or pastor says “Never mind our sufferings in this world because our prize awaits us in heaven”, he mystifies poverty and corruption as God’s will. He seems to saying: “we cannot do anything with it; we just have to accept it; anyway in heaven, we will enjoy God’s blessings.”
A religion that does not address poverty or injustice is actually an “ideology”. Through its language, it supports not only the abuse of secular leaders; it is also the legitimation of an oppressive social situation.
Father Daniel Franklin Pilario, C.M., is the President of Adamson University in Manila. He is a theologian, professor, and pastor of an urban poor community on the outskirts of the Philippine capital. He is also Vincentian Chair for Social Justice at St. John’s University in New York.
