Selective religion

Let’s assume that you’re one of the leaders – if not the Great Leader himself – of the Iglesia Ni Cristo (INC), with three million followers at your beck and call. You get word that one of your most prominent members, a sitting senator of the Republic, is going to be charged soon with plunder for admittedly pocketing P75 million in private donations without reporting it either as a campaign contribution or as personal income.

But you don’t bother yourself with the legal niceties of the case; they’re not important. What alarms you is the fact that one of your staunchest protectors – and not just of the INC, but of the Dutertes with which your church has cast its lot – is facing prison. It’s not the legal case, not a technical matter of proving plunder; while the senator himself seems to be taking things in stride, making noises about his willingness to go to jail, you know that it’s more existential than that.

It’s your own power that’s under threat, that’s being tested by the ingrate you helped to seat in the Palace. His presumptive successor, on whom you’ve bet all your marbles, herself stands to be impeached in the Senate for all manner of grave financial wrongdoing. You need your senator’s vote for her to escape the noose. Her once-formidable alliance is thinning by the hour – whether by their own commission (one has had to disappear to save his own neck, another is already in prison, also for plunder) or through deft politicking by unseen hands.

There could be more desertions down the road, as the impeachment trial starts this week. You know these characters; they’ve all come to you for your blessings, your quid for their quo and you know how fickle allegiances can be, especially under pressure. But you have your own pressure to exert. You need to remind them of that cordial but heavily nuanced conversation in your office, of the vast difference three million votes can make in the senatorial tally. (More on this later, but let’s get on with our scenario.) So what do you do?

You call the faithful out to the streets for a show of numbers, for the kind of visual impact that the network news and social media tend to magnify. You decide to hold this at the EDSA Shrine among other places for whatever symbolism it might carry, never mind that Mother Mary, so central to the EDSA spirit and experience, holds no special place of honor in INC belief. The night before, your organizers send out text messages ordering your people out to EDSA as early as 5 a.m.; every “lokal” has to be represented. You know that you can rely on what your members have had ingrained into their minds and bodies: unquestioning obedience to authority. (Some of their T-shirts will declare this openly: “Obey and Never Complain.”)

You beam with pride and pleasure as the crowds begin to gather at dawn, catching the drowsy city by surprise. You manage to choke off the city’s busiest and most important highway, convincing yourself and your own people that a day or two’s disruption of work and traffic is a mild inconvenience compared to the issue at hand. Ah, the issue – yes, let’s go with “selective justice,” which is clearly at work in the plunder case they whipped up against the good senator. Why him? Why now? What for?

This was the senator bravely threatening to unmask the biggest crooks in the highest echelons of government – never mind that he himself was now being unmasked for palpably gross misdeeds. You trot out a small parade of notoriously unsavory politicians – but then who else have you got? – to amuse the gathering. Never mind the irony of an Imee Marcos crying “Walang uwian!” at the very place that sent her and her family packing off for Hawaii 40 years ago (we don’t know if she stayed the night huddling with the INC masses – or went home as senators are wont to do after their speeches).

Nowhere in this spectacle did God or religion visibly figure – what the INC’s conception of justice was, how the Dutertes and Marcoletas would spread God’s dominion over the earth, how individual INC members (especially senators) were supposed to discern right from wrong except by executive fiat.

Sure, they can fill up streets and hold parts of a city hostage for a few days. They can make it look like they centrally matter, and perhaps in some swing situations they do, as did the support they allegedly threw behind Bam Aquino last year.

The greatest damage wrought by the INC in its EDSA excursion was neither to the traffic situation and much less to the case against Sen. Marcoleta. It was to its own image as a religious faith to be taken seriously as such, a body of belief driven by godly wisdom. By consistently supporting morally compromised politicians, it has revealed itself as a political instrument, manipulable and deployable, for reasons and purposes known only to its leaders.

And that’s sad because I do have some INC friends, upright people for whom I have a deep respect and whom I would be glad to hear from on the issues I raised above. I’ll promise them fair representation in this space – but they’ll have to speak for themselves and not their leaders, to the extent that that’s even possible.

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