Chastising Democracy: Does the “Conservative Turn” among Filipino Catholic
Bishops Mean a Retreat from (Democratic) Politics?
Rene Raymond R. Raneses, Jr.
Department of Political Science
Ateneo de Manila University
Abstract
In this paper, I explore why commentators skeptical of the commitment of the hierarchy
of the Catholic Church in the Philippines to the cultivation of democratic values
foreclose the possibility of deepening and widening the democratic space in the country
and why they are complicit in the perpetuation of the hegemonic neoliberal framework
that underpin much of contemporary academic work and civil society discourse. I argue
that both liberal and leftist critics of the Philippine Church fail to appreciate the
potential of what may be called the “conservative turn” or the “dogmatism” among
Filipino Catholic bishops as an unsettling phenomenon that can infuse both the
dominant neoliberal framework and the critical left’s alternative with an antagonistic
voice that can sustain a more vibrant political space. Liberal and leftist thinkers and
activists diminish the discourse of democratization in the country by either rationalizing
religious intervention in politics into institutional interests or bids for class dominance
and demanding that religious elites argue from compromised positions that reflect not
religious arguments but secular and scientific forms of reasoning. I claim that in doing
so, liberals and leftists severely limit the language and forms of struggle that can be
admitted in the democratic space for public deliberation and fail to recognize other
sources of political reason and collective experience. However, acknowledging the value
of the bishops’ seemingly conservative and dogmatic forms of reasoning is only possible
if one rejects the “stagist” or “sequentialist” model of democratic transitions and
consolidation and accepts with theoretical humility that democracy can never be fully
consolidated or finished. This entails an epistemological turn towards an attitude that
takes the task of democratization not as the resolution of conflicts among political
actors but the proliferation and cultivation of various sources of disagreement on the
fundamental principles and values that underlie the political system. Drawing from
recent works on radical democratic pluralism by authors such as William Connolly,
Chantal Mouffe, Ernesto Laclau and Hannah Arendt, I outline a preliminary theoretical
argument as to how the staunch refusal of the Catholic Church in the Philippines to
accept the norm of secular pluralism infuses conflict in the vocabulary of
democratization in the country and questions the metaphysically and historically
atrophied discourse of democracy in both the academe and in civil society. In doing so, I
suggest that Filipino Bishops, rather than consolidating an anti-democratic/antipluralistic sentiment, deepen the pluralism to include other perspectives and voices.
Rene Raymond R. Raneses Jr.
2
“A Question I Have Become To Myself”1
Corazon Aquino is asking Arroyo to resign because she is corrupt, the schools are
asking Arroyo to resign because she is corrupt, business is asking Arroyo to
resign because she is corrupt. And the Catholic bishops are asking Arroyo to
remain because she can help fight the corrupt? That has got to be the joke of the
century.
The way they're going, I wouldn't be surprised if more Filipinos turned
Buddhist or Islamic or downright atheist. The Catholic Church is giving them
every reason to. Except for luminous exceptions like Pope John Paul II and,
nearer home, Archbishop Angel Lagdameo and the Association of Major
Religious Superiors, the Catholic Church seems determined to preach only
the new theology that God wants to reward the wicked and punish the good.2
After enjoying decades of public regard for catalyzing the popular uprising of1986
that overthrew the twenty-year dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, the Philippine Roman
Catholic Church is confronting today what perhaps are the most serious challenges to
its authority among Filipino Catholics. On the one hand, certain sectors in government
which have for the past years been seriously seeking the passage of a Reproductive
Health Bill that will endorse artificial methods of birth control as a way to stem the
country’s persistently high population growth rates, appear to be gaining rhetorical
leverage and popular support given the government’s desperate failure to reduce
massive poverty. The Church hierarchy has unequivocally opposed any move towards
this direction and has vowed to mobilize its resources and faithful army in condemning
such attempt.
On the other hand, progressive groups continue to criticize the Catholic Bishops
Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) for refusing to join a multisectoral clamor for the
resignation and ouster of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo who has been at the center
of corruption allegations, including charges of fraud during the 2004 presidential
elections. Political activists long for the figure of Jaime Cardinal Sin – former Archbishop
of Manila – whom many agree played a critical role in the downfall of Marcos (Moreno
2006; Fabros 1988; Youngblood 1987 and 1978) and another widely-perceived corrupt
president, Joseph Estrada, some fifteen years after. The quotes at the beginning of this
The Latin – quaestio mihi factum sum – is from St. Augustine’s Confessions. In this paper, I use this trope,
first to highlight the challenged position of the Roman Catholic Church in 21st century Philippine society
and then second, to advance a notion of democracy that questions itself in every step of the way and
therefore necessitates an antagonistic partner to which it can turn towards for reflection and dialogue.
2 Conrado de Quiros, “Sayings” and “Misse en Scene” from his column, Philippine Daily Inquirer, July 2008
1
Rene Raymond R. Raneses Jr.
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paper reflect the growing frustration of civil society groups in relation to what may
arguably be called a “conservative turn” among Filipino bishops – a stark contrast to the
“progressive” role the bishops played in the resistance to the authoritarian regime of
Ferdinand Marcos in the 1980s.
The CBCP, however, is only one among many Catholic hierarchies that have
played significant roles during the “third wave of democratization” (Berger 2004; Philpott
2004) but whose commitments to democratic transformation during the posttransition/post-authoritarian period have been doubted and challenged. Among
scholars of religion and comparative politics, this backtracking from a period of Catholic
progressivism constitutes a puzzle that warrants historical and institutional
explanation. In this area, many scholars have produced generalizations on the effects of
a more pluralistic environment and religious competition on Catholic churches
especially in Latin America and Eastern Europe (Anderson 2003; Bellamy 2002). Faced
with the rise of Pentecostalism, Evangelism and other proselytizing sects, Catholic
Churches in Brazil, Chile and Venezuela have had to articulate more clearly and
forcefully their distinct tradition and identity to regulate believers and reclaim cultural
primacy (Drogus 1997; Fleet and Smith 1996; Taras 2003; Byrnes 2002; Gill 2001). In
the wake of an emerging pluralist and increasingly consumerist post-transition society,
the uncompromising articulation of traditional Catholic values by churches in Poland,
Nicaragua and other South American third wave democracies, are viewed as an
unfortunate wavering of the church’s commitment to democratic transformation.
Collectively, these responses, authors argue, had the effect of frustrating civil society
actors which have in the anti-authoritarian struggle allied with religious organizations,
such as women’s groups which were crucial in the formation of communities but have
remained shunted from official decision making process within the hierarchy because of
the church’s doctrine against women’s ordination. Elsewhere, including the Philippines,
progressive hierarchies were replaced, if not, disciplined by the Vatican (Fleet and Smith
1997; Brynes 2002; Cleary; and Stewart-Gambino 1992) which has grown more
theologically conservative under the leadership of John Paul II and intensified under his
Prefect of the Congregation for Doctrine and Faith, Joseph Ratzinger who in April 2005
would succeed him as Benedict XVI.
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While it is true that the Catholic Church has moved a long way from its clearly
antagonistic position against modern democracy in the beginning of the 20 th century
towards a nuanced and cautious accommodation of certain democratic principles, it has
generally remained hierarchical and undemocratic in structure. Thus, theorists and
scholars assessing the commitment of Catholic hierarchies to democratic values must
not forget that there exists an ontological and historical opposition between modern
democracy and Catholic ontological principles and preferred values (Philpott 2004). This
fundamental hostility is important to the argument of this paper, which, rather than
viewing it as something to be overcome will treat it instead as a resource that can
challenge the hegemonic epistemology of contemporary democratization theory and
empirical research.
My general objective here is to challenge the pervasive inquisitorial attitude of
many scholars of religion and politics towards the Catholic Church (and religion in
general) which seems to suffer from two epistemological assumptions that have already
been exposed and challenged in contemporary literature on democratic theory but have
never really been taken up seriously by policy-makers and the dominant school of
contemporary democratic theory. The first is the transitologist claim that any regime
that has shed its formal authoritarian structure is moving, in a gradual yet almost
definite trajectory towards democratic consolidation. The second assumption is the
philosophical hegemonic identification of the ideology of liberalism (and its present
neoliberal form) with the concept of democracy (and vice versa).
The result of these two assumptions is an overarching “template of ideal
institutional forms” (Carothers 1991) where the interests of political actors and agents
are merely aggregated to produce the best possible institutional arrangements without
really inquiring about the very constitution of political identities by these actors and
agents, including churches and other social movements. According to this framework,
the process of collective identity formation is pre-political, that it is settled outside the
formal sphere of political deliberation and that the role of politics is simply to reconcile
differing claims and identities (Dryzek 2000; Young 1996). Political actors from this
perspective have essential societal interests formulated prior to their positioning in
social discourse. These are the assumptions that underpin and are defended by
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5
contemporary works of John Rawls and Jurgen Habermas, but also underlie much of
traditional and conventional leftist thinking. While posing serious challenges and
proposing an alternative perspective to the market mentality and economistic
reductionism of many contemporary theorizing, Rawls and Habermas’ bracketing of the
cultural and historical milieus fail to extend their radical critique by deflecting
constitutive questions regarding identity and cultural formation that bear upon political
encounters. The result is a privileging of a secular political space which bypasses deep
political (and democratic) engagement because of its inattentiveness to other sources of
popular mobilization.
Thus, there appears a need to frame studies on the Catholic Church’s
commitment to democratic transformation in a way that pays attention to these
theoretical debates and challenges. But in order to do so, several interventions have to
be undertaken first in order to free scholarship on democratization from its liberalbound epistemology, and then revisit conventional conceptions of political identities in
the context of civil society and social movement theories. My argument is that, in this
de-liberalized space of democratic practice enacted by the performative and agonistic
disclosure of collective identities in the context of ambiguity and disturbance the
Church’s anti-democratic (in the liberal sense) character can provide a sacred
transgression of the liberal conceit of having found democracy at last. The distinct
character of this space is that it puts emphasis not on the resolution of political
priorities but prioritizes the political in every theoretical and practical movement.
Transcending/Transgressing Transition
The belief that countries transitioning from non-democratic regimes are moving
definitely towards democracy has undergone serious questioning since the publication
of Dankwart Rustow’s seminal work, “Transitions to Democracy” (1970). The strongest
and most convincing challenge was articulated by Thomas Carothers in “The End of the
Transition Paradigm” (1991). According to Carothers, the assumptions of the
transitology school were discredited by the number of regime forms that resulted out of
the breakdown of authoritarian regimes that were not liberal democracies and showed
no clear signs of becoming fully democratic. Instead of liberal democracies,
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“democratizing” societies in Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America were characterized
by “feckless pluralism” and “dominant power politics”. Both political arrangements show
that while they “include elements of democracy…(the historical paths of a number of
“democratizing” countries) should be understood as alternative directions, not way
stations to liberal democracy.” William Case’s (1990) work on semi-democracies in
Southeast Asia provides comparative case studies to buttress Carothers’ argument.
According to Case, democratic arrangements rather than leading towards fuller
democratization in Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand, have instead been used by elites
and their constituencies to protect each others interests. This for Case explains why
semi-democracies have been relatively stable in such societies characterized by
ethnic/class and even racial antagonisms. The growing literature on the resilience of
semi-democracies validates seem to validate Carothers’ thesis. In the Philippines, the
movement from authoritarianism did not translate to substantive changes in the
country’s electoral democracy and even served to legitimize and therefore ensure the
perpetuation of dominant elites and caciques in power (Hutchcroft and Rocamora 2003;
Bello 2004)
Despite this, scholars of democratization seem not to have really grasped the full
implications of or at least responded to Carothers’ call “for democracy activists to move
on to new frameworks, new debates, and perhaps eventually a new paradigm of political
change, one suited to the landscape of today, not the lingering hopes of an earlier era”
(ndamental belief that democracy could indeed be discovered, engineered and found
continues to guide much work in the area of democratization.
The fault, I think is that Carothers also failed to escape the trap he has set to
scrutinize: at the end of it all, the establishment of a real, working and functioning
democracy (Western and liberal) remains the ultimate dream, albeit through a reworked
formula of American aid distribution and developmental projects in the developing
world. Although such an argument opens the way for rethinking the democratization
discourse it does not say much about the historical and socio-economic contexts of
many democratizing nations. The task, I suppose, of deepening the critique falls in the
hands of political economy: to situate the democratization discourse within the broader
process and flow of global capital accumulation and penetration and the historical
Rene Raymond R. Raneses Jr.
7
process of state formation, which Juan Linz says is the very first requirement of
establishing a democratic order.
Critical commentators and scholars of Philippine politics have for quite some time
now been responding to this challenge, way before Carothers’ essay became widely
quoted and in a radically different spirit. What Carothers, Case and Diamond leave out
in their critical reading of the prevailing democratization discourse, Filipino political
scientist and activist Joel Rocamora fills in. Linking the democratization discourse in
the Philippines with the neoliberal identification of democracy with open markets,
openness to global capital, good governance and state deregulation as propounded by
the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other international financial
institutions – collectively known as the Washington Consensus – political scientist and
activist Rocamora raises some controversial questions:
If globalization is the current stage of the expansion of capitalist relations into
countries of the South, what is it about the particulars of this expansion that
makes "democratization" the preferred political strategy of international
capitalism? Is it part of the anti-state aspect of neo-liberalism? Does movement
away from authoritarian states in the South mean weaker governments? Or is
international capitalism mainly interested in moving against protectionist,
nationalist ruling class fractions to enable "modernizing elites" to come to power
and make way for the expansion of capitalist relations into new areas of the
economies of the South?
For Rocamora, this neoliberal identification of democracy vis-à-vis the
simultaneous marketization of the state and the strengthening of governmental capacity
through practices of good governance masks an ideological silence and ahistorical
appreciation of the (post)colonial character and history of state-making in the
Philippines and elsewhere in the postcolonial world. Yet, it is clear for him that the
paradox of this project is a logical one that supports the penetration of global capital
into postcolonial societies, while paying lip service to the demands of democratization:
“authoritarian governments in the South have, in fact, tended to be controlled by elite
groups based in agro-exports or in manufacturing…the "modernizing" elites in these
countries are in the financial sector or in import-dependent non-traditional exports.
These "democratizing" elites, not surprisingly are also the class fractions most needed
by international capital as local partners in the ongoing acceleration of globalization.”
This historical retrieve of the process of colonial state-formation in the Philippines
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serves as a crucial link and a valuable resource towards a critique of the present
neoliberal democratization discourse. It shifts the focus of analysis from cultural or
socio-anthropological factors that the dominant frameworks suggest to the colonial
policies which have attended Philippine state-formation and their lingering influence in
the form of discursive or what Foucault would call, truth regimes.
The groundwork for this analysis has already been laid down in Paul Hutchcroft’s
Booty Capitalism (1998), which traces the politics of banking in the Philippines in the
purview of a weak patrimonial state captured by competing oligarchic interests.
Hutchcroft’s historical retrieve goes back to the Spanish and American rule and
examines how wealthy land owning families entrenched their economic interests in the
provinces as a result of political bargaining with the emerging national elite and the
weak colonial structure. According to Hutchcroft, with the introduction of elections in
the early 1900s, the land-owning families gained control of the legislature and provided
the mechanism for staffing the bureaucracy. Thus, in contrast to other colonial
structures in the Asian region, like Thailand, a bureaucratic-aristocratic elite did not
figure prominently in the state formation of the Philippines. Hence, instead of a strong
productive state managing the accumulation of wealth, the families and the
competitions among and between them (McCoy 1994), treated state largesse as booty to
be captured and distributed to their patrons and clients.
But while Hutchcroft’s account contests the neoliberal democratization discourse
of less state intervention by paying close attention to the process of state-formation and
exposing how electoral exercises have served to perpetuate the pervasiveness of elite
domination, his eventual suggestion – the development of a neo-Weberian bureaucratic
state and in a follow-up essay with Rocamora (2003), the formation of strong political
parties and the institution of electoral reforms that will inaugurate genuine popular
representation and articulation in the formal political sphere – betrays the powerful
critique occasioned by the historicization of the state-making process in the Philippines.
While Rocamora observes that “since people know from experience that elections are
mainly occasions for choosing between one member of the elite and another, there is
pronounced cynicism towards the process. Why not make a little bit of money by selling
your vote when election results do not directly affect you. Since politicians do not have
programs that they follow, voting on the basis of establishing personal, clientelistic
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9
connections become the other major criteria for choice” (2000) he nonetheless pins his
hopes in the reformation of this process. Hence, rather than confronting this issue,
Rocamora unfortunately resorts to bashing the ideological argument and social
movement strategy of the revolutionary branch of the Communist Party of the
Philippines (CPP) and detailing the reformist strategies of his Akbayan People’s Action
Party.
Contested Democracy, Democratizing Contestations
I do not wish to entangle myself here in the complex web of antagonisms plaguing
the Philippine left. Instead, what I want to pursue is a sustained and decisive criticism
of the neoliberal and liberal project reproduced by most contemporary studies on
Philippine politics. Critical purveyors of Philippine affairs, I argue must resist
reinstating the liberal monopolization of democratic practice if their vital contributions
to knowledge production about Philippine political life should remain true to historical
criticism. This is not an original argument and I acknowledge here an intellectual debt
to a recent encounter with an essay by the literary critic, E. San Juan, Jr. who
published in a local online magazine an interesting piece which raises serious objections
to the dominant strain of analysis in Philippine studies. Inscribing analytical
frameworks such as “cacique democracy” or “elite democracy” in what he called
“Reactionary tendencies in the US production of knowledge about the Philippines”,
(2001), San Juan scowls over primordialist explanations – the persistence of family ties
and kinship networks which support an enduring oligarchic structure – and positivist
empiricism – the focus on micropolitical events and phenomena – that underpin
contemporary scholarship on Philippine politics. These tendencies in scholarship on
Philippine democracy for San Juan, deflects the responsibility of American colonial
legacy and justifies rather than provides a critical approach to the country’s
membership in the global capitalist system. Endorsing a historical materialist account
of Philippine democracy, San Juan obliges scholars to pay attention instead to the
“peculiar nature of the ‘postcolonial’ or ‘overdeveloped’ state, the politics of global
dependency, the class nature of "developing” societies, and the complex character of the
state and its apparatus in an uneven, disarticulated social formation” in order to
address the “the problematic of the overarching metanarrative of "modernization” and
how it has been persistently guided historical-sociological scholarship. By explicitly
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inscribing the dominant perspectives on Philippine democratization within the narrative
of colonial production of knowledge, San Juan’s essay paves the way for an eventual
rejection of overarching frameworks that deny validity to social movements and actors
claiming to be advancing the cause of democracy, including the organization he belongs
to – the Communist Party of the Philippines.
A recent work by Nathan Quimpo (2007) on the concept of “contested democracy”
works well with San Juan’s thesis. For Quimpo, rather than looking for overarching
narratives that tend to essentialize and silence other democratic voices, democracy in
the Philippines must be analyzed according to the ways and modes in which its
dominant structures are “contested”. This cautious acceptance of descriptions about
Philippine democracy makes Quimpo’s framework different from San Juan. But like San
Juan, Quimpo is also a historical materialist whose attention to the formation of the
Philippine state serves as a guiding principle in providing a more analytical reading how
political struggles can be analyzed and assessed. Quimpo achieves this by reworking
what he calls “static and top-down” historicization of Philippine democracy towards a
more “bottom-up”, history from below narrative. Conceptually, what these interventions
formulate is a democratic theory that frees democratic practice from its present
equation with liberal and neoliberal disciplinary frames narrated from the point of view
of the state and claiming to be democratic already. Taken in the context of the “end of
the transition paradigm” which calls into question the stagist or “sequential” trajectory
of the democratic struggle (which persists in the form of the Hegelian stagist conception
of history among traditional leftist theories), social movements and political actors in
Quimpo’s framework are given the full legitimacy of participating in the political struggle
as agents of democracy, since they contribute to the furthering of democracy as a
contested terrain, in the poetic language of political theorist, Sheldon Wolin, of
democracy as always not yet.
Unfortunately, the Marxist condemnation of religion as a conservative force – “the
opiate of the masses” – prevents critics like Rocamora, San Juan and Quimpo from fully
exploding the liberal political space to include not just nationalist leftists and insurgent
activists but also religious actors, institutions and their ideational messages. A similar,
albeit more nuanced rejection of the Catholic Church, as a transformative social force
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underlies the beautifully written work of Eva Lotta Hedman (2006). Also coming from a
Gramscian framework, Hedman clusters the Philippine church among the constitutive
forces of the dominant historic blocs – together with the business class, the academia,
mass media and the American government and its plenipotentiaries – reinforcing the
supremacy of the post-colonial oligarchic state. According to Hedman, in the various
crises of authority in Philippine trasformismo democracy – a Gramscian concept which
refers to the parliamentary expression of hegemonic class interest and the convergence
of consequences of the political strategies and decisions of its allies – the Catholic bloc
successfully provided elite activities with meaningful legitimation through its support of
both electoral, non-electoral and even extra-judicial (in the case of the 2nd People Power
uprising in 2001) political exercises organized by the dominant historic bloc. Hedman’s
conclusions are drawn from a historicization of the National Movement for Free
Elections (Namfrel) and its allied election watchdogs which she claims form part of the
contested terrain of civil society where
While there is much to be learned from Hedman’s irresistibly convincing
historical and empirical data as well as from her rejection of the Tocquevillian ideal of a
dense civil society in favor of an understanding of the concept as a contested terrain,
her reservations on of the Catholic Church and the seemingly homogenous gaze she
casts upon its hierarchy reveals several theoretical impediments that limit her critique
of the liberal hegemonic order supposedly legitimized by the Philippine Catholic Church.
Accepting, even so, that the Catholic Church is indeed complicit in the maintenance of
capitalist historic blocs, Hedman’s analysis is still unfortunately afflicted by the
traditional left’s insistence on the primacy of class formation and the overdeterminism of
the hegemonic moment which narrows down, despite her claim of expanding, the space
for conflict and struggle and restricts the admission of other political agents into the
project of social transformation. This is somewhat expected because of the subtle
materialism that underscores Hedman’s oeuvre despite her insistence on working from
a less non-reductionist problematic. Aside from this, the Hegelianism of her preferred
notion of historical motion – where dialectical struggles are performed by the privileged
unity of historical and political subjects and driven by the progressivism of dialectical
movement – weighs heavily against her critique of democratization, dragging it back to
the stagist and sequentialist framework of the liberal transitologist order disguised as a
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transhistorical analysis of class formations and hegemonic orders – what Rustow may
have easily called, the decisive moment of elites agreeing that democracy is the best
game in town.
Hedman’s theorization of electoral contests and crises of authority in the
Philippines as sites of political performance and spectacles where identities are reified
and relations of power are (re)negotiated invites a linguistic and post-Gramscian reading
of her approach to civil society, including the Catholic Church. In the traditional clarion
call for further research in the concluding chapter of In the Name of Civil Society,
Hedman bids scholars on democratization to look for other moments, fields of research
and phenomena in which the name of civil society is mobilized towards the
re/production of hegemonic orders.
This essay responds to this call by challenging Hedman’s rather reductionist
approach to the process of naming and the use of names – marking it as an act and
practice of power – not simply in the sense of domination/subordination relations but
as in Foucault, an investment of power and in Derrida, as the establishment of
referential points in language. To use the name of something enables remembrance and
posits an imaginary field of relationality. But while naming makes sense of an otherwise
chaotic void, it is also fraught with misuses and abuses – a subversion of the closure
and exactness it initially constructs – and when repeated without end drains the
reference of any substantial meaning. Thus, the name of civil society, may not simply be
contested as Hedman suggests, it may in fact be empty all along.
It is in this empty space where I locate the nexus of religion and politics, a space
which does not close upon itself and where political actors are only known through their
spatial and multiple subject positionalities. This necessitates an approach which
examines the Catholic Church in the Philippines not just as an institution but as an
identity whose phenomenological interpretation of the social milieu it is embedded
needs to be critically examined. This is in some ways a response to Daniel Levine’s
demand that “we take religion seriously as a source of guiding concepts and principles
instead of merely subsuming religious phenomena under secular rubrics” (1981).
Levine’s preferred analytical framework reads the self-images drawn by Church elites a
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13
resource for understanding why Church elites act the way they do vis-à-vis political and
social issues which requires a “working out from religious concepts, rather than in from
sociopolitical ones” because:
Catholic elites (most notably bishops) simply do not consider issues in strictly
social or political terms. Instead their answers are couched in religious concepts
and metaphors, which flow from their understanding of the requirements of
religious faith, their view of the Church as an institution, and their conclusions
about its proper relation to society at large – not from purely social analysis
alone.
By endorsing the above view of religious elites, one inevitably confronts highly
ambiguous religious voices open to various interpretations including, the possibility of
legitimizing social orders but because of their transcendental references also makes
them radically out of synch from extant discourses. Religious voices, thus, rather than
constituting an anti-democratic critique of politics or representing a reactionary
tendency to reify the hegemonic hold of dominant historic blocs, can infuse the political
terrain with the ambiguity necessary for the emergence of the political and disrupt the
monotonous, even banal vocabulary of liberal and leftist politics. In Philippine politics
where the political vocabulary of liberal/neoliberal democratization is captured by elites
and the left is unable to politicize and mobilize publics, religious rhetoric has the
potential to provide a counter-hegemonic discourse which eludes the normalizing
pressures of neoliberalism and the lethargy of the left.
From Hegemony to Ambiguity and Back
Because hegemonic formations are constituted in political terms they are
necessarily ambiguous, not in the sense that one hegemonic order may collapse to give
way to a new one in some projected future, but ambiguous in the very moment of its
constitution. In what follows, I assemble a number of contemporary works in democratic
theory that point to new ways of thinking about order to point to theoretical possibilities
that may lay the ground for a friendlier theorization of the relationship between
democracy and religion. Following Hannah Arendt’s characterization of the political as a
space of unpredictable results that arise out of the indeterminate consequences of
human action in contrast to economic production and fabrication which exhaust the
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possibilities of further disclosure, the political which for Arendt is also synonymous to
power is defined here as an artifice whose sustainability depends on the remembrance
and institutionalization of heroic and collective endeavors. As such, the establishment of
the political is really a hegemonic moment that does not foreclose the possibility of its
dissolution while at the same time nourishes and intensifies the multiple fields of
relationality and distantiated identities that cut across and possibly go against each
other as valuable resources for its continuity.
Ernesto Laclau writes: “if democracy is possible, it is because the universal does
not have any necessary body, any necessary content. Instead, different groups compete
to give their particular aims a temporary function of universal representation” (1992).
This implies that so long as democracy remains political, it can never be consolidated
nor can one treat the process of democratization as transitioning from one stage to
another. One could simply treat democracy then in episodic terms in the same way that
for Arendt, the political (practiced by the Greeks and the Romans) was simply an
episode that could never be repeated elsewhere in time. Political subjectivity in this case
is necessarily partial and provisional and always in the process of negotiation vis-à-vis
other competing claims for universal representation.
The now already classic text in post-Marxism, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy
by Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (2001) expands a similar position. From a genealogical
retrieve of the notion of hegemony, Laclau and Mouffe offer a non-essentialist, nonreductionist historical materialism which claims to have gotten over the determinism of
superstructure-base analysis that typifies conventional social analysis from the Left.
Accepting but then arguing to have understood in a better way Althusser’s concept of
overdeterminism, Laclau and Mouffe present an alternative to the “sutured” and final
constitution of political relations and identities that underpin both liberal and Marxist
political analysis. Turning to psychoanalysis and literary criticism to infuse new
perspectives on classical and neo-Marxist analysis, Laclau and Mouffe argue that
because hegemonic moments are symbolic, “society and social agents (which constitute
them) lack any essence and their regularities merely consist of the relative and
precarious forms of fixation which accompany the establishment of a certain order”
(2001, 98), hence the Left must engage deeply with the “polyphony of voices, each of
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15
which constitutes its own irreducible discursive identity”( 191). This for Laclau and
Mouffe is the heart of the project of “radical democracy”.
Rather than a rejection of liberal democracy, the central thesis of radical
democracy is the extremization of the liberal concept of pluralism as the constitutive
principle of contemporary politics. According to one of its leading advocates, “radical
democracy brings the demos back to the people” (Brown 2003). This means that in
contrast to the liberal notion, which includes recent models of deliberative democracy,
Mouffe’s pluralism is populated not by rational preferences of individual agents and
their competing interests but rather by claims drawn not just from calculated interests
but from a variety of sources and imageries. The task of politics in this framework is not
to settle and resolve conflicts as in aggregative and deliberative models of politics but to
nourish them and take them as the permanent character of political engagement
(Mouffe 2001).
While Mouffe does not advance intractability in politics, she is definitely against
the privileging of a universal public reason and the exclusion of “comprehensive moral
doctrines” in political deliberation. In fact, she argues that the very refusal of
deliberative models to include political voices that do not match the criteria of public
rationality delineated by theorists like John Rawls and Jurgen Habermas make
democratic deliberation rather irrational and sealed from popular participation because
they denigrate the passions or what William Connolly calls visceral sources of political
reason. As a result, deliberative models construct a political space autonomous from
individual claims of what constitutes the good life and thus falls into the trap of the
liberal pretense of value neutrality. Mouffe’s more recent works, The Return of the
Political (and The Democratic Paradox develop these theoretical positions by drawing
from the philosophical critiques of Carl Schmitt, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Hannah
Arendt on modern liberal democracy. In these works, Mouffe’s revises Schmitt’s notion
of antagonism into agonism as the characteristically political relationship and points to
the ineliminable and innumerable conflict struggles that heighten democracy and
therefore also to the anti-political character of theoretical positions that would rather
purge conflicts from the political process. Failure to define the political this way, Mouffe
argues, may instead lead frustrated social agents to the path of essentialism and
Rene Raymond R. Raneses Jr.
16
fundamentalism. For her, the only guarantee against such tendencies is to admit them
and their messages as constituent adversaries within the liberal democratic set-up.
The abandonment of the ideal of complete social harmony consequentially frees
practices of democracy from the normalizing and disciplining pressures of modern
political society which in William Connolly’s view displaces politics and replaces it with
administrative rationality and thus “subverts this appreciation of ambiguity” (1987, 141)
in political life. According to Connolly, democratic politics “is the medium through which
essential ambiguities can be expressed and given some redress” (1987, 16) where even
as an idealized and harmonized subject remains as the central actor, the “mechanisms
of normalization” that attend the constitution of subject-identity are simultaneously
given expressions. Connolly labels this as a kind of “dissonant holism” where the calling
into question of one’s subjectivity is simultaneously enacted in the very possibility of its
realization. In Why I Am Not A Secularist, Connolly (1999) tasks liberalism for excluding
in its secular idea of a public space not just theistic sources of antagonism, but because
of its rejection of metaphysical, even nontheistic challenges to a political order is denied
validity in public deliberations. For Connolly, liberalism ignores the biological fact that
humans draw their subjectivity from a variety of sources governed by the amygdala
from where religious and intimate, visceral forms of reasoning dwell. Hence, instead of
conceiving political actors as full subjects, Connolly adopts a “politics of becoming”
which necessitates constant exposure and “deep engagement” with a plurality of voices
and encounters. Thus, although religious authority appear to be dogmatic and
hegemonic, in the context of deep engagement and a politics of becoming, the very
dogmatism becomes essential to the deepening of the political encounter: its appeal to
authority opens new faces of disagreement and agonistic expressions.
In a very similar language, Romand Coles (2005, xi) claims that “democracy has
never been a safe, transparent possession rather, it has been a practice largely in search
of itself, struggling beyond pasts and presents in which it was unrealized (both for many
people and across many domains of life) and in the face of futures threatening to
retrench its achievements and aspirations. Democracy happens primarily as a
generative activity in which people seek to reinvent it in challenges and contestations
concerning the question of what it might become. Democracy is democratization.” The
Rene Raymond R. Raneses Jr.
17
only democratic practices that Coles defends therefore are those types cognizant that
once they have brought to life democracy historically and materially, “democracy was,
is, and will be significantly beyond democracy as ‘we’ ‘know’ it in its dominant forms”
(ibid) requiring an unceasing struggle to rearticulate history and in the process become
deeply receptive to the ambiguities and unanticipated outcomes of their own actions
and the meaning that the future will bear upon them. Hence, for Coles, the properly
democratic ethic is one that realizes that one does know democracy too well (xii).
For sure, Coles is not insinuating that democracy cannot be known at all. The
difference, however, between this type of giving meaning to democratic actions – calling
them democratic – in a partial, episodic kind of a way and the one that definitively
divines the discovery of complete or consolidated democracy is its engendering of an
agonistic space where political agents who claim to be defending democracy accept not
just the plurality of democratic practices, but the unresolvable tension that is generated
out of groups involved in a passionate and principled pursuit of enacting a better type of
democratic society. Liberal democracy, and to some extent, deliberative democracy
foreclose this possibility because they treat the “others” of institutionalized democracy
not as competitors towards the realization of democratic fullness but as enemies to be
destroyed and colonized. Coles beautifully puts it this way: “this recognition that our
own finite efforts unwittingly engender damage better enables insurgent democrats to
infuse their judgment and action with a greater degree of suppleness, receptivity, and
open-endedness” (xii).
Coles calls this ethic as “tension-dwelling” which he develops by suggesting two
interesting tropes: traditio and nepantla. The Latin traditio according to Coles, lies at the
very heart of conceptualizing tradition: the imperative to hand and pass on yet the
indeterminacy of the success of full transmission. While conventional notions of
tradition are couched in highly privatizing imageries – tradition as an imposition, as a
rule over a ruled – organized around the idea of household management, Coles retrieves
the distinctively public nature of tradition which for the Greeks and the Romans is quite
commonsensical, by taking the imperative to “pass on” as its constitutive component. To
“pass on” tradition according to Coles does not just mean to bestow, it also means, the
inverse, to refuse, making tradition inherently laden with the tension of human agency
Rene Raymond R. Raneses Jr.
18
and autonomy. The effect of tradition in this sense is unsettling and in some ways,
disturbing. Nepantla or “borderland living” evokes a similar meaning. Referring to the
work of Gloria Anzaldua – “a borderland Chicana, feminist, and lesbian with roots in the
struggles of farmworkers”, Coles invites democratic theorists “to work history (in this
way) in an effort to creatively forge better modes of coexistence while resisting those
tendencies and forces that would congeal into a new, tensionless, unreceptive totality”
(xv). Traditio and nepantla represent for Coles, the provisional key to appreciating the
teleological and ateleological demands of democratic political action. Teleological,
referring to the direct aims of democratic activities – struggles against oppression,
injustices, inequality – and ateleological to the self-disclosing, identity-revealing but
indeterminate attributes of political action. Taken together, traditio and nepantla give
life to Connolly’s concept of intersubjective registers of deep political engagement. They
highlight how one’s attachment to collective identities do not necessarily lead to a
closing down and narrowing of one’s lifeworld but rather contributes to the very
multiplication of networks and nodes of political relationalities and precisely because
these other networks and sources of relationality, provide the space for contesting and
challenging what otherwise would congeal into unchecked suppositions about the world.
Towards a Catholic Counter-Hegemony?
In democratizing societies pervaded by the discourse of neoliberalism, Connolly,
Coles, Laclau and Mouffe introduce an argument that favors the proliferation of political
voices that would otherwise be considered incongruent with the basic indicators and
standards of neoliberal democratization. What these recent works on radical democratic
pluralism do is to point to the opacity of prevailing standards of democratization to
other sources of political reason. What religion can offer democratization then is a
thickening of the field, a complication of the theory and the opening of a whole new sets
of possible relationships that can provide a backbone against the atrophied and historyless discourse of neoliberal democracy.
Any account of the Catholic Church’s impact to democratization in the
Philippines has to confront the neoliberal and elitist character of democratic politics in
the country as well as the alternatives being offered by civil society actors and critical
Rene Raymond R. Raneses Jr.
19
commentators. Although the value pluralism trumpeted by the hegemonic discourse as
the most definite manifestation of a deepening democratic space falls apart in the face of
state and societal structures captured by dominant power players and globally
intertwined ideational forces, a theory of democracy that limits the legitimate
participants and partners in the formation of public discourse and in the conduct of
public deliberation avoids deep political engagement and contents itself with an
impoverished version of pluralism. The radicalization of the political field can only
happen however with a revision of the conceit that underlies modern democratic theory,
a turning away from progressive accounts that involves delimiting the process of
democratization into various stages where each stage represents a definite movement
towards fuller realization of the democratic vision. Democratic theory must not be
modest as Samuel Huntington (1990) suggests, but rather humble – that is, it must
resist any grand hope of arriving at finally seeing the fullness of democracy. Yet it must
also be open to political voices that demand constitutive principles and values inserted
into the terrain of public discourse. To arrive at this, theorizing about the constitutive
actors of the political field must also abandon the reductionist, albeit, parsimonious
portrayals of political actors as simply self-interested, ahistorical and disembedded from
cultural (and religious) contexts with purely rational and non-comprehensive voices
towards a serious attentiveness to other sources of intersubjectivity beyond selfinterested ties and motivations.
In this paper, I argued that the conservativism of Filipino Catholic Bishops must
not be taken as a step back or a stumbling block towards fuller democratization and
politicization. I claimed that observers and commentators of democracy in the
Philippines must instead treat this conservative turn as potentially challenging the
dominant neoliberal discourse because of its appeal to tradition and its utilization of
metaphors and tropes that vigorously oppose the analytical frame of neoliberal (and
even liberal) democracy – models that do not adequately respond to the problems and
challenges of a postcolonial and developing country. Scholars of democratization and
the Catholic Church must therefore pay attention less to whether the values espoused
by its Catholic elites and organizations can be harmonized with democracy-as-we-knowit. Instead, a more productive and political agenda – in the sense that the research itself
can generate challenges to the dominant framework – will be to study how Catholic
Rene Raymond R. Raneses Jr.
20
elites and organizations struggle to remain staunch against increasing calls for them to
liberalize and take these strategies of strengthening the ranks of its community, their
metaphors and advocacies not as problems that should warn and make democratic
policymakers and participants nervous but as hopeful signs that a democratic
deepening and radicalization is underway.
Rene Raymond R. Raneses Jr.
21
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