The Separation of Church and State as an Imperial Project in the Philippines during the Early American Colonial Period

Abstract

This paper examines the separation of church and state in the Philippines during the early American colonial period, contextualizing it within the process of American overseas expansion and considering it as one of the projects of imperial hegemony construction. After the Spanish–American War, the United States substituted Spain as the new colonial ruler of the Philippines, legitimizing its regime as the spread of ‘civilization’ to the Filipinos. On this basis, the Americans enacted laws guaranteeing religious freedom and introduced an American-style institution dealing with church–state relations. Beyond the legal and administrative initiatives, the new regime also constructed an official narrative of the transformation of political–religious relations in the Philippine that emphasized the absolute ‘difference’ between the American human rights principle, which guaranteed freedom of worship, and the Spanish theocracy, which was dedicated to the consolidation of privileges. By legislating the separation of church and state, buying up church properties, recognizing the equality of denominations, and constructing the official imperial narrative of church–state relations, the Americans hoped to ‘teach’ Filipinos that the ‘true’ belief was rooted in the inner convictions of individual Christians, not in the authority and coercion of the hierarchical church. By disciplining the construction of ‘difference’ under tutelary colonialism, the separation of church and state movement initiated by the American colonial government in the Philippines became an important source of imperial self-endowed legitimacy.

1. Introduction

Christian culture has been present in the Philippines for more than four centuries since Magellan’s fleet first introduced the Christian faith there. During the Spanish colonial period, Roman Catholicism became the official and dominant faith among Filipinos, with four major religious orders (Augustinians, Dominicans, Franciscans and Recollectos), driven by the Catholic Reformation movement, sending a great number of friars to the Philippines to spread the Gospel faith. For various reasons, these orders insisted on their special rights in missionary matters. However, this caused resentment among the indigenous Filipino clergy and led to the birth of an anti-friar nationalist movement in the late 19th century. After a series of religious and political disputes, the official status of the Roman Catholic Church was revoked and Christian denominations were granted the right to legitimate missions. Since then, the number of Christian denominations in the Philippines has grown rapidly, and the Christian gospel has increasingly spread to high mountains and other remote areas. As Bishop Stephen Neill said, “no country in the world offers better possibilities for research into missionary history than the Philippines.” (Neill 1969, p. vii).

In the Philippines, the separation of church and state in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the pivotal event in its Christian history. For a long time, Roman Catholicism, with the support of the Spanish colonial regime, was the only recognized religion in the Philippines. The friars from the Peninsula insisted on the special status of the religious orders in spiritual matters and claimed to be consulted on political matters. However, with the establishment of the separation of church and state, the legitimate religious status of indigenous Christian denominations in the Philippines was recognized, and Protestant denominations from North America were also allowed to preach in the country.

To tell the story of the separation of church and state in the Philippines, most scholars use the European model of church–state relations to contextualize it in the process of state-building and politico-religious modernization, recounting how Filipinos, with the help of the American regime, gained the right to freedom of worship and ‘liberated’ themselves from the corrupt theocracy established by the Spanish friars who monopolized the priesthood. According to Peter Stanley, “the most fundamental reforms carried out by the Americans were the secularization of the government”, “with the blessing of liberal American Catholics, the near identity of church and state was ended” (Stanley 1974, p. 82). Peter Gowing adopted a narrative pattern which is similar to that of Peter Stanley in his monographic study on the separation movement in the Philippines during the early American colonial period. According to him, secularism in the Philippines arose out of Filipinos’ dissatisfaction with the Spanish friars and various other demands. It ended when Filipino sects learned to coexist peacefully under the American regime, completing the modernization of church–state relations (Gowing 1969)1.

In fact, most research has mainly adopted the narrative model of the secularization in Europe or the United States, thus weakening the context of colonial rule that was prominent in Philippine political and religious processes, underestimating the extent of the influence of imperial cultural power. In view of this, this paper attempts to contextualize the separation of church and state in the Philippines in the process of American imperial construction and discusses how the colonial officials’ cultural hegemony shaped Philippine church–state relations in accordance with American political and religious schemas. In essence, the separation of church and state in the Philippines led by the American colonial government was seen as a part of the mission of ‘civilization’ of the American empire. Colonial officials, mainly from the American legal and political communities, believed that the legitimacy of American rule in the Philippines lay in the spread of American ‘civilization’ and the construction of a new Filipino state modeled on the United States. In terms of church–state relations, the new regime believed that its goal was to destroy the Spanish-style hierarchical church and state in order to ‘protect’ Filipinos’ religious liberty. In the context of the imperial expansion of the United States in the early twentieth century, the separation of church and state in the Philippines was not simply the result of the autonomous development of nation-building but also the product of the cultural hegemony imposed by U.S. colonial officials.

2. The American Colonial Officials’ Idea of the Separation of Church and State

When the conflict between Filipino and American forces erupted in Manila in 1899, the President of the United States appointed Jacob Schurman to head a five-man commission to investigate the situation in the Philippines. The Commission soon learned that one of the root causes of the political turmoil there was the widespread resentment among the Filipino people against the class of so-called ’friars’. At the time of the Commission’s arrival, General Otis, the head of the U.S. Army, was discussing the release of the Spanish friars from Filipino captivity by General Aguinaldo, the President of the Philippine Republic. The Commission also noted that “for the first time in the history of the islands several priests in different parts of Luzon were murdered by the populace; many of them were arrested and held as prisoners by the Filipinos” (Report of the (First) Philippine Commission vol. 1, 1900, pp. 130–31). As the investigation progressed, the Commission learned that hostility towards the Spanish friars had erupted throughout the Philippines. When the Commission asked a local Negros elite about the attitude of the people there towards the friars, the latter replied that “it is completely hostile” and “they are enemies of the friars, and do not wish to see a friar there” (Report of the (First) Philippine Commission vol. 2, 1900, p. 419)2.

In describing the conflict between the Filipinos and the Spanish friars, the Commission did not fail to emphasize the American idea of the separation of church and state and religious freedom. The Commission wrote,

under our system of government the state would confine itself to securing religious liberty, and would by no means make any distinction between religious sects. All sects would be treated alike and no special privileges would be granted to any (Report of the (First) Philippine Commission vol. 1, 1900, p. 130).

According to the Commission, the root cause of the conflict between Filipinos and religious orders was precisely the close relationship that exists between the Church or religious order and the State. At the end of their report, the Commission provided their policy recommendations on the need to bring the well-established American institution of the separation of church and state to the Philippines in order to end church–state disputes there and to popularize modern religious concepts of freedom of worship among Filipinos (Report of the (First) Philippine Commission vol. 1, 1900, p. 136). The following year, when the Taft Commission succeeded the Schurman Commission in establishing a civil government, it again stressed the need to adopt the modern political principles advocated by the United States, including the separation of church and state. The Taft Commission wrote,

Ordinarily, the Government of the United States and its servants have little or no concern with religious societies or corporations and their members. With us the Church is so completely separated from the State that it is difficult to imagine cases in which the policy of a church in the selection of its ministers and the assignment of them to duty can be regarded as of political moment, or as a proper subject of comment in the report of a public officer (Reports of the Taft Philippine Commission 1901, p. 23).

What American colonial officials were expressing was their own standard view of the relationship between church and state, with the government primarily managing public affairs and guaranteeing the legal rights of citizens. In light of this view, religion, as it is rooted in the inner beliefs of individual citizens, does not belong in the realm of public affairs. Since this principle was written into the U.S. Constitution, Americans have always followed it strictly. According to this, government and public officials usually have little or no interest in religious organizations, and similarly, the selection of ministers and the allocation of priesthoods are entirely internal matters of the religious society and have nothing to do with the government. It was seen by American colonial officials as a self-evident, modern and civilized political principle that required no further explanation. As long as it was upheld by the government, it would prevent many unnecessary conflicts between the church and state or between different sects. The Americans also believed that it was possible to implement this principle directly in the colonial Philippines and that it would quickly resolve the endless disputes between the Filipinos and the Spanish friars.

By emphasizing the political superiority of the American idea of the separation of church and state, the colonial government affirmed the importance of spreading “civilization” to the Filipinos. Before the legal status of the Philippines had been fully determined, President McKinley issued the “benevolent assimilation” proclamation and announced that it was “the earnest wish and paramount aim of the military administration to win the confidence, respect, and affection of the inhabitants of the Philippines by assuring them in every possible way that full measure of individual rights and liberties which is the heritage of free peoples, and by proving to them that the mission of the United States is one of benevolent assimilation, substituting the mild sway of justice and right for arbitrary rule” (Go 2008, p. 46). According to this, the popularization of the concept of human rights, freedom of worship and religious liberty among Filipinos was a source of legitimacy for the new regime, and the establishment of a basic institution of secularism to protect the right of Filipinos to worship would therefore be a priority of governance.

In fact, the American idea of the separation of church and state stems from the historical experience of the Christian Atlantic world. In the midst of the Reformation Movement and denominational conflicts, Martin Luther articulated the idea of “two kingdoms”: God created two kingdoms, the church as the kingdom of believers and the government as the secular kingdom, with the secular government ruling by the law and the kingdom of believers ruling by the gospel; thus, the church has no secular power. After the British Civil War, John Locke, a naturalistic theist, set out to convince his countrymen that sectarian conflict over minor doctrinal disputes was unnecessary. In his Treatise on Religious Toleration, Locke systematically articulated the idea that political governance should be isolated from religious sects. According to him, sectarian divisions are nothing but divisions in the Church, caused by some unnecessary questions belonging to worship or canon law, and therefore, certain Christian sects ought to be tolerated, so long as they do not attempt to establish undue privileges over other sects (González 2010).

The founders of the United States, influenced by Locke, generally accepted the concept of ‘religious toleration’, which regarded the right of citizens to follow their inner convictions to believe in one God, without external coercion, to be born with nature. In 1786, the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, drafted by Thomas Jefferson, systematically articulated the principles of religious freedom and the separation of church and state. Jefferson regarded this act as one of his three greatest achievements, and he wrote that “the natural rights of the citizen are not dependent upon his religious opinions” and that “any provision, therefore, that a citizen shall not be allowed to hold public office without professing or renouncing this or that religious opinion, is, in effect, a derogation from the natural rights which he enjoys in common with other citizens” (Jefferson 1786). In a reply to a Jewish newspaper editor, Mordecai M. Noah, Jefferson explained why religious toleration was so important, because “the universal spirit of religious intolerance, inherent in every sect, disclaimed by all while feeble, and practiced by all when in power”, and the only antidote to this universal religious intolerance was “our laws, protecting our religious, as they do our civil rights by putting all on an equal footing” (Jefferson 1818).

In the 1791 Amendment to the United States Constitution, it was expressed as “the Congress of the United States shall make no law respecting an establishment of a religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”. It contained two main points: (1) the government does not support any particular sect, i.e., the government’s authority is limited to public affairs, and religious concepts and the rituals associated with them are the outward manifestation of an individual’s inner convictions, which do not belong in the realm of public affairs; and (2) the government, guided by the principles of natural law, should protect the individual citizen’s right to freedom of belief and worship, and that is one of the sources of the legitimacy of democratic government.

The American idea of the separation of church and state, born out of intense sectarian conflicts in the North Atlantic, was based on a particular individualist conception which tended to divide the various dimensions of human experience into a series of dichotomous categories, such as the individual and public, state and society, sacred and secular, rational and irrational, etc. Thinking about political modernity, it means to apply these dichotomous categories to political experiences. As Dipesh Chakrabarty wrote in Provincializing Europe, “to think of ‘political modernity’ anywhere in the world”, it would invoke certain categories and concepts, such as “citizenship, the state, civil society, public sphere, human rights, equality before the law, the individual, distinctions between public and private, the idea of the subject, democracy, popular sovereignty, social justice, scientific rationality, and so on”, which comes from “the intellectual and even theological traditions of Europe” (Chakrabarty 2000, p. 4).

This particular individualist scheme of political modernity, combined with the empire’s self-endowed mission of ‘civilization’, became a universal value system for dealing with church–state relations during the expansion of imperialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The principle of protecting citizens’ religious freedom and the institutional separation of church and state were seen as both the core institution in the United States and the universal principle of political modernity. With the expansion of American imperialism, it also became an important source of legitimacy for the United States to establish its rule in the ‘uncivilized’ tropical areas.

3. The Perception of American Colonial Officials Regarding the Church–State Relation in the Philippines

American colonial officials already had a clear set of schemes regarding the church–state relation before arriving in Manila. When they wanted to shape a new regime in the Philippines, they necessarily applied their own conceptual scheme of secularism to understand the religious and political affairs there. They studied in detail the extent and scale of the conflict between Filipinos and Spanish friars in different parts of the country. They consulted Filipino ‘ilustrado’ (enlightened) and religious leaders about Filipino perceptions of the friars, the extent of church property, the role of the clergy in politics and governance, the validity of Filipino accusations against the friars, and the possibility of returning the Spanish friars to their dioceses. From these consultations, they concluded that the Spanish had established a hierarchical theocracy both in central Manila and in the local provinces. The friars monopolized the priesthood, while the government relied on them to suppress Filipinos’ liberty. They were spiritual leaders to Filipino people, owned large tracts of the best farmland and controlled a large dependent labor force on the haciendas. They were not only prominent figures in local power but also controlled local culture and education and even the life and death of local residents.

The first fact noted by the Americans is that in the Philippines, most parish positions are held by friars rather than secular clergymen, and the religious orders controlled by Spanish friars normally refused to enroll native Filipino priest. There are 746 regular parishes, 105 mission parishes and 116 missions in the Archipelago. Of the regular parishes, all but 150 were administered by Spanish priests of the Dominican, Augustinian or Franciscan orders. And native Filipinos were not admitted to these orders (Reports of the Taft Philippine Commission 1901, p. 23).

The second fact noted by the Americans was that the Spanish friars not only controlled most priesthood, thus possessing the divine authority, but also exercised extensive political influence on local and national political matters. The Schurman Commission listed fourteen powers that the friars actually exercised in local government, which made them “reverend parochial priest[s]”. The Commission wrote, “the reverend parochial priest” in each parish, “assists in all the meetings of the municipal tribunal”, “has the right to intervene in all business conducted by the tribunal”, and “gives his opinion in regard to the approval of bills presented by the captain and advises the town officials” (Report of the (First) Philippine Commission 1900 vol. 1, pp. 57–58).

American officials knew that it would be very strange to the American readers to comprehend the fact that the friars had so much political power. They explained that although the friars were nominally limited to provide advice and oversight, and not decision-making, there were special circumstances in the Philippines that gave the friars actual political influence. First, the friars had amassed a large amount of real estate, the most important economic resource in the predominantly agrarian Philippines, and mastery of the land means direct control of the survival resources for most Filipinos. Second, unlike civil servants, whose tenure was limited, the friar’s tenure in the parish was virtually unlimited. Finally, as parish priests, the friars were usually the only educated and literate people in the parish who understood both the local dialect and Spanish. They would not only act as the spiritual leaders of the locals but also as mediators between local people and Spanish officials in secular matters (Reports of the Taft Philippine Commission 1901, pp. 24–27).

The third fact noted by the Americans was that the friars not only controlled most priesthood and wielded considerable political influence but also controlled much of the best agricultural land, establishing numerous haciendas and forcing many Filipinos to become their tenants. According to government statistics, the Roman Catholic Church held a total of about 160,000 hectares (406,370 acres) of land in the Archipelago, of which the Dominicans held about 65,000 hectares (161,593 acres) and the Augustinians held 60,000 hectares (151,742 acres), most of it in the vicinity of Manila, which had the most fertile farmland in the Philippine Islands (Willis 1905, pp. 192–93). As soon as they landed in Manila, the Americans learned that there were numerous land disputes between the Filipinos and the Spanish friars. The Filipinos hated the friars for plundering their land, and this was the direct cause of their arrest of the friars and their revolt against Spanish rule. In 1898, the U.S. general, General Otis, acting under presidential orders and the provisions of the U.S.–Spanish Peace Treaty, took the responsibility to protect the security and property of Spanish friars. To this end, he opened negotiations with General Aguinaldo for the release of a number of Spanish friars arrested by the Philippine army. Aguinaldo, however, refused to release these Spanish priests and noted various reasons for his conduct. He charged that the religious orders had acquired large agricultural colonies by means of fraud and stated that “the products of these lands […] were first granted”, but in the course of time, the “possession was taken” with the support of Spanish authorities, and ever since, these lands were held by the religious orders (Report of the (First) Philippine Commission 1900 vol. 1, pp. 130–31).

The fourth fact observed by the Americans was that friars enjoyed broad immunity from civil jurisdiction, which was considered as the most critical factor in making them a privileged group. The American officials had consulted a Negros municipal official, Luzuriaga: “Does the friar exercise this influence over the people by virtue of his office? Does he have any position ex officio?” Luzuriaga gave a positive response and said, “no complaint could be made against a priest”, even if “he took a man’s wife away from him, or made him pay an exorbitant burial or marriage fee, or induced some dying person to leave him a legacy”, because the friars were “not subject to prosecution in ordinary courts, but in the ecclesiastical court”, and it was obvious that “a native could never win his suit” as “all the judges were friars” (Report of the (First) Philippine Commission 1900 vol. 2, p. 420). For U.S. officials accustomed to the idea that all citizens should be subject to common law, the actual immunity from jurisdiction made friars the largest privileged group in the Philippines.

The fifth fact noted by the American officials was that there were many allegations about the immorality among the friars. The Americans wrote that some of the friars came from the peasant class of Andalusia, did not receive qualified theological training or education and were sent to remote areas, usually at a very young age, to preside over mission sites. As the only white man in the area, “he suddenly sees the women half clothed”, “his eyes were opened”, and if “he is not strong he will fall”. The immorality of the Spanish friar may have shocked educated Americans, but in the Philippines, where “the living together of a man and woman without the marriage ceremony is not infrequent and is not condemned”, the Spanish friar’s affair with the Filipina was not enough to cause outrage (Reports of the Taft Philippine Commission 1901, pp. 28–30). The widespread allegations of the immorality of the Spanish friars were largely the result of Filipino resentment of the extensive privileges enjoyed by the friars, and the key issue was still the lack of an institutional design for the separation of church and state similar to that in the United States.

In contrast with the separation of church and state in the U.S., colonial officials attributed all aspects of the Filipino secular conflict to the same root cause, namely, the theocracy established by the Spanish in the Philippines and the Spanish government’s heavy reliance on the orders and the friars. They summed up Philippine church–state relations as follows: in the Philippines, “the friars were not only spiritual leaders, but were actually the rulers of the local government”, and if the basic principle of American politics was the protection of the natural rights of the citizenry, Spain based its entire rule on the preservation of a hierarchical theocracy, as the friars were “the pedestal or foundation of the sovereignty of Spain.” If removed, “the whole structure would topple over.” In short, the Americans’ investigations convinced them that the relationship between the church and the state in the Philippines under Spanish rule was in every way the opposite of the rational American system of the separation of church and state, and such an arrangement was not so much for the purpose of evangelization but for the deliberate maintenance of Filipino ignorance and the consolidation of privileges of the religious orders (Le Roy 1907, p. 127).

4. The Implementation of the Policy of the Separation of Church and State in the Early American Colonial Period

Against the American scheme of the separation of church and state, the colonial government was convinced that they were confronted not only with widespread Filipino hostility to the Spanish friars but also with an entire Spanish-style ‘theocratic’ power structure. They had to settle the specific disputes of the secular conflict on the one hand and to introduce the American institution of the separation of church and state on the other. This included the law-making of a “freedom of worship” clause similar to that in the Bill of Rights in the U.S. Constitution, the gradual abolition of the privileges of religious orders, a proper response to the conflict between the Philippine Independent Church and Roman Catholic Church and the subjection of all denominations to the common law in order to establish the supremacy of civil government.

4.1. The Making of the Law of Separation of Church and State

In order to establish political order as soon as possible, American officials agreed that the principle of the separation of church and state should be proclaimed without delay. In early 1900, President McKinley wrote in a letter of instructions to the Taft Commission indicating that, in order to end the war, the Commission should respect the customs and habits of the natives, while at the same time, it should take care to introduce “certain great principles of government” which “we deem essential to the rule of law and the maintenance of individual freedom”. And these included the protection of private property and “the free exercise and enjoyment of religious profession and worship” (Instructions of the President to the Philippine Commission 1900, pp. 8–9).

In 1902, the United States Congress passed the Philippine Organic Act, which laid down the basic principles of the organization of the Philippine government. Section 5 was the “religious freedom” Clause. It reads as follows: “That no law shall be made respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, and that the free exercise and enjoyment of religious profession and worship, without discrimination or preference, shall forever be allowed” (Philippine Organic Act 1902). This bill was in fact an extension of the corresponding clause in the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America. The First Amendment reads as follows: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”. Both expressed the same two points: first, that the legislature shall not legislate in favor of or against any particular religious denomination and shall strictly observe the principle of neutrality regarding sectarian conflicts; second, that the legitimate government shall protect the freedom of belief of its citizens.

Interestingly, the formulation in the Organic Act of 1902 was very different from the separation of church and state clause written by the leaders of the Philippine Revolution in the Malolos Constitution of 1898. The Malolos Constitution reads as follows: “The State recognises the freedom and equality of all religions and the separation of Church and State (El Estado reconoce la libertad e igualdad de todos los cultos así como la separación de la Iglesia y del Estado).” This statute, drafted by Tomás G. del Rosario, then a member of the Philippine Revolutionary Assembly, was later submitted to the Assembly for discussion and narrowly defeated a proposal by Felipe Calderón to retain Catholicism as the national religion of the Philippines. In drafting the constitution, the delegates looked primarily at the written constitutions of France, Belgium, Mexico, Brazil, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Guatemala, believing that “the Philippines is very similar to these countries”. In fact, the delegates to the Philippine Revolutionary Assembly never considered borrowing from the United States Constitution, as they would not consider that the Philippines was in any way similar to the United States (Malcolm 1921, pp. 94–95)3.

The difference in formulation incorporated different meanings. While the American officials considered the principle of “separation of church and state”, with its guarantee of freedom of worship, to be the source of legitimacy for the colonial government, Filipino revolutionary leaders envisioned that an independent Filipino state would rely on this principle to be free from the encroachment of foreign friars on the sovereignty of the state. This difference in perspective is succinctly captured by the political historians Patricio N. Abinales and Donna J. Amoroso, as they point out that while “nineteenth-century Spanish officials and ilustrados who thought about the problems of the Philippines thought about the state”, “the new twentieth-century governors, set on proving the superiority of American rule, thought about democracy” (Abinales and Amoroso 2017, p. 134).

4.2. U.S. Sent Taft as an Unofficial Envoy to the Vatican

Despite the U.S. colonial government’s initial determination to introduce the modern political institution of the separation of church and state in the Philippines, it was not easy for U.S. officials to take into account the views of different interest groups when implementing this policy. In the Philippines, the government was obliged to address Filipino grievances as expeditiously as possible. The investigations conducted by the Shurman and Taft Commissions, in addition to the military government led by Generals Otis and MacArthur, concluded that the primary source of ongoing unrest among the Filipino population was the widespread discontent against the Spanish friars. The capacity to forestall the return of the Spanish friars to their original parishes became a pivotal concern, one that tested the credibility of the American colonial government. Concurrently, the government was obliged to take into account the criticisms directed at it by Catholics in the United States. Following the commencement of hostilities in the Spanish–American War, members of the Catholic community in the United States expressed concern that the actions of the U.S. military against Spain would result in widespread animosity towards Catholics. Imposing a decree in the Philippines to expel the Spanish friars at this juncture was likely to exacerbate the concerns of Catholics in the United States, leading them to perceive that the United States was not merely acting to defeat Spain but also intended to suppress the Roman Catholic Church (Reuter 1982, pp. 105–10).

The above dilemma required the first Philippine governor-general, William Howard Taft, to be flexible enough to calm Filipino discontent while at the same time assuaging the concerns of Catholics both domestically and internationally. Upon his arrival in Manila, Taft initiated negotiations with Archbishop Chappell of New Orleans, who had been dispatched by the Holy See. The objective was to reach an agreement that would result in the voluntary departure of the Spanish friars from the Philippines in a manner that would be as decent as possible and would also encompass the sale of the friars’ land holdings. However, Bishop Chappell, who had arrived in Manila prior to Taft, developed a profound sense of empathy for the plight of the friars in the Philippines upon learning about the specific circumstances of the Catholic Church in the Philippines. In his view, the accusation in the press that the religious orders had appropriated vast tracts of land was unsubstantiated. He learned that the religious orders lacked alternative sources of income, given the extensive charitable work they conducted in the Philippines. Moreover, the land they possessed was the sole source of revenue that enabled them to sustain this charitable work. Chappell posited that the ongoing conflict had precipitated a dearth of religious services in the Philippines. He contended that the continued deportation of Spanish friars by the U.S. government would likely result in the complete dissolution of the religious service in the Philippines (Reuter 1982, pp. 111–12).

It would appear that Taft and Chappell would not reach any agreement on the Philippine church problem, as they almost held the opposing views on the situation of the friars and religious orders. In light of these circumstances, Theodore Roosevelt, who assumed the presidency of the United States in 1902, along with the Secretary of War, Elihu Root, facilitated an unofficial visit by Taft to the Vatican, with the objective of reaching a direct settlement of the Philippine church problem with the Vatican. Due to the unofficial nature of the trip, President Roosevelt did not provide Taft with any official diplomatic documentation. Instead, he furnished Taft a letter of instruction from Elihu Root, which read as follows:

The President wishes you to take the subject up tentatively with the ecclesiastical superiors who must ultimately determine the friars’ course of conduct, and endeavor to reach at least a basis of negotiation along lines which will be satisfactory to them and to the Philippine Government, accompanied by a full understanding on both sides of the facts and of the views and purposes of the parties to the negotiation; so that, when Congress shall have acted, the business may proceed to a conclusion without delay. You are accordingly authorized, in the course of your return journey to Manila, to visit Rome, and there ascertain what church authorities have the power to negotiate for and determine upon a sale of the lands of the religious orders in the Philippine Islands, and if you find, as we are informed, that the officers of the church at Rome have such power and authority you will endeavor to attain the results above indicated.

(Baldwin 1902, p. 3)

The United States sought to establish a direct agreement with the Vatican, thereby circumventing the ecclesiastical representatives in Manila. It was anticipated that the ecclesiastical superiors in the Vatican would comprehend the American officials’ concern and assist the U.S. government in facilitating the decent withdrawal of the Spanish friars from the Philippines. However, the United States was unable to make its request to the Vatican through the established diplomatic channels and was compelled to engage in informal consultative negotiations between Taft and the ecclesiastical superiors (Alvarez 1992, pp. 361–62). As the instruction letter prepared by Root said, it “will not be in any sense or degree diplomatic in its nature, but will be purely a business matter of negotiation by you as Governor of the Philippines” (Baldwin 1902, p. 3).

4.3. Vatican’s Response to Taft’s Proposal and Pope Leo XIII’s Encyclical

Taft anticipated an early and satisfactory agreement with the Holy See. However, the Vatican’s initial response just made Taft feel “not unsatisfactory”. The Vatican accepted in principle the offer to purchase the friars’ estates while requesting that the details of the purchase plan be left to the apostolic delegate in Manila. This was precisely what Taft had sought to avoid. Additionally, the Vatican proposed that the Spanish friars should be permitted to remain in their parishes, as they believed that the popular antipathy toward orders and friars could be solved by exhorting the orders to return to a proper spiritual life and avoid participation in civil affairs. In this regard, the Vatican refused to recall the Spanish friars from the Philippine Islands as a means of addressing the ‘friar problem’ there (Alvarez 1992, p. 365).

Why did the Vatican not immediately agree to Taft’s proposal? David Alvarez points out that “the vague wording of the American proposal had obscured Washington’s main goal (the expulsion of the friars) and confused the papal negotiators.” The Americans’ actual intention was that, subsequent to the United States’ purchase of the orders’ property at a “full and fair” price, the orders would utilize the proceeds of the sale to facilitate the withdrawal of Spanish friars from the Philippines. However, the instruction letter lacked clarity regarding the subsequent disposition of the friars and emphasized that the negotiations to secure such agreement would be “purely a business matter” without any diplomatic overtones (Alvarez 1992, pp. 364–66).

In fact, the Vatican proposed an alternative plan for the reform of the Church in the Philippines beyond the confines of the “purely business matter” framework established by the United States. In December 1902, Pope Leo XIII issued an encyclical letter, recommending “a plan of action and of organization to be sought promptly and with great care […] to provide against the relaxation of ecclesiastical discipline” in the Philippine Islands. In the introductory section of the encyclical, Pope Leo XIII acknowledged the significant contributions of the Spanish government and friars to the advancement of the mission and civilization in the Philippines, while he also noted that “the change which the fortunes of war have wrought in civil matters has also affected religion there”. The remainder of the encyclical sets out 12 measures proposed by the Vatican for reforming the Church in the Philippines, including an increase in the number of bishoprics, improved training for Filipino priests and a larger role for them in Church affairs, in the enforcement of ecclesiastical discipline and reforms and so on. Among the significant aspects pertaining to the friars in the Philippines are the following:

First, the training of native Filipino clergy should be expedited; however, it is imperative that they be formally ordained to the priesthood only after they have undergone rigorous training in virtue and learning. As the Pope said,

Since it is proved by experience that a native clergy is most useful everywhere, the bishops must make it their care to increase the number of native priests, in such a manner, however, as to form them thoroughly in piety and character, and to make sure that they are worthy to be entrusted with ecclesiastical charges.

Second, the clergyman should prioritize evangelization and religious service and refrain from involvement in secular political disputes. This matter was particularly important in the Philippines at that time. As the encyclical wrote,

Above all things the clergy should hold to the rule that they are not to allow themselves to be mixed up in party strife. Although it is a maxim of common law that he who fights for God should not be involved in worldly pursuits, we deem it necessary that men in holy orders in the present condition of affairs in the Philippine Islands should avoid this in a special manner.

Similar, to the members of the Religious Orders, Leo XIII “recommend earnestly to discharge holily the duties which they have assumed when pronouncing their vows, ‘giving no offense to any man.’”

Finally, the clergyman should reverence the authority of the civil government, as St. Paul elucidated in his teachings, “for all power is from God”. And the church, as the “brotherhood in Christ is unanimity in heart and in soul”, should “address themselves with paternal charity to all the inhabitants of the Philippine Islands, and to exhort them with all the persuasion to maintain union in the bonds of peace” (Pope Leo XIII 1903, pp. 372–79).

In essence, the majority of the Pope’s proposed plan of ecclesiastical reform is not in contradiction with the principle of the separation of church and state as proposed by the United States. The encyclical exhorts the clergy to prioritize religious endeavors, adhere to doctrinal and ecclesiastical tenets, refrain from engagement in secular controversies, and acknowledge the newly constituted secular authority of the United States. This created an environment conducive to the implementation of the U.S. policy of the separation of church and state within the Philippines and alleviated concerns among Catholics in the U.S. that the government might be pursuing an anti-Catholic agenda.

The primary point of contention between the Vatican and the United States pertained to the disposition of the Spanish friars in the Philippines. The United States requested that the Vatican arrange the Spanish friars to withdraw from the Philippines on a voluntary basis. The Vatican, however, maintained that the disputes between the friars and the people could be resolved by enhancing theological training, reaffirming church discipline and prioritizing religious services. Moreover, the Vatican emphasized the necessity of secularizing the diocese, advocated for the expeditious formation of local Filipino clergy and pledged to assist the Philippines in establishing additional seminaries and providing financial assistance to local clergy for further training in Rome. In short, the Vatican acknowledged the necessity for ecclesiastical reform in the Philippines to respond to the growing unrest among the Filipinos against the Spanish friars.

4.4. The Removal of the Privileges of the Friars and the Religious Orders

It was the view of United States officials that the popular discontent with the Spanish friars and the rise of the movement of the Philippine Independent Church were both rooted in the privileged position of the Spanish friars and the Catholic religious orders within the Philippines. Consequently, the initial measure taken to implement the policy of the separation of church and state there was to dismantle their privileges. This perspective was aligned with the progressivist reform paradigm that was prevalent in the United States at the time. This paradigm posited that the removal of privilege and corruption was a necessary precursor to moral upliftment and civilizational progress. In official documentation, the United States government made it clear that their opposition was not to Catholicism itself but rather to any privileges that were incompatible with democratic political principles. They held the view that the Filipino public’s resentment of the Spanish friars was based on similar grounds. As the Schurman Commission reported,

The Filipinos do not antagonize the church itself; they are faithful and loyal to it; their hostility is aimed at the religious orders; they demand that the parishes should be filled by priests who are not friars; they claim that this is a law of the church and should be the practice in the Philippines (Report of the (First) Philippine Commission vol. 1, 1900, p. 131).

In order to remove the privileges of the friars and religious orders, the U.S. colonial government identified two key policies: first, to reduce the economic power of the religious orders, especially by finding ways to address the problem of the religious orders’ ownership of large amounts of hacienda land; and second, to replace the Spanish friars with American liberal Catholics without disrupting the basic organization of the Roman Catholic Church (Willis 1905, p. 192).

The first key policy was to dismantle the friars’ economic power and repossess the vast amount of land held by the orders. According to the second paragraph of Article VIII of the treaty of peace, negotiated at Paris, the new regime should protect “the property which by law belong to the peaceful possession of property of all kinds, public or private establishments, ecclesiastical or civic bodies, or any other associations” (Report of the (First) Philippine Commission vol. 1, 1900, p. 131). In effect, the Americans, without fully understanding the true state of affairs in the Philippines, were tied up by a sweeping guarantee of the personal and property rights of the very men who had done the most to drive the Filipinos to insurrection (Gowing 1969, p. 207). Restricted by the stipulations of the peace treaty, the United States had to try to appease Filipino discontent while protecting the religious orders’ property. The colonial government eventually offered a compromise whereby the government would issue bonds to raise funds to redeem the orders’ estates and sell the properties at auction to the Filipino people. In 1902, the Philippine Commission drew up a detailed program of redemption, the main elements of which were the (1) authority to acquire and hold real estate by the exercise of the right of eminent domain; (2) permission to use such authority in acquiring the friar lands; (3) power to issue 4.5% five-thirty bonds for the purchase of the lands; and (4) authority to treat the acquired lands as a part of the public domain and to sell, convey or lease them (Willis 1905, p. 196). By the end of 1903, Taft had reached an agreement with representatives of the Vatican according to which the colonial government would contribute USD 7.4 million towards the redemption of the vast majority of the properties held by the churches in the Philippines. In 1904, the Commission passed Act 1120, which placed all lands acquired from the orders under the administration of the Bureau of Public Lands and directed that they be subdivided and sold as soon as possible (Golay 1997, p. 92).

The second key policy in the removal of the friars’ privileges was the government’s encouragement of sending American liberal Catholics to the Philippines to replace the Spanish friars. Given the widespread hostility to the friars in the Philippines, the colonial government did not dare to hastily agree to allow them to return to their original parishes at the end of the war. At the same time, however, the government had to comply with the provision in the U.S.–Spanish peace treaty that required the United States to protect the personal security of the Spanish friars. As in the case of the friars’ lands, the United States again offered a project of compromise. On his travel to Rome, Taft proposed to the Pope that American Catholic priests be appointed to archbishop and other senior priesthood positions in the Philippines. The Americans believed that American priests would be willing to cooperate with the U.S. government, just as the Spanish friars were loyal to Spain. What to do with the Spanish friars was nominally left to the Vatican (Willis 1905, p. 203).

How to make the Spanish friars withdraw from the Philippines in a ‘decent’ way had preoccupied Taft for several years. Nevertheless, it proceeded in a surprisingly expeditious manner. As mentioned above, following Taft’s diplomatic mission to the Vatican, the Pope declined the American proposal to withdraw the Spanish friars from the Philippines with immediate effect. Furthermore, he was reluctant to issue a public bill urging them to do so. However, in light of the Vatican’s subsequent actions, it appears that no further steps were taken to restore the power and status of the Spanish friars in the Philippines. This may suggest that the Vatican took into account the actual situation in the Philippines and respected the demands of the U.S. government. This tacit arrangement greatly facilitated the process of replacing the Spanish friars with Catholic priests from the United States or other countries. In fact, the problem of the Spanish friars just disappeared after several years. Some Spanish friars were killed during the war, and others fled to Manila after the Spanish defeat to seek repatriation. By the end of 1898, there were still 1013 friars in the Philippines. By December 1902, however, there were only 380 friars left, and a year later, there were only 246. Many of the remaining friars were very old and wanted to live out their lives in the place where they had given so many years of their lives. The Vatican did nothing to stop the decline in the number of Spanish friars, and in 1903, all Spanish friars who had been bishop in the Philippines ‘resigned’ and were replaced by American Catholic priests. Meanwhile, the cultivation and promotion of native Filipino clergy proceeded apace in response to the Vatican’s call, which resulted in the appointment of the inaugural Filipino bishop in 1905 (Golay 1997, p. 93). The problem of the withdrawal of the Spanish friars was thus settled.

4.5. To Submit the Disputes between Roman Catholics and the Philippine Independent Church to Judicial Decision

In addition to purchasing the Hacienda land held by orders and arranging the departure of Spanish friars from the Philippines, the colonial government also had to determine how to deal with the sectarian division that arose in the Philippines during this period. When the Americans arrived, the Catholic Church in the Philippines was undergoing a schismatic movement, with local priest Gregorio Aglipay leading Filipino believers out of the Roman Catholic Church to form the Iglesias Filipina Independiente (Philippine Independent Church) or Aglipayan Church.

Rumor has it that when the Americans were about to occupy Manila, Archbishop Nozaleda, fearing that the Church would lose all its property, secretly ordained Gregorio Aglipay as Archbishop of the Philippines and asked him to take charge of the Church’s property. After the war, however, Nozaleda decided that he no longer needed Aglipay’s help and refused to recognize any ‘deal’ with Aglipay or his episcopal status. Aglipay, on the other hand, declared that he would lead three million Filipino believers to break away from the Roman Catholic Church and organize their own independent church, and in October 1902, Aglipay was inaugurated as “obispo maximo (supreme bishop)” of the new church. The Aglipayan set out their doctrinal differences from the Roman Catholics; they said,

Its doctrines are rationalistic, conforming rigorously to the results of modern science. It accepts Darwinism, harmonizing it with Biblical doctrine. It denies the trinity of the persons of the Divinity, but believes in a trinity of attributes and names. The explanation of this idea accepted by the church is entirely new and peculiar to itself, founded upon reasoning based on scriptural text and upon rationalist writings. It denies original sin, as well as the view that the consequences of such sin were expiated through Jesus Christ, but it maintains that Christ’s sacrifice has redeemed us from our own errors, weaknesses, and passions by means of his divine attributes and inimitable example, but not through an actual material sacrifice. It aims in its constitution and roles to re-establish a more pure democracy and the common holding of wealth which Jesus preached and the apostles practiced. The explanation afforded by its catechism of the creation of the world follows recent geological discoveries.

(Willis 1905, p. 209)4

In addition to highlighting the rational and scientific tenets of their teachings, the Aglipayans also underscored their nationalist identity, asserting that they had supplanted the Roman Catholics as the “Philippine Catholics”. They claimed,

The Roman Church has suffered greatly from desertion and defection because the Pope undertakes to maintain in the parishes friars who are most odious to the country, owing to the great evils they have caused it. The American bishops likewise have proved themselves very distasteful to the people because of their efforts to sustain the friars. For that reason, of the 6,000,000 or 7,000,000 Filipino Catholics formerly counted by it, it would be difficult to find 1,000,000 now remaining. The former members have chiefly passed over to the Iglesia Filipina, which is the representative of the wishes of Philippine Catholics.

(Willis 1905, p. 210)

In general, we could say that while the American colonial government was trying to pacificate the religious and political disputes through the establishment of the institution of the separation of church and state, and the Vatican or the Roman Catholic Church was trying to assuage the Filipinos’ discontent through ecclesiastical reform, the Aglipayans intended to satisfy the nationalistic appeal of the Filipinos through sectarian independence and rational purification of the doctrines. In fact, the Aglipayans, as well as the Roman Catholics, recognized the secular authority of the American civil government. They even sought the help of the government to have them recognized as a legitimate heir to Roman Catholics in the Philippines.

The conflicts between the Philippine Independent Church and Roman Catholic Church lasted for several years. As the 1904 Government Report stated, “We regret to say that there still continues to be much controversy and ill feeling between the Independent Filipino Church and the Roman Catholic Apostolic Church in regard to the ownership of churches, convents, and cemeteries in many localities” (The Annual Report of the Philippine Commission 1904, p. 19).

The colonial government, committed to the separation of church and state, had to decide whether or not to recognize the Aglipayan Church as a legitimate Christian denomination. When the Aglipayans declared that their main aim was “to re-establish evangelical truth, disfigured as it has been by the Romanists, and to restore the pre-eminence of the Philippine clergy, which has been usurped by the friars” (Willis 1905, p. 215), some American officials felt that this made them look more like political radicals than a peaceful Christian denomination. Nevertheless, in order to appease the Filipinos as quickly as possible, the colonial government decided to recognize the legal status of the Aglipayans. As the Americans observed, most ordinary Filipinos were unaware of the dispute between the Aglipayans and the Roman Catholics; all they knew was that the two could offer similar religious services, celebrate the same holidays, impose the same religious duties and follow the same principles of conduct. For the government to recognize the legitimacy of one while outlawing the other would appear to be a breach of its commitment to treat all faiths equally.

The colonial government also had to settle property disputes between the Aglipayans and the Roman Catholics. Gregorio Aglipay himself had a good relationship with Taft, and when Taft made harsh accusations against the friars and suggested that they be stripped of their agricultural property, it gave the Aglipayans hope that the United States would support their claims to church property. The Aglipayans suggested that the huge stone churches that stood in the Philippine Islands had been built on the exploitation of the poor Filipino people, as the Roman Church had forced the Filipino people to provide free labor, pay tithes and induce common people to give money and inheritance to the Church on their deathbeds. The church property was really the blood and sweat of the Filipinos, extracted by the friars through the most brutal oppression and the most calculating appeals to superstitious fear. On this basis, the Aglipayans proposed that the church property should be returned to the Filipinos, who would then decide to whom it should be entrusted for safekeeping.

While the government acknowledged the validity of the Aglipayans’ complaint, it also argued that property disputes between sects are civil disputes that should be decided by the courts and that the government should not overstep its authority in favor of one sect or the other. In this regard, the government insisted that these property disputes be adjudicated by the Philippine Supreme Court. Governor Taft issued an executive order stating that in every case the church should remain in the hands of the present beneficial owner first, and if the other sect contested it, he should prepare the evidence, submit it to the court and await the court’s decision. As a result, in most cases, the current priest of the church was treated as the beneficial owner of the church, and the support of the priest and congregation was an important consideration in the ownership of church property. In January, 1905, the Secretary of War approved a proposed Act of the Insular Government conferring authority upon the Supreme Court of these Islands to hear cases relating to Church property claims and pronounce a final decision thereon (Foreman 1906, p. 606). The outcome was a six-to-one decision by the Supreme Court in 1906 favoring the Roman Church, as a majority of the court were Catholics (Golay 1997, p. 93). The Roman Catholics, by their recourse to the courts, received back most of their churches (Robertson 1918, p. 342). There had also been cases where the vesting of church property had not ended up following legal judgements. In La Paz, a suburb of Iloilo, all the natives received an Aglipayan priest to have the right to use the parish church for worship. The Spanish Catholic acting bishop brought a suit to regain possession of the property, but the case was dismissed by the American judge before whom it came up, on the ground that no evidence of titles of ownership or possession had been presented by the Catholic party to him. Yet, a few months later, a Catholic bishop with a crowd of armed retainers took possession of the church. Strangely, the government did not help the Aglipayans to regain possession of the church after the Catholic priests had illegally seized it (Willis 1905, p. 217).

The judicial resolution of sectarian disputes was part of the colonial government’s policy of the separation of church and state. The Americans believed that all people were equal before the law, that the judicial process did not take into account the political aspirations of denominations or have anything to do with doctrinal controversies and that the judiciary followed the same fair and approved procedures and treated all denominations equally. This was, in effect, a colonial application of the idea of ‘legal reformism’ within the United States.

While these disputes between the Roman Catholics and the Aglipayans were no longer regarded by the colonial government and Filipinos as significant political and religious conflicts, they resulted in a gradual diminution of the influence of the movement of the Philippine Independent Church, as the claims put forward by the Aglipayans were no longer perceived as matters of religious or political consequence; instead, they were only regarded as civil cases pertaining to the property rights of churches. As James Robertson described, “the schism diminished greatly” as a result of “the necessity of appeal to the courts”, and with the lapse of time, “the fundamental reasons that lay at the bottom of the schismatic church became weakened, the institution […] continued to diminish in numbers and importance, and [it became] an incident” (Robertson 1918, p. 342).

Moreover, the waning influence of the Aglipayans in religious affairs could be attributed to a number of factors. Primarily, the majority of the Filipino populace was unaware of the schism between the Aglipayans and the Roman Catholics. Instead, they perceived the two as offering comparable religious services, celebrating analogous holidays, imposing analogous religious duties and adhering to analogous principles of behavior (Willis 1905, p. 210). In other words, there was no compelling reason for the general public to abandon the religious services provided by Roman Catholic priests in favor of the teachings of Aglipayan priests. Second, despite the emphasis placed on the purification of the Roman Catholic Church by the Aglipayans, the majority of religious critics at the time did not perceive their teachings as a catalyst for the renewal of the religious or spiritual cause (Stuntz 1904)5. Third, the Aglipayans may have lacked the key resources needed to train indigenous clergies to spread their new doctrines (Robertson 1918, p. 335).

The Protestant churches, which were legally allowed to preach in the Philippines after the passage of the religious freedom clause, faced a dilemma similar to that of the Aglipayans. They were also unable to provide more religious services to the general public, who were not too concerned with doctrinal differences. In addition, most Protestant priests were from the United States and spoke English, a language still unfamiliar to the Filipino people at the time, which meant that their religious work would be mainly confined to the American community in the Philippines. As Henry Parker Willis, an American banker and observer interested in Philippine problems, wrote in 1905, “thus far, the actual hold gained by the Protestant churches has been small” (Willis 1905, p. 221).

In a sense, the American colonial government’s policy of the separation of church and state inadvertently helped the Roman Catholic Church consolidate its position as the most influential religious sect in the Philippines. The depoliticization of religious disputes brought about by the separation of church and state led to the gradual loss of political momentum for the movement of the Philippine Independent Church, which had grown out of the nationalist atmosphere. It also relieved the Catholic Church in the Philippines of too many civil duties, which had been the main cause of discontent among Filipinos towards the Spanish friars. Moreover, the religious disputes and sectarian schism in the Philippines drew the Vatican’s attention to the serious crisis facing the Roman Catholic Church there and prompted the Vatican to propose a detailed plan of ecclesiastical reform. The Philippine Independent Church, which had the potential to become the Roman Catholic Church’s main rival, had been unable to sustain the denomination’s rapid growth due to a lack of clergy and financial resources. According to the 1918 census, Roman Catholicism remained the number one faith among Filipinos, while the Aglipayans only gained some influence in provinces like Iloco Norte (Census of the Philippine Islands vol. II, 1918, pp. 49–52).

5. The Separation of Church and State in the Philippines and the ‘Civilization’ Logic of the American Empire

Since the issuance of President McKinley’s ‘benevolent assimilation’ proclamation, to spread ‘civilization’ has become the source of legitimacy for U.S. rule in the Philippines. In essence, the separation of church and state led by the colonial government was an example of the imperial logic of ‘civilization’. The government’s legislation on religious freedom was modeled on the U.S. Bill of Rights, the acquisition of religious property balanced the principle of protecting private property with the homesteader–citizen ideal of the Homestead Act, the regulation of sectarian disputes followed the spirit of Thomas Jefferson’s ‘religious toleration’ and, most importantly, the dismantling of the privileges of the Spanish monastic orders followed the reform pattern during the progressive movement to reduce privilege and corruption in order to promote true democracy. These actions were all in correspondence with the imperial project of ‘civilization’, which means introducing “certain great principles which we [Americans] deem essential to the rule of law and maintenance of individual freedom” (Instructions of the President to the Philippine Commission 1900, p. 8).

Indeed, as Julian Go puts it, in analyzing the politics of meaning in tutelary colonialism, this ‘civilization’, consistent with the internal cultural beliefs or value systems of American colonial officials, required, for its actual operation in the colonies, a set of external symbolic practices (Go 2008, p. 16). It required repeated references by high-ranking colonial officials in government documents to demonstrate the legitimacy of the concept, as well as repeated proclamations on important occasions involving the practice of rule to emphasize its universality. It also required the construction of a richly detailed official narrative with impeccable logic, in which the colonial officials who carried out the mission of ‘civilization’ are portrayed as the protagonists of the story and in which their administrative and judicial orders were interwoven with that civilized process.

Following the imperial logic of “civilization”, the first action of U.S. officials was to keep preaching to the Filipinos that the legitimate government has the power to enforce the separation of church and state and the duty to protect freedom of worship and that this is the only way to deal with the church–state relations recognized by civilized modern governments.

In 1900, President McKinley’s Letter of Instruction to the Taft Commission suggested that the future Philippine government would have to balance two principles of governance: to respect the habits and customs of the Filipinos on the one hand and to introduce certain great principles of civilized government on the other. These civilized principles include that “no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law” and “no law shall be made respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, and that the free exercise and enjoyment of religious profession and worship without discrimination or preference shall forever be allowed” (Instructions of the President to the Philippine Commission 1900, pp. 8–9). According to this, a civilized government should take responsibility for protecting the religious freedom of individual citizens while not supporting any particular denomination.

Apart from repeated references in government documents, the American version of protecting religious freedom was also repeatedly preached in public by American colonial officials. General Arthur MacArthur, the governor of military administration, issued a pledge to the Filipino people on 6 July 1900 which, among other things, popularized the American concept of the separation of church and state among the Filipinos:

As under the Constitution of the United States complete freedom is guaranteed, and no minister of religion can be interfered with or molested in following his calling in a peaceful and lawful manner, and there must be a complete separation of Church and State, so here the civil government of these Islands hereafter to be established will give the same security to the citizens thereof, and guarantee that no form of religion shall be forced by the government upon any community or upon any citizen of the Islands; that no minister of religion in following his calling in a peaceful and lawful manner shall be interfered with or molested by the government or any person; that no public funds shall be used for the support of religious organizations or any member thereof; that no official process shall be used to collect contributions from the people for the support of any church, priest or religious order; that no minister of religion, by virtue of his being a minister, shall exercise any public or governmental office or authority and that the separation of Church and State must be complete and entire.

(Gowing 1969, pp. 209–10)

Since then, America’s idea of the separation of church and state has continued to appear in various government documents and accounts by American scholars. As mentioned above, when the Schurman and Taft commission reported the ‘friar question’ in the Philippines, they would refer to the American concept of the separation of church and state. Through repeated references and proclamations in a series of government documents, the U.S. version of the separation of church and state was molded into a self-evidently civilized political norm.

Beyond government documents and public pronouncements, a series of detailed official narratives were also constructed to explain the legitimacy of government behaviors to ordinary Filipinos. While the colonial government implemented secular measures in the executive and judicial spheres, the official narrative was responsible for explaining the significance of these actions in the historical process of ‘civilization’ and documenting how the United States had liberated the Filipinos from Spanish theocracy.

For instance, when the American historian David Barrows was commissioned by the government to write a brief history of the Philippines for the four-volume Census in 1903, one of his focuses was the transformation of the church–state relationship. According to his narrative, the oppressive Spanish regime was the historical root cause of all of the friars’ problems; it was “history that made the friars responsible for the errors committed by the Spanish government” in the Philippines; the arrival of the Americans meant the end of the theocracy and that “the power of the monastic orders has been completely destroyed” after “having lost support of the government” (Barrows 1905, pp. 340–46).

Similarly, John Foreman, another famous writer who had provided advice for the American colonial government, described the change the Americans brought to Philippine church–state relations as follows: at the outset, “the common people were quite unable to comprehend that under American law a friar could be in their midst without a shred of civil power or jurisdiction”, and it was “with the American domination that came free cult”, and “no public money is disbursed for the support of any religious creed; no restraint is placed upon the practice of any religion exercised with due regard to morality.” (Foreman 1906, p. 594). Similar historical narratives almost always began with the theocracy under Spain and, after a series of struggles between the Filipinos and the Spanish friars, heralded the end of the church–state disputes under the United States, where the Filipinos were granted permanent religious freedom.

A series of differences permeate the official narratives, which were deliberately constructed by U.S. officials and scholars to underline the absolute distinctions between U.S.- and Spanish-styled church–state relations. The first is the difference in regime legitimacy between the American way of government and church governance based on ‘democracy’, ‘consent’ and “rule of law” and the Spanish way of government and church governance based on ‘privilege’, ‘monopoly’ and ‘suppression’.

For example, in his account of the conflict between the church and state in the late Spanish colonial period, David Barrows noted that successive Philippine revolts were related to the Spanish friars’ desire to continue to monopolize the priesthood. Barrows’ History of the Philippines was widely used as a Philippine history textbook in public schools during the American colonial period. In the section of the book dealing with the history of the late Spanish colonial period, he focuses on the Apolinario de la Cruz Rebellion of 1841. He suggests that the rebellion arose from the Spanish clergy’s unwillingness to recognize the spontaneous religious fervor of the Filipinos, their refusal to acknowledge their autonomous understanding of their faith and preventing Filipinos from holding any position of priesthood. He wrote, “Apolinario de la Cruz, a young Filipino, came up to Manila filled with the ambition to lead a monastic life, and engaged in theological studies”; through “his attendance upon lectures and sermons and by imitation of the friar preachers of Manila”, he became an orator and was able to “arouse great numbers of his own people by his appeals.” However, in order to monopolize the priestly power of spiritual services, the Spanish friars refused to recognize Apolinario’s religious zeal. Instead of “sympathizing with these [Filipinos] religious aspirations”, the Spanish friars “viewed the rise of a Filipino religious leader with alarm”, as “their policy never permitted to the Filipino any position that was not wholly subordinate”, and “they believed that the permanence of Spanish power in these islands lay in suppressing any latent ability for leadership in the Filipino himself”. To maintain the privilege of spiritual services, the Spanish friars suppressed the legitimate religious rights of Filipinos to the priesthood while relying on an alliance with secular power. The Spanish friar, “who in nearly every pueblo was the parish curate, continued to be the paternal guardian and administrator of the pueblo”. He could decide everything; “neither gobernadorcillo nor councillors dared act in opposition to his wishes”. He was also “the local inspector of public instruction and ever vigilant to detect and destroy radical ideas”. Indeed, “to the humble Filipino”, “the friar was the visible and only representative of Spanish authority” (Barrows 1925, pp. 237–39).

The difference in regime legitimacy brought about a second important difference, namely, the “difference” in missionary purpose. Under the American institution of the separation of church and state, priests and clergies were preoccupied with their missionary, concentrating on the spread of the evangelical faith, with the aim of building up the character and ethical values of the Filipino people in order to lay the foundations of a civilized society. Under Spanish rule, on the other hand, the main purpose of missionary work was to consolidate the privileges of the friars and the oppressive power of the government. Thus, the “cross” of the Spanish friars was merely an extension of the power of the “sword”, designed to force the Filipinos into submission through physical and spiritual violence. John Foreman adopts this typical imagery of the juxtaposition of the “sword and cross”. He wrote that the “extension of dominion seized” the Spaniards “like a mania”; they “elected to follow the principles of that religious age” and were prepared to “pass the breach opened for him by the sword” and “concluded the conquest by the persuasive influence of the Holy Cross”. After the conquest, the cross replaced the sword as the main instrument used to force the Filipinos into subjugation. He wrote as follows:

History attests that at least during the first two centuries of Spanish rule, the subjugation of the natives and their acquiescence in the new order of things were obtained more by the subtle influence of the missionaries than by the sword. As the soldiers of Castile carried war into the interior and forced its inhabitants to recognize their King, so the friars were drafted off from the mother country to mitigate the memory of bloodshed and to mold Spain’s new subjects to social equanimity.

(Foreman 1906, pp. 1–3)

James Le Roy, a famous specialist and government consultant on Philippine problems, who had served as secretary of the Taft Commission, further described how the friars relied on the Christian faith to enslave the ordinary Filipino spirit. One of the most important means was the promotion and exploitation of the natives’ “superstitions, witchcraft and fears”. He wrote that, “in the good old days when the Filipinos were represented as being docile and plastic as clay”, the friars did not teach Filipinos “real religion” and did “not make of them models of Christian virtues and morals in all respects”. This has left the Filipinos with little knowledge of real religion to this day, and while “their practices in worship may have changed and they were given a more stately ceremonial”. He noted that “their already existing superstitions were not only not uprooted by the friar’s teachings; they were even, in some ways, utilized as a means of holding them to the new practices”. In fact, “the Filipinos only put on a veneer of Christ”, without grasping any truth of Christianity. Le Roy further stressed that this was the fundamental political problem in the Philippines, namely, that after some 300 years of Spanish rule, the Filipinos had still not been positively influenced for the better by the West, and that their very low level of ‘civilization’ had left them “practically the same Malays as they were in the sixteenth century” (Le Roy 1907, pp. 126–27).

Why were Spanish friars so keen to enslave the Filipinos spiritually? David Barrows explains the matter from the historical perspective in which he specializes. He suggests that it was due to a critical shift in the missionary purpose of the religious orders, following the decline in faith and moral fervor of the Spanish friars: “the work of the friars had been of very great value,” he wrote, but soon “men as well as institutions may lose their usefulness”, and “the autocratic and paternal régime of the friars no longer satisfied the Filipinos”. The friars’ “zeal no longer disinterested, and their work had become materialized by the possession of the vast estates upon which their spiritual charges lived and labored as tenants or dependents.” The decline in faith was accompanied by an increase in the desire for power, and “the policy of the friars became more and more repressive”. As “the aspirations of the Filipinos increased”, the friars, “filled with doubt and fear”, instead of sympathizing with the religious aspirations of the ordinary people, “tried to draw still tighter the bonds of their own authority, and viewed with growing distrust the rising ambition of the people” (Barrows 1925, p. 237).

Barrows’ historical narrative was widely cited as the standard account of the evolution of church–state relations in the Philippines, with the central episode being the decline in missionary zeal and faith among the Spanish friars. The colonial government’s superintendent of education, Fred Atkinson, virtually repeated that kind of narrative in his own observation on the Philippines’ history. He wrote that the root cause of the conflict between the church and state in late colonial Spain was the changing nature of the Church in the Philippines. With the friars’ “possession of rich estates” and “the great political power which followed almost inevitably”, “their character changed”, and “they became something more than mere ministers of the gospel”. The extension of their power beyond the religious sphere, “in a way that proved injudicious”, “laid the foundation for serious antagonism that began to make itself felt on the part of the populace”. And that became known to U.S. officials as the “friar question”. It was not until the arrival of the Americans that the Filipino secular conflict, or “friar question”, reached its standard end, when “our government has effected a satisfactory arrangement” to purchase the arable property belonging to the religious orders and separate the church and state. Finally, with the assistance of the Roman Catholic Church, “an archbishop and three bishops have arrived from the United States and are zealously striving to upbuild the religious institutions that were injured or destroyed by neglect or war” (Atkinson 1905, pp. 320–21).

By constructing ‘oppositions’ and ‘differences’, U.S. officials and scholars constructed a standard history of the transformation’ of church–state relations in the Philippines under U.S. rule. The Spanish friars turned from the evangelization to the consolidation of rule through privilege, becoming ‘corrupt’ and ‘despotic’. The Americans, with their spirit of religious tolerance and reconciliation, revived a benign political order and Christian spirituality. In the realm of secular politics, Taft advocated for the judicial adjudication of disputes between Roman Catholics and Aglipayans to establish the supremacy of civil government while avoiding the impression of government support for any particular sect. In the area of religion and belief, liberal American Catholics took over from the Spanish clergies and resumed the Church’s role in spreading the Gospel. In this way, the Philippine separation of church and state led by the colonial government formed part of the imperial mission of ‘civilization’ and was an important part of the defense of ‘good governance’ and the establishment of a ‘civilized’ order in the U.S. overseas territories.

6. Conclusions

By enforcing the separation of the church and state, American colonial officials believed they were leading the Filipinos away from the decadent theocracy imposed by the Spanish. In a sense, however, American and Spanish imperial constructions followed a similar logic: the Spaniards established the legitimacy of their rule over the Philippines as the spread of the ‘Gospel’, while the Americans proclaimed the legitimacy of their rule as the spread of ‘civilization’ to the Filipinos. In order to spread the ‘Gospel’, the Spanish colonial government responded to the missionaries’ criticism of the institution of encomienda by sending a large number of friars to the Philippines, granting them lands to support their missionary work and allowing them to supervise local politics in order to spread Christian doctrines to the Filipinos. Similarly, in order to spread ‘civilization’ and establish Philippine society on the basis of individualism similar to that of the United States, the Americans advocated the separation of church and state, the privatization of land through the purchase and auction of church property and the reduction in church interference in government through administrative reforms. Much as the Spaniards molded the Filipinos in the image of the Christians of the Reformation era, the Americans sought to mold the Filipinos into the American version of the individualist ‘Christian’ citizen who follows the convictions of his own inner heart. In short, in the context of the overseas expansion of the United States, the separation of church and state led by the United States colonial government in the Philippines was in fact part of an imperial construct, a manifestation of imperial cultural hegemony in dealing with church–state relations in the overseas territories.

In essence, the legitimacy of empire and its cultural hegemony are maintained mainly through a series of constructions of ‘difference’. The empire defends ‘good governance’ against the breakdown of order; the empire popularizes ‘civilization’ and ‘real religion’ to get rid of ‘barbarism’ and ‘superstition’; the empire encourages ‘evolution’ and ‘development’ and curbs ‘decline’ and ‘decay’. The consolidation of U.S. colonial rule in the Philippines after the Spanish–American War followed the same logic. The separation of church and state it led in the Philippines was not only intended to settle the specific disputes between the Filipinos and the Spanish friars but also to introduce the American concept of religious freedom and to emphasize the absolute ‘difference’ between American-style ‘democracy’ and Spanish autocratic ‘theocracy’. It was also an attempt to replace the ‘declining’ Spanish Empire and restore the legitimacy of the rule in the overseas territories.