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Religious sector resistance against the Marcos dictatorship

Opposition in the Philippines, 1960s-1980s

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Many of these leaders and workers belonged to the Catholic Church in the Philippines, to which belonged the majority of the Philippine population at the time. But various opposition efforts were also notable in both the mainline and the evangelical Protestant traditions.

In the Catholic Church

In the early years of the Marcos administration before the declaration of Martial Law, the poverty and inequality in Philippine society had already begun sparking debates among Catholic theologians about how the church ought to respond. The Second Vatican Council had just concluded in December 1965 and Liberation theology was becoming increasingly influential. Some priests wanted to be more directly involved in activism and with activist organizations resisting the Marcos dictatorship, while those who were more conservative preferred that the pursuit of "the prophetic challenge of the gospel" be "without any ideological affiliation."

After the declaration of Martial law, the Marcos dictatorship's abuses - particularly extrajudicial killings and forced disappearances - convinced a small but very vocal number of the church workers to fight the dictatorship by actively joining underground resistance movements, while the majority resisted within the ordinary means available to then through their office, such as those who formed the human rights monitoring organization Task Force Detainees of the Philippines, or of Manila Cardinal Jaime Sin and Infanta Bishop Julio Labayen, who described their high level engagement with Marcos as "critical collaboration."

After the ouster and exile of the Marcoses in 1986, there began to be less space for activists in the Church, and engagements between church workers and activist organizations went into decline.

In a 2021 international conference held in Taiwan, Daniel Franklin E. Pilario of the Congregation of the Mission presented a paper on a Philippine experience, noting among others that the implementation of the politics of fear and terror present in populist regimes is the same style of governance found in the country; later, because of his mentions of extrajudicial killings during the Marcos dictatorship and the Rodrigo Duterte presidency, he was called an anti-EJK priest.

Among the Protestant denominations

While Protestants represented a much smaller portion of the Philippine population in relation to Catholics during the 1970s, there were significant opposition movements within the various Protestant denominations, whether mainline or evangelical.

Among the mainline Protestant denominations, there were significant opposition movements within the Philippine Independent Church, the United Church of Christ in the Philippines, and the United Methodist Church in the Philippines.

Because evangelical denominations tend towards locally independent congregations and are thus less centralized, the most prominent evangelical opposition was in organizations like the Institute for Studies in Asian Church and Culture and individual congregations like the Diliman Bible Church, and among the evangelical Pentecostal churches, the Foursquare Church in Romblon. The Institute for Studies in Asian Church and Culture and the Diliman Bible Church played a key role in the formation of the Konsensiya ng Febrero Siete (KONFES) coalition which mobilized evangelicals during the 1986 People Power revolution.

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