INTRODUCTION
Recent debates over religion and politics in the Philippines bear strong echoes of ongoing contention in the United States. Actors advocating issues tied to gender, sexuality, and reproductive health services have clashed with some leading religious leaders, and these tensions have extended at times onto the campaign trail. Protesters allude to the “founding fathers” of each country, arguing that the place of religion in today's democracy is far from what was intended by historical leaders. While the details of these controversies may vary in each case, similarities are striking. It is not difficult to imagine a protester shouting, “Stop getting involved in politics,” at some United States clergy, as Philippine activist Carlos Celdran did in interrupting a 2010 prayer service in Manila.
And yet, while each case has confronted provocative policy issues touching on religion and reproductive health, religious-secular relations in the two cases have diverged in response to those tensions. In the United States, questions posed by legislation like the Affordable Care Act are just one part of broader religious-secular division tied to what some have termed a “culture war” in contemporary public life. In the Philippines, in contrast, in spite of disagreement over the Reproductive Health Act of 2012, both religious and secular elites have worked to maintain broader religious-secular cooperation. As the head of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines, Archbishop Socrates Villegas, put it, “We cannot see eye-to-eye with our pro-RH brethren on this divisive issue, but we can work hand in hand for the good of the country” (Esmaquel II Reference Esmaquel2014).
What explains the varied patterns of religious-secular elite conflict between these two cases, and what lessons might they hold for the broader study of religion and democratic politics? Does the intersection of religion and reproductive health policy inevitably lead to heightened conflict between religious and secular actors? If not, what conditions might explain variations in conflict and cooperation on a cross-national basis? The United States and the Philippines provide a useful pairing to address these questions because, while they share much formal constitutional language related to religion and state, their religious-secular relations have diverged in recent years. While tensions tied to the Philippine Reproductive Health Law have strained elite ties, they have not eliminated broader religious-secular cooperation in public life. In contrast, the United States has experienced broader religious-secular conflict, particularly tied to the intersection of the Affordable Care Act and expanded gay rights with claims of religious conscience exemption.
In this article, we highlight the role of religious change in explaining this variation in relations between religious and secular actors. Religious change matters particularly because of its impact on political incentives facing elites engaged in policy debates that impact religious-secular ties. In countries experiencing significant religious change, religious-secular relations are more prone to what others have termed “religious outbidding,” in which “elites attempt to outbid each other to enhance their religious credentials and thereby gain the support they need [to achieve political ends]” (Toft Reference Toft2007, 103; Hefner Reference Hefner, Shah, Stepan and Toft2012), with the important caveat that both religious and secular elites play an active role in this outbidding process. Conflict between religious and secular elites in the United States can be traced in part to the role of religious change in recasting partisan incentives over the past quarter century plus. In contrast, we expect relatively stable religious landscapes to be more likely associated with cooperation between religious and secular elites in part because general religious continuity minimizes political incentives to sharpen religious-secular divisions. Enduring cooperation between religious and secular elites in the Philippines, in spite of tensions raised by reproductive health legislation, illustrates this half of the argument.
We believe these findings about the sources of religious-secular conflict can enrich the broader study of the impact of religion on democratic politics in a range of cases, from India (Chhibber Reference Chhibber2014) to Latin America (Hagopian Reference Hagopian2008) and in various corners of the Muslim-majority world (Menchik Reference Menchik2014; Stepan Reference Stepan2012; Driessen Reference Driessen2012). Broad conflict between religious and secular actors in democratic life is not inevitable, even in the face of highly contentious public policy issues. However, periods of significant religious change heighten the risks of such conflict, as they provide reasons for both religious and political entrepreneurs to stoke division and undermine attempts at promoting a more conciliatory religious-secular relationship.
THEORIZING DEMOCRACY AND RELIGIOUS-SECULAR TIES
Studying conflict across the “religious-secular cleavage” has a long history in comparative politics, particularly in the study of Western party systems (Lipset Reference Lipset1959; Lipset and Rokkan Reference Lipset and Rokkan1967). Many modernization theorists expected the political importance of religion to fade entirely with increased economic development (Lerner Reference Lerner1958). Others argued that divisions between religious and secular actors could undermine democratization, particularly where religious cleavages reinforced other sources of political division. More recently, a range of scholars has highlighted tensions and mutual suspicion between religious and secular actors (Fox Reference Fox2015) particularly during periods of potential democratization and regime transition such as those roiling parts of the Middle East (Blaydes and Lo Reference Blaydes and Lo2012; Kalyvas Reference Kalyvas2000). Anecdotal evidence indicates resistance to secularism from an impressively interfaith range of religious elites, including Hindus in India, Muslims in Bangladesh, Christians in the United States, Jews in Israel, and Buddhists in Sri Lanka. Scholars of American politics have highlighted and explained the rise of the religious right (Wilcox Reference Wilcox1996; Leege et al. Reference Leege, Wald, Krueger and Mueller2002) and tied its growth to the subsequent rise of the religiously unaffiliated (Hout and Fischer Reference Hout and Fischer2002; Putnam and Campbell Reference Putnam and Campbell2010).
In spite of these examples, there is reason to believe that nature of religious-secular relations is variable, even within individual countries over time (Buckley Reference Driessen2012). In the empirical analysis that follows, we set out to explain variation in religious-secular elite ties, distinguishing cases characterized by religious-secular elite conflict from those featuring elite cooperation. The nature of elite ties is observable in statements from leading religious and civil society organizations and the extent of cooperation in public policy advocacy. One could also operationalize religious-secular relations at the mass level through public opinion research, but for the purposes of this initial argument, our attention focuses on the elite level of analysis. While, in practice, any concrete case is likely to feature some combination of conflict and cooperation, it is possible to characterize cases as predominantly cooperative or conflictual in religious-secular elite ties. Religious-secular elites in the United States have not always been so conflictual, with some religious and secular leaders working closely on a variety of social movements including labor, women's rights, civil rights, temperance, and even portions of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender movement. Analysts regularly point to the hostility between religious and secular elites in periods of French political development, but place less emphasis on the end of the “war of two Frances” after the First World War.
We highlight the role of religious change in explaining variation in religious-secular ties, through its impact on incentives it may present to both religious and political elites to stoke religious-secular tensions. First, we expect that levels of religious change are one force shaping religious-secular ties. A range of scholars has highlighted the importance of religious diversity in shaping levels of religious competition, hypothesizing that the material interests of religious groups dictate political behavior (Gill Reference Gill1998; Trejo Reference Trejo2009). Others have emphasized the importance of religious beliefs, whether conceptualized as political theology (Philpott Reference Philpott2007) or religious doctrine (Grzymała-Busse Reference Grzymała-Busse2012). We see good reason to think that religious change comes with implications for both material interests and normative trends related to religious-secular ties. Materially, religious change may introduce new competition in the marketplace, particularly from the growth of religiously unaffiliated individuals, which place new strain on religious-secular relations. Religious change may weaken the ability of religious and secular elites to make credible commitments to one another in policy negotiations. Normatively, religious change may also alter beliefs about the appropriate relationship between religion and democracy, whether introducing revivalists who call for restoration of a religious state or anti-clericals seeking to drive religious into purely private life. Change may also impact the intensity of religious beliefs on hot-button policy issues. Research suggests that minority communities may be more effective in socializing members in strict values, while theorists of the religious marketplace have long argued that religious monopolies lag in providing religious goods, which could include normative socialization. Religious change, in sum, is likely to shape both the material and normative dynamics that influence religious-secular ties.
In particular, periods of religious change are important to religious-secular relations because they present opportunities to elites to stoke religious-secular conflict, particularly to the extent that partisan incentives become tied to religiosity. Much recent scholarship has emphasized the importance of political conditions to explaining religious politics. In the United States, Republican efforts to create cultural cleavages included explicit appeals to evangelicals and conservative Catholics (Leege et al. Reference Leege, Wald, Krueger and Mueller2002). On a comparative scale, scholars worry that political competition, particularly in countries transitioning to democracy, could encourage “religious outbidding” between political elites looking to build popularity through hardline religious appeals (Toft Reference Toft2007; Hefner Reference Hefner, Shah, Stepan and Toft2012). We contend that periods of religious change can provide similar opportunities for outbidding from either religious or secular hardliners, especially where a close link develops between religiosity and partisanship. These risks should be particularly pronounced in cases where small, but politically significant, religious or secular minorities provide opportunities for partisans to construct minimum winning coalitions rather than making inefficient appeals to a dominant religious majority (Riker Reference Riker1962). In contrast, periods of relatively low religious change, especially in the context of a dominant religious majority, ought to be more likely to correspond to more cooperative religious-secular relations. Where there are not close ties between party interests and religious identification, one should expect that there is less political incentive to make appeals that could divide religious and secular elites, thus encouraging cooperation across this potential divide. This could also be the case where no political party advances a policy platform that is entirely congruous with either religious or secular interests.
In highlighting the role of periods of religious change in introducing more conflictual religious-secular relations, we do not mean to imply the demographics are destiny in religious politics. Agency is an important part of this story, particularly in cases where religious and secular elites take action in public life to stabilize elite ties in the face of controversial policy issues tied to gender and reproductive health. Periods of religious change may themselves be a product of active religious (or secular) agents. Similarly, the argument need not imply that elite ties are a result of solely material political interests. The causal logic underlying this argument blends both material interests of key actors with normative concerns about the appropriate place of religion in public life; hardliners who fuel outbidding may be normatively dedicated, not simply politically or religiously self-interested.
CASE SELECTION AND RESEARCH DESIGN
We examine evidence from two countries to illustrate our argument about the sources of religious-secular relations. The logic of inference behind this case selection blends between-case comparison resembling Mill's Method of Difference and within-case process tracing. The between-case comparison is especially useful in holding some significant alternative explanations fairly constant, while within-case variation is important in illustrating the causal process through which religious change shapes the outcome of interest, particularly through its impact on political incentives. Evidence is drawn from a range of primary and secondary sources, with special attention given to the impact of religious-secular relations on recent debates about reproductive health policy in the two countries. Space constraints place some limitation on the depth of the evidence presented in each case. We highlight evidence most closely tied to the theoretical argument, and point to more extensive resources in each case beyond this article.
To provide useful tests, cases should be democratic and have faced significant challenges to religious-secular relations in the recent past, to allow us to focus on the potential deterioration of religious-secular relations. We focus on the Philippines and the United States, cases that meet this basic criterion. Moreover, both countries have recently passed health care laws that involved reproductive health issues that had the potential for conflict between conservative Christian groups and the state.
Comparing the United States and the Philippines provides useful leverage in examining not only variation in elite relations but also holding some important alternative explanations of religious-secular conflict fairly constant. Our goal in this piece is not to falsify alternative explanations, but rather to point out that their clearest empirical implications are not a clear fit with the variation in these cases. One alternative approach might highlight the unique role of policy issues tied to gender and sexuality in stoking religious-secular conflict. While such issues may indeed provoke tensions each of the cases here confronted quite similar challenges related to reproductive health; in each case, a government public health program included elements objectionable to some religious actors, who in turn sought exemption for themselves and their adherents. Thus each of these cases faced a true tough test around hot button issues of reproductive health and religious liberty. It may be the case that policy issues tied to sexuality and the family are especially likely to generate challenges to religious-secular ties. However, the divergent outcomes in our two countries indicate that even hot-button issues of sexuality do not necessarily lead to broad religious-secular conflict.
Second, the two cases have a similar institutional relationship between religion and state, which holds fairly constant the potential influence of institutional context on religious-secular ties. A range of recent scholarship has argued for the importance of historical institutional context in shaping religious politics (Jelen and Wilcox Reference Jelen and Wilcox2002; Kuru Reference Kuru2009; Buckley Reference Buckley2015). We are sympathetic to these arguments, but want to highlight more contemporary variables shaping religious-secular relations. The basic constitutional language regarding the religion-state relationship in the United States and the Philippines is very similar because of the heavy influence of American colonial administrators on the Philippine Commonwealth Constitution. Each features differentiation of religious and state institutions and guarantees of free exercise, with considerable flexibility in how these basic institutions will be applied to concrete policy challenges. Institutions likely do matter, but it is unlikely that institutional variation between the United States and the Philippines is sharp enough to account for the divergent outcomes we document below.
While comparing the two cases helps account for some plausible alternatives, the evidence presented relies on within-case process tracing to illustrate the unique contributions of both religious change and political incentives to the nature of religious-secular relations (George and Bennett Reference George and Bennett2005; Collier Reference Collier2011). Because the observable implications of our approach should exist over time within a single state, evaluating the sources of religious-secular relations requires within-case attention to links tying religious and political variables to elite ties. This largely qualitative approach also helps to isolate the unique contribution of each independent variable to the outcome of interest.
There are some limitations on the generalizability of an argument tested here against two cases. We close this article with some thoughts on the argument's generalizability. It is also appropriate to acknowledge some potential challenges to the exogeneity of the variables in our model. In particular, it could be the case that patterns in religious-secular relations in earlier historical periods help account for the contemporary political incentives facing partisan actors, as well as, perhaps, levels of religious change. We highlight both religious change and political incentives as fairly contemporary causes of variation in religious-secular ties, and invite further research into longer-term factors that may underlie the general causal model.
THE PHILIPPINES: DURABLE RELIGIOUS-SECULAR COOPERATION
While religious and secular actors certainly have differences of opinion on some questions in contemporary Philippine politics, they cooperate closely in other areas and have generally avoided the kind of broader religious-secular tensions seen in other cases. While recent Reproductive Health (or “RH”) Law debates in the Philippines did feature tensions between religious and secular actors, in the end cooperation between elite actors bridging religious-secular divisions endured the controversy, and shaped the legislation in the process.
Policy Challenges, Enduring Cooperation: Gender and the RH LawFootnote 1
Since the fall of the Marcos dictatorship in the People Power Revolution of 1986, relations between religious and secular elites in the Philippines have generally been cooperative. Religious and secular portions of civil society worked closely on a range of issues, from accounting for human rights abuses under the dictatorship to combatting urban and rural poverty. However, these generally strong ties do come under some strain, particularly when questions tied to gender, family, and reproductive health arise on the national agenda. This was especially apparent in debates over Republic Act 10354, the Responsible Parenthood and Reproductive Health Act of 2012, or, for short, the RH Law. The RH Law expanded governmental funding of non-abortifacient contraceptives, mandated certain forms of sex education in schools, and provided a boost in funding for maternal health services. Would the combustible intersection of reproductive health politics and religious mobilization introduce a broader religious-secular divide in Philippine politics?
In spite of challenges tied to combustible issues like the RH Law (and other initiatives such as the 2009 Magna Carta of Women), elites in Catholic institutions and more secular portions of civil society mobilized to ensure that disagreements over the RH Law did not undermine broader cooperation between religious and secular elites. Several institutions tied to the Catholic Church mediated between RH Law advocates and critics, including the Bishops-Businessmen's Conference for Human Development (BBC-HD) and faculty at prominent Catholic universities. Jesuit priests Fr. Eric Genilo, Fr. Joaquin Bernas, and the late Fr. Jack Carroll published documents detailing areas in which advocates and opponents could agree to some mutual accommodation (Genilo, Eric, John J. Carroll, and Jaoquin G. Bernas. 2011. “Towards Critical and Constructive Engagement [Talking Points for Dialogue on the RH Bill]). As Meneleo Carlos Jr., Co-Chairman of the Bishops-Businessmen's Conference for Human Development, put it about the BBC-HD's mediation efforts, “During the formative stages of the bill, we did do quiet consultations … I would say we got most of what we wanted in there” (Carlos, Meneleo. Interviewed by David Buckley, Pasig City, Philippines, June 30, 2014). Both advocates and opponents of the legislation pointed to these negotiations as important in diffusing broader religious-secular tensions. As Sen. Risa Hontiveros, a leading RH Law advocate, summarized to me, “[The mediations] built a presumption of good faith among discerning adults,” and resulted in the bill's authors accepting several amendments to the legislation offered by the bill's critics (Hontiveros, Risa. Interviewed by David Buckley. Quezon City, Metro Manila, Philippines, June 24, 2014). Bernardo Villegas, an economist, prominent member of Opus Dei in the Philippines, and continued critic of the RH legislation, pointed to concrete changes in the eventual legislation, notably tied to firm language clarifying the protection of human life and religious conscience exemptions (Villegas, Bernardo. Interviewed by David Buckley. Makati, Metro Manila, Philippines, July 1, 2014).
In the end, in spite of tensions raised by the RH Law and related disputes about gender and reproductive health, broader patterns of religious-secular cooperation endure in the Philippines. Even within the Catholic majority, there has been no general religious-secular divide since recent controversies. As one, symbolic indicator of the endurance of religious-secular cooperation throughout the crisis, differences on this issue did not prevent Cardinal Tagle of Manila from celebrating private masses for the Aquino family or sharing birthday party appearances in the wake of the legislation. Cooperation runs far beyond this kind of symbolism. Religious organizations work closely with more secular portions of civil society on election monitoring, particularly through groups like the National Citizens' Movement for Free Elections and Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting. Religious and secular partners continue close work on peace initiatives tied to Bangsamoro Peace Process, implementation of land reform, opposition to the influence of political dynasties, and human rights monitoring, particularly under the controversial administration of President Rodrigo Duterte. As Bishop Broderick Pabillo, then-Chairman of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines's (CBCP) Episcopal Commission on Public Affairs, put it, “[Even among the bishops] there are many public policy issues, but not one that would galvanize the bishops … in some provinces the issue is mining, in some corruption, in some, climate change” (Pabillo, Bishop Broderick. Interviewed by David Buckley. Binodo, Metro Manila, Philippines, June 20, 2014). On these issues, if not the particulars of the RH Law, religious-secular cooperation has endured a turbulent period in Philippine politics.
Accounting for Religious-Secular Cooperation: Limited Religious Change and Political Incentives
What accounts for the cooperation of religious and secular elites in the Philippines in the recent controversies over the RH Law and beyond? In keeping with the theoretical expectations above, cooperative ties rested on relatively low levels of religious change in recent years. The Catholic Church remains a predominant majority, and those with no religious affiliation are an extremely small minority of the population
While the Philippines certainly has an active religious landscape, it has not experienced dramatic religious change, in contrast, for instance, with many Catholic-majority countries in Latin America. A predominant Catholic majority co-exists with various Protestant churches, some indigenous Christian communities like the Iglesia ni Cristo, and Muslim minority concentrated in portions of the island of Mindanao. In three waves of survey data from the International Social Survey Programme (2008), the share of the country identifying as Catholic hovered between 81 and 85% between 1991 and 2008, with other traditions dividing the remaining share. This relative demographic stability among those with a religious affiliation is mirrored by the consistent and small share of the population that could be considered personally non-religious. In the most recent International Social Survey Programme survey, no respondents identified as atheists, and nearly none described themselves as very or extremely non-religious. If religious change is one factor encouraging religious-secular tensions, it has been in short supply in the Philippines. This basic religious stability is accompanied by relatively constant normative priorities, particularly from key figures within the CBCP. In sum, CBCP elites have maintained a fairly constant set public priorities that actual converges in several areas with secular portions of civil society, particularly those tied to poverty reduction, anti-corruption campaigning, and peace negotiations. Leading Catholic prelates highlight the so-called preferential option for the poor, tied to developments within post-Vatican II global Catholicism, but pushed forward through local bodies, particularly the Second Plenary Council of the Philippines, which met in 1991 and put special emphasis on the Philippine church's call to become a “church of the poor” (Bacani Reference Bacani2005). This priority on the poor is not to say that CBCP leaders are unconcerned about issues associated with the American “culture wars,” particularly abortion. But these disagreements do not inhibit broader cooperation. In Bishop Pabillo's words, “On some issues we don't see eye to eye … but we can work together on other issues” (Pabillo, Bishop Broderick. Interviewed by David Buckley. Binodo, Metro Manila, Philippines, June 20, 2014).
This relative consistency, both in demographics and norms regarding religion in public life, encouraged consistent religious-secular elite cooperation that endured the turbulence around the RH Law. The key religious and secular actors involved in the RH negotiations, whether from religious bodies like the Bishops-Businessmen's Conference or more secular portions of civil society, have cooperative ties stretching back to resistance to the Marcos regime. Fr. Joaquin Bernas was an actual member of the 1986 Constitutional Commission that restored a democratic constitution. Bernas served as a mediator of religious-secular tensions on that body, and filled a very similar role throughout the RH debates. Similarly, the efforts of the BBC-HD did not arise in a vacuum. Relationships between the bishops and the business elite were central as protests against Marcos’ dictatorship grew, and the BBC-HD remained a prominent actor in public life after the dictatorship's fall, especially by working to ensure electoral transparency and implement social development projects. The steady presence of groups like the BBC-HD and leaders like Fr. Bernas did not remove the challenge posed by the RH issue in the Philippines. But it ensured that pre-existing networks of elites who shared a general consensus on religious-secular cooperation could effectively organize to ensure that a challenging piece of legislation did not progress into broader conflict. In a counter-factual Philippines where traditional religious and secular elites have been destabilized by rapid religious change, it is reasonable to expect that the RH Law controversy would have been much more likely to lead to lasting religious-secular conflict.
This limited religious change played a part in restraining partisan incentives to engage in “outbidding” for votes from either the religious or secular communities. With a demographically insignificant secular community, and a Catholic community with little history of bloc voting, there is little reason for politicians to think they will find electoral success by pushing hardline religious or secular positions. At the “secular” end of the spectrum, the small size of those who consider themselves religiously unaffiliated undercuts any incentive to stoke religious-secular conflict for votes. The International Social Survey Programme's (2008) study on religion in public life identified no respondents who reported no religious affiliation and only 1% who reported that they were either “very or extremely non-religious.” There is simply no analogue in the Philippines at this point to the electoral incentives Democrats in the United States have developed in cultivating an “unaffiliated” religious vote. While there are some associations of the unaffiliated like the Filipino Freethinkers, these fairly small groups are not an electoral base. There would be little political reward for engaging in appeals to hardline secularists.
Even within the Catholic majority, there is little prospect of candidates or parties mobilizing a unified vote on Election Day. While bodies like the CBCP regularly call for clean elections, and religious groups have been heavily involved in election monitoring in partnership with bodies like the National Citizens’ Movement for Free Elections and the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting, there is less successful history of religious partisan mobilization since the restoration of democracy after the fall of the Marcos regime. There are various reasons for this, including evidence of the sort of limited indoctrination that theorists of religious monopolies might expect. As Bernardo Villegas, a vocal opponent of the RH Law, pointed out, “there is a great gap between the [religious] elite and the masses,” and your average Filipino Catholic is “very short on doctrine” (Villegas, Bernardo. Interviewed by David Buckley. Makati, Metro Manila, Philippines, July 1, 2014.). Thus, even if CBCP elites were inclined to swing an election, it is not clear that they possess the capacity. Moreover, there are indications that CBCP elites themselves have limited interest in linking religiosity to partisanship. As Bishop Pabillo put it to me, “[Some parties] would like to have the endorsements from the bishops, but we cannot do that, we cannot play partisan … Because you are not the only Catholic running … [the bishops] have to be shepherds for all, and not only for you” (Pabillo, Bishop Broderick. Interviewed by David Buckley. Binodo, Metro Manila, Philippines, June 20, 2014). Furthermore, within the Catholic majority, there is both limited popular demand for religious involvement in elections. The same International Social Survey Programme data cited above finds only 22% support for religious influence on voting decisions even among the Catholic majority. Even smaller parties like the Ang Kapatiran Party that attempt to mobilize a more explicitly Catholic political base note this limited link between religiosity and partisanship. Kapatiran's President, Norman Cabrera, discussed the disinterest of leading bishops in electoral mobilization with some frustration (Cabrera, Norman. Interviewed by David Buckley. Quezon City, Metro Manila, Philippines, June 19, 2014). A former Kapatiran presidential candidate, JC De Los Reyes, remarked, “There is a deafening silence, almost tantamount to resignation,” when it comes to religious endorsement in elections (De los Reyes, John Carlos. “J. C.” Interviewed by David Buckley. Intramuros, Metro Manila, Philippines, June 26, 2014.).
The relative lack of strong ties between religiosity and partisanship showed through as the RH Law moved through the legislative process. Key advocates of the bill, such as Rep. Edcel Lagman, were willing to engage in negotiations with those in Catholic circles who pressed for revisions to the draft legislation, rather than appealing only to hardline supporters and fueling a process of outbidding. When it came time for the definitive votes in the House of Representatives, the major political parties were internally divided. 38% of President Aquino's Liberal Party opposed the bill, against his wishes, in the crucial House of Representatives vote. Across the aisle, Rep. Lagman, the bill's primary author, was a leader of the political opposition, although on the same side as Aquino in support of the RH Law. This is consistent with what one would expect given the lack of ties between partisanship and religiosity. After the bill won its crucial votes, President Aquino eventually signed the bill into law “without much fanfare” as a sign of respect to CBCP authorities, again, avoiding an opportunity to engage in outbidding and ramp up religious-secular divisions (Casauay Reference Casauay2012). In a counter-factual world in which partisanship and religiosity were more closely linked, it seems reasonable to expect that such conciliatory stances would have been less likely to occur, and instead that hardliners on either side would have been more likely to engaging in a process of outbidding.
In sum, even episodes like the RH Law debates, which certainly raised levels of contention, have been fairly effectively mediated to avoid lasting religious-secular conflict. A range of factors, both internal to Philippine Catholicism and external in the Philippine political context, have encouraged this outcome. In contrast to the “culture wars” United States, the combination of relative religious stability and limited political incentives to engage in outbidding has encouraged significant religious-secular cooperation in democratic life.
CHANGE AND CONTENTION: RELIGIOUS-SECULAR RELATIONS IN THE UNITED STATES
Compared to the Philippines, the United States has experienced a period of religious change that has corresponded to broader tension between religious and secular elites in American public life. Religious change was perceived to threaten the status of conservative Protestants, and increased the number of non-Christians and secular Americans. Moreover, as we will see, that change produced strong political incentives that stoked those religious-secular tensions, from both religious conservatives and, later, secular liberals. In many ways tensions over the Affordable Care Act (ACA) echoed conflicts over sex education, contraception, and especially abortion that had been fought at the national, state, and local levels for more than two decades.
The United States’ Mixed Religious-Secular History
Recent history in the United States contrasts with the Philippines, as we will examine momentarily. The legislative action and subsequent court cases surrounding the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (aka [also known as] Obamacare) have been heated and distinctly conflictual. However, it is worth noting that the longer record is more mixed. There has been strong religious support for progressive causes throughout the nation's history, including cooperation between religious and secular elites. Religious groups helped coal workers to organize across racial and religious lines (Corbin Reference Corbin1981), working together with secular and even Marxist labor organizers. Religious activists helped push for women's suffrage, for temperance, and for civil rights for African Americans and others (McAdam Reference McAdam1982; Harris Reference Harris1999). Opposing religious groups were on the opposite side of each of these issues as well. Many white southern churches opposed desegregation, often with vehemence. Jerry Falwell railed against the Brown v Board of Education decision, saying, “When God has drawn a line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line.” Religious-secular fault lines were messy for much of American history, and many deeply devout religious individuals partnered with self-consciously secular social reformers. That began to change with the social movements of the 1970s and beyond.
Documenting Religious-Secular Tension: Conscience, Conception, and the ACAFootnote 2
Tensions between religious and secular elites in the contemporary United States, particular among non-Latino whites, have arisen in a range of policy areas, particularly those tied to gender, sexuality, and reproductive health. Many of the debates on contraception and abortion in the United States have been fought at the state level, since American states have traditionally regulated health care. State laws prior to the ACA regulated health insurance, and there was a wide variety of provisions reflecting varied influence of interest groups at the state level. Feminist groups lobbied state legislatures to include contraception in general health insurance, arguing that birth control pills were no different than other prescriptions and that other forms of contraception are simply medical devices. In other states, groups took advantage of state constitutions to press for mandated contraceptive coverage. In states where contraceptive coverage was mandated, Catholic groups sought to carve out religious exemptions that were in some cases narrowly applied to actual religious institutions and in other cases were far broader. Some states allowed exemptions for Catholic institutions, while others required insurance work-arounds whereby the insured could purchase a contraceptive rider, which in many health plans was free.
The debate over the ACA took these tensions to the national level, first in the legislature and then the courts. Even before the details of the ACA were announced, the Southern Baptist Convention had sent a letter to all member congregations in opposition to the plan. Catholic groups were torn between their desire for universal health care and their opposition to health insurance that provided contraception and/or abortions. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops first lobbied for a national health insurance program, then objected to the abortion language, which mirrored the procedures that many states follow when they allocate funds for Medicaid, but which was not as restrictive as health insurance provided for federal workers. Later some Bishops privately lobbied for the ACA with an inclusion of coverage for undocumented workers, which pose a significant cost for Catholic hospitals. Some Bishops insisted that the only acceptable national health care plan would include no coverage for abortion, an option that was not realistic but which allowed them to join GOP (Grand Old Party, which is a nickname for the Republican Party) efforts to oppose the plan. Catholic Charities and the Catholic Health Association, along with several orders of nuns ended up supporting the plan, arguing that although the abortion plan was not optimal, the opportunity to provide health insurance for the poor was paramount.
Interestingly, during the legislative bargaining, a group of pro-life, largely Catholic Democrats pushed for a compromise on abortion language. Similar compromise efforts have taken place since the ACA's passage, from mediators trying to diffuse objections based on claims of infringement on religious conscience. The eventual legislative compromise in the ACA included a provision that allowed states to ban abortion from inclusion in health plans offered through state exchanges, and required that any woman who obtained a plan that DID cover abortion to make two separate payments, with the second covering an abortion rider. President Obama also signed Executive Order 13535 which reaffirmed the Hyde Amendment's ban on federal funds to directly pay for abortions, and the compromise prohibited women who benefitted from federal subsidies for health insurance from purchasing abortion coverage in that plan. However, in spite of these efforts, pro-choice groups and pro-life groups alike were highly critical of the document. Several pro-life Democrats eventually voted for the bill, although some paid a cost in the next election.
Since passage, there have been a series of legal challenges to the contraceptive mandate, which required health insurance plans to cover contraception but exempted churches and provided alternative ways of providing coverage for other religiously-oriented non-profits, an arrangement that Catholic institutions had accepted in many states. The Court has ruled that a tightly owned private company that claimed religious objections to comprehensive contraception coverage was entitled to exemption under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a decision that raised many questions about how corporations could have religion.
These tensions over the ACA are emblematic of broader religious-secular divisions in contemporary American public life. This pattern of conflictual relations extends beyond even social issues, as can be seen in distinctive views of foreign policy among religious subsections of the United States population.
Accounting for Conflict: Religious Change, Partisan Incentives, and Religious-Secular Tension
This period of growing religious-secular tension in the United States has corresponded to a time of broad change in the American religious landscape. It is not accurate to say that the United States has become religiously diverse for the first time only in the past half century. Even in the colonial period, the United States was characterized by a diversity of Protestant traditions at the national level, and over the course of American history non-Protestants have made up a significant portion of the American religious landscape. However, from the early 1970s until the present, America's religious landscape has been altered first by the expansion of white evangelical Protestantism and then the rise of the religiously unaffiliated as a major demographic bloc, what Putnam and Campbell (Reference Putnam and Campbell2010) have referred to as the two “aftershocks” of post-1960s America. The growth of the unaffiliated has been particularly important in two regards. First, while the unaffiliated are internally diverse and do not necessarily represent a coherent “denomination,” they have grown quickly as a share of the population, to 23% in the most recent Pew Religious Landscape Survey, with even larger concentrations among younger Americans. Simultaneously, Protestants have seen their overall share of the American population decline, to only 46.5% in that same Pew study. This period of rapid demographic change set the stage for broader shifts in religious-secular ties in the United States.
These demographic changes were connected to normative shifts that brought significant implications for religious-secular relations. For example, when the Supreme Court struck down federal, state, and local laws limiting abortion rights, the Catholic response was immediate, but evangelical Protestants initially saw the issue as outside their moral sphere of concern. Baptists saw abortion as a “Catholic issue,” and The Baptist Press noted on January 31, 1973 that
Religious bodies and religious persons can continue to teach their own particular views to their constituents with all the vigor they desire. People whose conscience forbids abortion are not compelled by law to have abortions. They are free to practice their religion according to the tenets of their personal or corporate faith.
Some six years later, evangelicals had become even more united in their opposition to abortion than were American Catholics. Some have suggested that the early shapers of the New Christian Right promoted the abortion issue to detract from their focus on segregated religious schools (Balmer Reference Balmer2014). A more charitable interpretation might be that abortion had different implications when combined with feminist demands for careers, and with growing acceptance of premarital sex. Abortion then came to symbolize a larger constellation of family issues, without losing its power as a concrete issue (Luker Reference Luker1984). Although the evidence of normative shifts on the part of unaffiliated Americans is less long-standing, due to their more recent growth, here too there are elite signs of increasing anti-religious sentiment, particularly from leading commentators like Christopher Hitchens. Interest groups like the Secular Coalition for America likewise came to play a more prominent part in public life.
These religious changes set the stage for new political incentives, with both conservative religious and secular liberal appeals finding new traction in American politics. White evangelicals joined the pro-life movement as part of a larger Christian Right mobilization that was largely coordinated by GOP strategists who sought cultural cleavages to build a majority coalition (Leege et al. Reference Leege, Wald, Krueger and Mueller2002). Inspired by a series of localized cultural protests and the success of Southern Baptist Jimmy Carter in the 1976 presidential election, these partisan strategists invested resources in training evangelical leaders, and provided seed money to help jumpstart organizations such as the Moral Majority and Christian Voice. Longtime Republican activist Morton Blackwell described the strategy, calling white evangelicals “the greatest tract of virgin timber on the political landscape … We set about quite systematically to identify leaders, to teach them how to become effective, how to organize, how to communicate, how to raise funds, how to use direct-mail technology — skills to make them more effective” (Martin Reference Martin1996). The Christian Right was essentially a Republican effort to realign white evangelical voters. The second wave of Christian Right mobilization was even more overtly partisan. Marion (Pat) Robertson proclaimed his goal to help Republicans gain control of Congress by 1994 and the White House by 2000. He claimed that “so far, we have been more or less non-partisan, but I think, rather clearly — Republican”(Wilcox Reference Wilcox, Brint and Schroedel2009).
Around this time the National Right to Life Committee (NRTL), which initially sought a truly bipartisan stance, became more closely allied with the GOP. In 1994, the Republican National Senatorial Committee contributed nearly $200,000 to NRTL to pay for voter mobilization calls — all for Republican candidates. In 1996, the Republican National Committee donated more 650,000 to NRTL to help mobilize voters. The increasing connection between the Christian Right and pro-life movements on the one hand and Republican secular actors was part of a self-reinforcing spiral. As the GOP dropped the Equal Rights Amendment plank from the platform and increasingly adopted pro-life language — rejecting nominee Bob Dole's call for a tolerance plank on abortion in 1996 — feminists and pro-choice activists became more ardently Democratic. By 2000 even the previously non-partisan Planned Parenthood was entering electoral politics, in part to protect the Supreme Court majority in favor of Roe. Both sides became increasingly active in open primaries within their preferred parties, and consequently the positions of party legislators diverged on abortion. As the GOP congressional delegation became increasingly pro-life, the Democratic delegation became pro-choice (Adams Reference Adams1997). Abortion became a litmus test for presidential candidates. As the Christian Right has become increasingly associated with the GOP, Democratic partisans have sought to woo the dramatically increasing portion of younger Americans with no religious affiliation.
These shifts were directly implicated in the eventual broad religious-secular conflicts that emerged over the ACA. Although the general outlines of the law are very similar to proposals made by leading Republicans as recently as the 1990s, the GOP committed itself to defeat the ACA and has spent considerably energy since its passage repeatedly voting for its repeal. Religious actors who had clearly cast their lot with one or the other political parties lined up in favor of or against the plan.
A spate of additional legal challenges to the ACA related to religious objections have worked their way to the Supreme Court, including arguments that filling out paperwork to quality for an exemption is a violation of religious liberty. Typically these arguments are coupled with strong public statements condemning Democratic disregard for religious liberty, suggesting that at least one purpose of these cases is political. This is not to say that all voices fueling religious-secular tension on this issue are motivated only or even mostly by partisan politics. However, religious-secular tension tied to reproductive health legislation have become closely linked to party interests as a part of broader shifts in the American religious landscape. This dynamic makes it difficult to imagine the sort of de-escalation in tensions that took place in the Philippines in the post-RH Law period.
CONCLUSION
Comparing tension and cooperation between religious-secular elites in the Philippines and the United States reveals the diverse forces structuring the democratic politics of religion. The histories and contemporary politics of the two cases make it clear that there is no essentialist conflict between religious and secular elites. In each case, cooperation and contention have varied over time, as religious change has shaped incentives facing religious and political elites in public life. Both countries formally separate religion and state, but this has never meant a sharp privatization of religious. Instead, public religion is alive and well in both cases. At times, this has signaled trouble for religious-secular relations, as in the ongoing debates about the ACA in the United States, but not always, as a range of ongoing cooperation in the Philippines indicates.
An important proviso to our argument, especially in the United States, relates to the intersection of any potential religious-secular cleavage with other markers of identity, particularly race or ethnicity. One can point to evidence of religious-secular tensions from a variety of racial and ethnic groups in the United States, but an honest assessment of the dynamics we analyze should acknowledge that religious-secular divisions are sharpest within white America. This is especially true when it comes to the partisan incentives at play; African-Americans remain, in the aggregate, both highly religious and highly Democratic in their voting habits. On a comparative scale, this raises interesting questions about how religious-secular relations may vary not only between countries, but within distinct identity groups within a single country.
In many ways the approach employed in this article highlights avenues for future empirical research and theoretical development. For example, we do not set out in this article to settle disputes about whether religious change is best conceived of as a demographic or normative process. There seems to be some evidence of each in the cases, but further research could explore links between material interests and normative change in both religious and secular communities. Also, more extensive testing could examine links between what Grzymała-Busse (Reference Grzymała-Busse2015) terms godly nations and religious-secular ties. She, for instance, rates the Philippines quite high on links between religion and nationalism, and yet this has not ruled out religious-secular cooperation around controversial issues like the RH Law.
The relative weakness of religious-secular ties in the United States raises the related question of how (or whether) historical coalitions may be reinvigorated after they deteriorate. There is evidence, for instance, that some Catholic elites, particularly those tied to Pope Francis’ public agenda for the Catholic Church, are trying to restore elite ties in the United States by stepping away from further confrontation over the Affordable Care Act contraception mandate and highlighting religious-secular cooperation in areas like opposition to climate change. Are these efforts likely to succeed? The results of the recently concluded 2016 presidential election, particularly patterns in voting among non-Latino white Americans, seem to call this into question. One could make a case that tensions tied to the RH Law in the Philippines were partially alleviated when both church and state needed to work closely together in response to the disastrous damage caused by Typhoon Yolanda. It could be that the best medicine for ailing religious-secular relations is regular cooperation in policy areas where religious and secular interests more closely align.
