Chaplaincy As a Moral Enterprise: Insights from Local Government Chaplains in the Philippines

In a local government unit in the Philippines, a ministerial organization composed of trinitarian churches partnered with local officials for the creation of a chaplaincy program for government employees and residents. Such partnership allowed church leaders to lead activities like prayers, bible reading sessions, and values formation seminars as part of the local implementation of the Moral Recovery Program–the national campaign for moral transformation.

Following Becker (1963), this paper offers to understand chaplaincy work as constitutive of a moral enterprise seeking to transform the locality for divine purposes. Drawing from a study involving the leaders and members of the ministerial organization, I unpack the contents of their moral claims informed by localized interpretations of legal documents and biblical passages. Based on the interviews, what underpins their continuous involvement in public affairs is the collective vision for their locality to be the “place of God” (Bayan ng Diyos). This imaginary, as claimed, incrementally manifests as they maximize the space and time afforded to them for “non-doctrinal” but biblically-based teaching sessions during office hours and official government functions. Bolstering their claims to legitimacy are references to observed everyday moral transformations among government employees commended by the local chief executive.

By focusing on the work of chaplains, my study contributes to understanding the role of religion in public life in the Philippines beyond traditional indicators such as the electoral participation of religious actors and their lobbying on morality policies. Framing the chaplaincy program as part of a moral enterprise sheds light on the everyday consequences of the localized interpretations of the constitutional provisions on the separation of church and state and the participation of civil society organizations in Philippine democratic politics.