Against the "People Power Church"? Contemporary Forms of Organized Nonreligion and the Debate on Reproductive Health in the Philippines

After being heavily debated for more than 10 years in- and outside congress, current president of the Philippines, Benigno Aquino III., signed the so-called "Reproductive Health Bill" (RH Bill) in December 2012. However, firmly opposed by the Roman Catholic Church (RCC) and its public organ, the Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines (CBCP), the now called RH Law is still waiting for its implementation. The RCC's/CBCP's influence as a "moral compass" (Bautista 2010) or "public religion" (Casanova 1994) in this Christian dominated nation is grounded in its prominent role during crucial historical events and political transformations, e.g. the "People Power Revolution" in 1986. Such events and their interpretations led to a "religio-nationalism", a discursive "process of co-construction between Catholic identity and national identity" (Natividad 2012), which enables the RCC/CBCP to shape public and political debates. Such debates like the conflict over reproductive health issues, in which various social actors articulate their own notions of morality, nation, and modernity, provide an ideal framework to analyze church-state relations and the local intersections and complex dynamics of religion and modernity in the Philippines from a social scientific perspective.

In my paper I will focus on nonreligious groups like atheists, humanists, and freethinkers which have emerged in the Philippines within recent years. Although constituting different forms of organized nonreligion with different agendas, they find common ground, for example, in their fight for secularism, LGBT rights, and their engagement in the debate on the RH Bill/RH Law. By looking at their criticism of the RCC's/CBCP's position on reproductive health policies through ethnographic fieldwork and a relational approach to nonreligion (Quack 2014), I show how they try to delegitimize the Church's strong public role by breaking up the aforementioned "religio-nationalism" and by offering an alternative, modernistic-scientistic moral/social framework.