A Government of Religion

It has been said that if you are good in personal relations and public speaking, and you want to be instantly rich, religion will be your best profession - and surely you will be damn good rich.

The Philippine 1987 Constitution provides for the separation of Church and State and the respect for the inviolable right to religion. However this very thin line separating these two influential powers are sometimes grayed out.

The Court states in Estrada vs. Escritor that our Constitution adheres to the benevolent neutrality approach that gives room for accommodation of religious exercises as required by the Free Exercise Clause. This benevolent neutrality could allow for accommodation of morality based on religion, provided it does not offend compelling state interests.

As such, unlike the other rights embodied in the Constitution which provides for the strict scrutiny test, the test required to evaluate if there is an infringement to the right to religion is very lenient and more or less similar with the void for vagueness test on infringement of freedom of speech.

Under the compelling state interest test, in order for a certain act to be considered as violation of religious right, it is essential that the government be given an opportunity to demonstrate the compelling state interest it seeks to uphold in opposing the persons position that his act is not immoral and punishable as it is within scope of free exercise protection. 

All of us do not have the same competence as judges of the Supreme Court. We are not that analytical to rationalize every now and then our every move and the actions of the Church of State, checking if our religious right has been infringe and if there is crossing of boundaries. We just continue allowing ourselves to continue to experience the clash between these two great bodies as regards critical national matters.

We have the Reproductive Health Bill, which until now the Church continually attacks, even though our High Court already promulgated its decision that only portion of the RH Law is unconstitutional. Also, the show of strength of major religious affiliations such as the Iglesia ni Cristo, El Shaddai and Jesus is Lord Movement are displayed prominently to influence the political climate of our country. Lastly, we have the upcoming visit of the Roman Catholic Pope where local government units and prospective electoral candidates are recently leveraging to boost their hype for the upcoming elections.

Religion and State, no matter how we try to separate them, will always have a common ground. These two, though always collide, sometimes complement each other. The era of very intimate relationship between Religion and State has long been gone. At the present time, there are more clashes than compliments. The medieval era of religious dominance may not be any more imminent but still the influence of religion in our daily life is still significant and unavailing. Anyway, we cannot deny the fact that our country has been founded upon by religion.