Tag Archives: INC

Qwertyman No. 205: Selective Religion

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Qwertyman for Monday, July 6, 2026

LET’S ASSUME that you’re one of the leaders—if not the Great Leader himself—of the Iglesia Ni Cristo (INC), with 3 million followers at your beck and call. You get word that one of your most prominent members, a sitting senator of the Republic, is going to be charged soon with plunder for admittedly pocketing P75 million in private donations without reporting it either as a campaign contribution or as personal income. 

But you don’t bother yourself with the legal niceties of the case; they’re not important. What alarms you is the fact that one of your staunchest protectors—and not just of the INC, but of the Dutertes with which your church has cast its lot—is facing prison. It’s not the legal case, not a technical matter of proving plunder; while the senator himself seems to be taking things in stride, making noises about his willingness to go to jail, you know that it’s more existential than that. 

It’s your own power that’s under threat, that’s being tested by the ingrate you helped to seat in the Palace. His presumptive successor, on whom you’ve bet all your marbles, herself stands to be impeached in the Senate for all manner of grave financial wrongdoing. You need your senator’s vote for her to escape the noose. Her once-formidable alliance is thinning by the hour—whether by their own commission (one has had to disappear to save his own neck, another is already in prison, also for plunder) or through deft politicking by unseen hands. 

There could be more desertions down the road, as the impeachment trial starts this week. You know these characters; they’ve all come to you for your blessings, your quid for their quo, and you know how fickle allegiances can be, especially under pressure. But you have your own pressure to exert. You need to remind them of that cordial but heavily nuanced conversation in your office, of the vast difference 3 million votes can make in the senatorial tally. (More on this later, but let’s get on with our scenario.) So what do you do?

You call the faithful out to the streets for a show of numbers, for the kind of visual impact that the network news and social media tend to magnify. You decide to hold this at the EDSA Shrine among other places for whatever symbolism it might carry, never mind that Mother Mary, so central to the EDSA spirit and experience, holds no special place of honor in INC belief. The night before, your organizers send out text messages ordering your people out to EDSA as early as 5 am; every “lokal” has to be represented. You know that you can rely on what your members have had ingrained into their minds and bodies: unquestioning obedience to authority. (Some of their T-shirts will declare this openly: “Obey and Never Complain”.)

You beam with pride and pleasure as the crowds begin to gather at dawn, catching the drowsy city by surprise. You manage to choke off the city’s busiest and most important highway, convincing yourself and your own people that a day or two’s disruption of work and traffic is a mild inconvenience compared to the issue at hand. Ah, the issue—yes, let’s go with “selective justice,” which is clearly at work in the plunder case they whipped up against the good senator. Why him? Why now? What for? 

This was the senator bravely threatening to unmask the biggest crooks in the highest echelons of government—never mind that he himself was now being unmasked for palpably gross misdeeds. You trot out a small parade of notoriously unsavory politicians—but then who else have you got?—to amuse the gathering. Never mind the irony of an Imee Marcos crying “Walang uwian!” at the very place that sent her and her family packing off for Hawaii forty years ago (we don’t know if she stayed the night huddling with the INC masses—or went home as senators are wont to do after their speeches). 

Nowhere in this spectacle did God or religion visibly figure—what the INC’s conception of justice was, how the Dutertes and Marcoletas would spread God’s dominion over the earth, how individual INC members (especially senators) were supposed to discern right from wrong except by executive fiat, and how the reported INC practice of cornering certain lucrative government posts after elections fulfills God’s mandate. 

Sure, they can fill up streets, and hold parts of a city hostage for a few days. They can make it look like they centrally matter, and perhaps in some swing situations they do, as did the support they allegedly threw behind Bam Aquino last year. 

But here’s the bottom line. The INC’s reputed 3 million members comprise voters and  non-voters including children. Studies put the real number of voting INC members at less than 1.4 million, and even less in terms of who actually shows up at the polling booths. SWS chair emeritus Mahar Mangahas puts it at “around 5 percent” of all voters. 

Do they vote as a bloc? Yes—but not absolutely. The 2016 TV5-SWS Exit Poll showed that 77.2 percent of INC voters supported Rodrigo Duterte. SWS data also indicate that  around 20 to 25 percent of INC voters do not vote for church-endorsed candidates. So 75 to 80 percent do vote by command—but whether they do so because of obedience or because the INC tends to endorse popular candidates has yet to be determined. So the discipline and the reliability are there to some extent, but it’s a power that can be easily overstated and just as easily abused.

The greatest damage wrought by the INC in its EDSA excursion was neither to the traffic situation and much less to the case against Sen. Marcoleta. It was to its own image as a religious faith to be taken seriously as such, a body of belief driven by godly wisdom. By consistently supporting morally compromised politicians, it has revealed itself as a political instrument, manipulable and deployable, for reasons and purposes known only to its leaders. 

And that’s sad because I do have some INC friends, upright people for whom I have a deep respect, and whom I would be glad to hear from on the issues I raised above. I’ll promise them fair representation in this space—but they’ll have to speak for themselves and not their leaders, to the extent that that’s even possible.

Penman No. 154: Teaching English to Filipinos

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Penman for Monday, June 22, 2015

I HAD a great time last week with the English faculty of New Era University in Quezon City, who had invited me to speak at their three-day workshop on “Enhancing English Teaching Practices.” For three days, I met with a very lively group of about 30 to 40 college and high school teachers of English, talking about writing, reading, and teaching the language in today’s Filipino classroom.

I was backstopped in these discussions by the young and very sharp Ms. Cyndriel “CY” Meimban, who had taken her high school at New Era before doing an English degree with us at the University of the Philippines and then a master’s in Education at Arizona State U. CY—who also just happens to be the daughter of an old friend and fellow Fulbrighter, Dr. Adriel Meimban—took a break from her teaching duties at Northern Arizona University to help out her fellow teachers at NEU.

It was my first visit to the NEU campus near Commonwealth Avenue, which was rather ironic because we’ve lived on the UP campus just across that avenue for the past ten years. The NEU is part of the Iglesia ni Cristo complex and is run by the church, although I was pleasantly surprised to find that it’s open to all faiths. There’s a substantial Muslim population in that very area, for example, and many students from that community attend New Era.

We held our workshop in the new Professional Schools building, which housed NEU’s colleges of Law and Medicine, among others; more prominently, along Commonwealth Avenue, the College of Evangelical Ministry which Dr. Meimban (a former president of NEU) now heads trains young INC ministers, including about a hundred students from overseas—Filipino-Americans and Filipino-Europeans, among many others; I was surprised to be addressed by a young black man from South Africa in perfect Filipino. I was, in other words, in a very rich cultural and linguistic environment, in which language is used not just to express oneself or get jobs but to propagate the faith.

Otherwise, the workshop attendees voiced the same problems I’ve heard elsewhere: a clear decline in English proficiency not just among students but teachers as well; the lack of new materials in the syllabi, particularly in literature classes, as well as teaching guides for these materials; and the persistence of outdated approaches to the reading and teaching of literature and of English itself.

I began my presentation with something I always emphasize when I teach English in UP, especially in my American Literature class: we study and teach English not because we want to be Americans, British, or some other Anglophone people, but to become better Filipinos. We learn English and study other literatures in English to gain insights into and understand how these other societies operate and how certain human values and truths transcend national and social boundaries. Thereby, we should lose our unfamiliarity with and our awe of the foreign, empowering ourselves as citizens of the world.

I did a module on creative writing—focusing on fiction and nonfiction—as a way of showing teachers how writers think and work, so they can themselves become writers or at least understand what writers do and how they do it. In reading and teaching literature, I went over several poems and stories, and asked my audience to draw up a list of questions that could or should be raised about the text beyond “What’s the moral lesson?”

I emphasized the importance of considering and discussing form and technique as much as content and meaning as a way of seeing how language works, on the level of the sentence or even the word. I argued for the enjoyment of language for its own sake—in effect, for the study of literature as an exercise in pleasure as much as in education.

The problem with too many literature classes is that they’re taught as anything but literature—as philosophy, as religion, as politics—rather than as the imaginative play on words that lies at the heart of literature. When teachers march into class and declare, “Class, this is what this poem means, and believe me because I’m the absolute authority on it,” students and even teachers miss out on the fun of discovery, of teasing out sense from seeming chaos.

Inevitably, the question of a “language policy” came up. Would students benefit from the imposition of an “English-only” policy? Was it all right (or was it criminal) for a teacher of English to resort to Filipino when teaching English, or literature in English?

I went out on a limb here—and I’m sure that what I’ll say here will turn many a reader livid with consternation and disgust—but I said that, even as a former chair of the UP English Department, I’ve always been opposed to an English-only policy, because it’s silly and it simply doesn’t work.

We study English—and try to master it—because it serves us well in communication and in business, especially in a global sense, but to deliberately throttle our use of other languages (of which we have an enormous wealth) in the notion that it will somehow make us better users and speakers of English is downright stupid. I’ve yet to meet someone who now speaks and writes perfect English by having paid 5 centavos for every Filipino word he or she used. Most writers of my generation are happily bilingual or even trilingual, and we don’t get our languages or linguistic registers mixed up; what’s key is appropriateness—which language and which register is best for which occasion?

I would even argue that code-switching from English to Filipino can work in the teaching of English, and especially of literature in English, if it relaxes the non-Anglophone student and allows him or her to speak—and even to make a mistake, which should also be encouraged (and gently corrected) without too heavy a penalty. Patience and understanding, rather than force and sheer authority, have always gotten me better results in the classroom. I hope my colleagues in New Era University got a taste of that treatment, and that they enjoyed the experience.