Throughout the nineteenth century, Christianity in the islands named after Philip II of Spain faced profound social change initiated by economic and political forces of modernity and culminating in the emergence of the Filipino nation. As Benedict Anderson’s analysis of nationalism suggests, this emergence as ‘an imagined political community’ involved a complex cultural process rooted in changing perceptions of community, language and lineage.

Christianity’s reaction to these changes and participation in the growth of nationalism have marked its place in Philippine society then as now. Implicated in politics because of its nature and stature, the colonial church reacted to different groups and concerns involved in the nationalist and revolutionary movements. But beyond those in the church’s direct influence, Christianity offered a paradigm of redemption in the Christ story that a wider population appropriated and later read to envision social relations different from Spanish aims. Both as church and story, Christianity’s response was based on the dynamics between Spanish Catholicism and native culture.

Beyond transplanting Spanish Catholicism

Early studies often described the encounter between the Spanish and the native as a unilateral process of transplanting the entire imperial ethos, including Catholicism, and thus spoke of ‘Hispanisation’. These works, which relied primarily on Spanish sources, suffer from their primary focus on events and leaders and their representation of natives as passive objects of the colonial enterprise. More recent historians include non-traditional and often vernacular sources to write social history, and draw on anthropological studies of cross-cultural contact, or theological discussions of the relations between faith and culture.