While lower than a 3rd of Americans rate clergy as highly honest and ethical, across the globe within the Philippines, 91 percent of the general public trusts religious leaders, in response to EON Group’s 2021 Philippine Trust Index. Respondents of the survey ranked pastors as probably the most trusted leaders in Filipino society, in comparison with a Gallup poll that found clergy within the US ranked lower than 10 other professions, including chiropractors and law enforcement officials.
“When people outside of church discover I’m a pastor, their demeanor changes out of respect,” said Aldrin Peñamora, director of the Philippine Council of Evangelical Churches’ Justice, Peace, and Reconciliation Commission. Some people even ask him for prayer.
The disconnect is rooted in cultural differences, religion’s role in society, in addition to the impact of church scandals. Still, pastors from each countries noted the importance of getting pastors engage with their congregations and native communities to construct trust.
Drivers of trust within the Filipino church
In the Philippines, Catholics make up 80 percent of the population, while evangelicals make up about 3 percent. Catholicism got here to the Philippines through Spanish colonialism and stuck as Filipinos made their faith their very own. Today, the Catholic faith has develop into a cultural attribute of Filipino life.
The high view of church leaders also reflects traditional Filipino values, said Peñamora: “Filipino culture values respecting the elderly, which spills over to their submission to people in authority, including religious authority.”
In the Philippines, older persons are considered sensible, they usually provide a way of order and direction to the lifetime of the community, Peñamora said. The root of this respect is utang na loob, defined as “the sense of obligation to return a favor to someone.” Because the older generation paved the best way for next generations to enjoy certain privileges, younger people feel indebted and wish to present back to their elders. Philippine Daily Inquirer columnist Anna Cristina Tuazon writes that utang na loob isn’t a transactional relationship but an acknowledgement of a malasakit, “an act of compassionate sacrifice that goes above what is predicted.” The debt is rarely fully repaid.
According to the EON survey, the primary driver of trust within the Filipino church is when it “has integrity and espouses honesty, providing a full accounting of its funds and other resources.” Other drivers include having a large reach (including global connections), and maintaining a separation of church and state. Despite recent scandals in Filipino Protestant and Catholic churches, Filipinos of all ages still trust the church: 85 percent of Gen Z responders said they trust the church, in addition to 89 percent of millennials, 95 percent of Gen Xers, and 97 percent of baby boomers.
As a result, Peñamora said that many congregants are desirous to emulate what ministers are doing, including evangelizing and serving in church ministries.
Francis Egenias, the chairman of the board of the Philippine Missionary Institute, said that almost all congregants trust religious leaders to guide them in matters of religion. “Filipinos take heed to their leaders out of respect, even once they don’t like what’s being said to them,” Egenias said. Yet that doesn’t mean that folks are heeding their words, as “sermons enter one ear and exit the opposite.”
For instance, although the church speaks out on practices like vote buying—where candidates give money to people in exchange for his or her votes—or playing the illegal gambling game jueteng, Christians proceed to do this stuff, Egenias said.
“Filipinos do each the profane and the sacred,” Egenias said. “They go to church even once they don’t obey. They take heed to their pastors so long as they don’t interfere with their vices.”
Filipino Americans caught between two worlds
This high trust can be seen in Filipino American communities, three-quarters of whom discover as Christian, mostly Catholic. Father Perry Leiker of Los Angeles’s St. Bernard Catholic Church noted to the Los Angeles Times that just about half of the church’s parishioners are Filipino American. “They’re just very expressive of their faith and really happy with their faith, and I believe they find a variety of support of their faith,” he said.
However, that trust can easily be broken in each Catholic and evangelical churches. Gabriel Catanus, lead pastor of Garden City Covenant Church in Chicago, has observed that Filipino Americans raised in white evangelical megachurches often develop into disillusioned by organized religion due to the hurt and spiritual abuse they experience.
“[Filipino Americans] are treated like the assistance in churches, seminaries, and Christian colleges but do not need a voice in leadership,” Catanus said. He finds that folks with marginalized identities suffer most from the worst parts of institutional life.
In response, he builds trust along with his multiethnic congregation by allowing Filipino Americans to receive and construct community without the expectation to serve. He can be intentional about educating them on the historic and systemic realities upon which institutions are built and welcoming them to consistently follow the person of Jesus.
Filipinos’ trust within the church, whether or not they are within the homeland or within the diaspora, is formed heavily by their experience with the church leaders, Catanus said. They long for a shepherding presence whom they will confide in during times of hardship and strife.
“We must have leaders who take heed to God and to people and who’re willing to take heed to people who are suffering,” Catanus said. “When you do this, you can’t rush.”
Breakdown in institutional trust
For the larger American population, the distrust of pastors is representative of the country’s own values and culture.
“The decline in trust in religious institutions is part of the larger decline in trust in all institutions,” said Daniel Hummel, research fellow within the history department on the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Americans are highly individualistic in how they understand the world, and this bleeds into the role of the church.”
Instead of being a mediator, the church becomes a spot where one goes to fulfill one’s needs, Hummel said. This cultural reality makes it harder for trust in institutions to be sustained since it is simple to opt out of a fellowship when it not serves one’s needs.
Also, church attendance today stays lower than pre-pandemic levels, making it tougher for church leaders to construct personal relationships with their congregants. As a result, there are fewer points of contact between clergy and people outside the church.
In CT’s January article on why Americans not trust pastors, Nathan Finn, executive director of the Institute for Transformational Leadership at North Greenville University, pointed to several aspects for this transformation: clergy sex abuse, political polarization, and evangelicals’ countercultural moral positions. Finn said this decline in trust is notable “especially amongst those that have either had bad church experiences or whose worldview assumptions are already at odds with historic Christian beliefs.”
In the Black church, some see a failure of leadership as clergy stay silent amid injustice.
“Black churches turn the opposite cheek to issues that plague our world,” said Taylon Lancaster, senior pastor at Third Baptist Church in Springfield, Massachusetts. “Black clergy are silent on the problems that Christians should’ve cried out loud about.”
Building trust is required in each contexts
Despite the differences in how pastors are viewed within the two countries, leaders from each stressed the importance of increase the credibility of churches of their context to witness to the gospel.
In the US, Lancaster believes the church can construct trust by caring concerning the issues that communities are facing and acting as a transformative presence that holistically meets people’s needs. This requires religious leaders to create space for people to share their concerns.
Sandra Maria Van Opstal, cofounder and executive director of Chasing Justice, noted that, to construct trust, “churches have to be honest, repent, and confess once they’ve done something unsuitable, even when it’s hard to do as an establishment.”
She has observed that in communities of color, it might probably be difficult for Christians to walk away from their congregation because a lot of their relationships are wrapped up within the structures of the church. “The church is integral to the flourishing of marginalized people,” she said.
The church is where people in her community find food and financial support, and where they connect with people from similar ethnic and linguistic backgrounds. This is why Van Opstal finds it essential for churches to be intentional in creating an environment where trust can grow. Although Filipinos have high trust of their church leaders, evangelical churches still need to intentionally construct relationships inside their communities.
Over in Quezon City, Philippines, Chonabelle Domingo, executive director of Mission Ministries Philippines (MMP), believes “the evangelical ought to be creative in doing outreach.” Her ministry builds trust inside her community by offering early childhood education to low-income families. The ministry began after she saw that she was more welcomed into homes as a teacher than as a preacher. “When God’s love is prolonged to children, it results in meaningful community engagement,” she explained. MMP designs its curriculum to care for college kids holistically.
Meanwhile, the Philippine Council of Evangelical Churches (PCEC) actively engages in interfaith and inter-political dialogue and develops good relationships across different groups. “We need to have interaction in society on different levels,” director Peñamora said. “Neighborliness, no matter differences, is a component of our mandate as Christians.”
That’s why PCEC is energetic in relief distribution when natural disasters like typhoons or earthquakes strike. With support from PCEC, many evangelicals built houses for Muslims in Lapayan, Lanao del Norte, after the 2017 Marawi siege when ISIS-affiliate militants overtook town. The group was also heavily involved in peacebuilding within the region, and have seen that constructing relationships with the community have helped with lessening animosity amongst people of various faiths.
Peñamora longs for the local church to form relationships locally that should not imperialistic or hierarchical. He believes church leaders shouldn’t be passive or apathetic to issues happening outside of church partitions. Instead, churches need to fulfill people where they’re, as Jesus did, and be worthy of trust.
“The more we become involved throughout the community, the more we’re trusted,” Peñamora said.
