One September day in 1972, Melba Padilla Maggay stepped outside to find Manila’s newspaper stands empty and massive lines for jeepneys, the Philippines’ local public transportation. Then-president Ferdinand Marcos had declared martial law, giving him wide-ranging power over the government.
At the time, Maggay was a journalist and a young Christian who had come to faith through the ministry of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. The nine-year period of martial law saw tens of thousands of Marcos’s critics thrown in prison and thousands tortured or killed.
In 1978, she and some friends started the Institute for Studies in Asian Church and Culture (ISACC) to wrestle with the question of how Christians should respond to martial law. Maggay and ISACC later joined the nonviolent 1986 People Power Revolution, which eventually deposed Marcos and restored democracy in the Philippines.
Maggay, who has long studied the intersection of religion, culture, and development in the Philippines, is a founding member of the international Life & Peace Institute and an ambassador for Micah Global, an international alliance of over 700 faith-based development organizations.
Currently, she is working to mentor a new generation and “disciple young people who will be formed in holistic witness, not just evangelism,” Maggay said. She hopes to raise leaders not just of churches or Christian organizations but of the Philippines’ barangays (“neighborhoods”), cities, and country.
Christianity Today recently spoke with Maggay about how Christians should respond to the current challenges facing the Philippines. The responses have been edited for clarity and length.
Several weeks ago, we marked the 52nd anniversary of the Philippines’ declaration of martial law. Today, the former dictator’s son—Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr.—is now in office. Why is understanding that period of martial law important when viewing current events?
It’s hard to tell these stories, even though we’re talking about something from 40 years ago and people like me weren’t jailed and didn’t experience human rights violations from the martial-law years. But what I didn’t realize was that I was traumatized by the experience and the fact that the church didn’t understand the implications of martial law properly.
I was also traumatized when I was suddenly out of a job and could not exercise what I felt was my calling: journalism. [Marcos had shut down all independent media.] Some people, including Christians, thought martial law was okay because they thought the victims of human rights abuses were rebels anyway. But the whole country was traumatized without realizing it.
Because so many people didn’t fully grasp what happened to our country during this time, I’ve encouraged everyone to write down our stories. That’s why my book—Dark Days of Authoritarianism—is a book of personal accounts of people who lived through this period. Unlike ideology, nobody can quarrel with a story.
How did the church respond to the declaration of martial law?
At that time, I was a young Christian and a new university graduate. I was a cub reporter at the Manila Chronicle. Then, suddenly, there was martial law and the newspaper was shuttered. I spent the first three months of martial law visiting my friends in jail. The editor of The Manila Chronicle was the first to be imprisoned because he was investigating an incident of gun smuggling. I did not want to write for the newspapers allowed to operate at the time, as they were all run by Marcos’s cronies.
I remember that in our church, one of the leaders praised God for martial law. He said, “Now our freedom to worship is secure, and we are not going to [fall into communism].” But as I was sitting there listening, I thought, Wait, there’s something wrong with this. Why should we praise martial law? Just because of our freedom to worship?
Christians can praise God even in jail. The right to worship is not something that the state gives and takes away; you can worship God anywhere. Paul was a tremendous witness when he was in jail. So I told several leaders within the evangelical community, “Wait, why are we prioritizing our freedom to worship?”
If that’s the case, we are no different from lobbyists as we lobby for our freedom to worship.
It seemed that ISACC was at odds with a lot of the evangelical community when the group joined the nonviolent People Power Revolution.
There were two forces that disagreed with the People Power Revolution. One was the evangelicals; the other was the extreme left. The evangelicals didn’t want to join because they say faith has nothing to do with politics.
Like Protestants in many countries, the Protestants in the Philippines have been divided over whether they should put a greater focus on social justice or gospel proclamation. How can believers bridge that divide?
The dichotomy of When you’re for evangelism, you don’t care about social justice; if you are for social justice, you don’t care about evangelism is wrong. This is a legacy of Western dualism. But this dichotomy is too ingrained in our brains, and I think we should get out of that.
Filipino culture is very holistic. In fact, most Asian cultures are. That’s why religion in Asia has always been the basis for culture.
In the Philippines, we’re just labeled as Catholic, but the indigenous culture and religious imagination of Filipinos are strong. I have always said, “We are not Christianized; we simply adapted,” because that is a very strong feature of the culture. The Filipino always adapts.
Look at the Overseas Filipino Workers everywhere. Local cultures love them. Why? Because we adapt. In other words, people mistake that for conversion. No. Five hundred years of Christianity did not really change us.
In anthropology, there is what we call surface and deep structures of culture. The surface is easy to change. In our case, the anitos (“ancestor spirits”) were exchanged for saints with Caucasian features—then, the church, instead of huts or shrines near our houses. Stonemasons were called to build churches. It’s easy to change the surface. But the mindset has remained. In other words, we may have 500 years of Christianity, but when it comes to our idea of morality, nothing changed.
You mentioned that Filipino evangelicals seemed to withdraw from the public square during martial law. But what are your thoughts about those who preach dominionism, the idea that nations should be governed by Christians and biblical law?
That is also wrong. Today, Filipino evangelicals are entering politics in the same way evangelicals in America did in the 70s after they lost cultural power. The Filipino church is made in the image of the American Bible Belt. But the problem is that Christians should not use the coercive powers of the state to persuade people about the values of their faith.
This is why separation of church and state is in both countries’ constitutions. What the separation of church and politics means is that you tolerate everybody. We are now in a pluralistic world.
In other words, you do not coerce people to conform to your values. Paul said that “we commend ourselves to everyone’s conscience” (2 Cor. 4:2). Fight for your values in the public space, but without using the coercive powers of the state, where there is a punishment for those who hold different values.
For instance, when it comes to same-sex marriage, the church has to stand for its values. In the same way, we must be prepared to tolerate other people’s values as long as they’re not criminal behavior.
Filipino evangelicals in political office share the same strategy as the Religious Right in America. Before, they didn’t want politics. Now that they’ve entered politics, they got off on the wrong foot. In other words, they are sensitive to values that are against us, like abortion. But they don’t speak out on issues of justice. That’s wrong. Christians, when they’re in politics, should be seen as people who speak for those who are voiceless.
Is there a better way for Christians to engage with politics or run for political office?
In the New Testament, dominion means servanthood. Leadership is servanthood.
The only meaning of dominion is that when we fell, we lost mastery over creation. But now, Jesus has given us power. Human agency was restored. That’s why I tell my elderly friends, “We can do something for as long as we are alive.” We have human agency, including the poor, who think they can’t do anything because they are victims of social forces around them. But no, they can take hold of these things. It is part of the restoration of dominion.
Dominion is not lording it over people. We should be servants to everybody. If you want to be a leader, you have to serve everybody. So dominionists’ take on dominion is wrong. In other words, we have power now to serve everyone. We have power, agency, in such a way that we can help all others in human society.
What is the most pressing challenge facing the Filipino evangelical church?
Developing a theology that will respond to our context of poverty and injustice, as millions of Filipinos are still mired by these societal ills, should be the first priority of the church. We have been reductionist in our understanding of what it means to bear witness. In 2 Corinthians 10:5, Paul says “We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.” That’s the witness—not just formulas like “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life” and “You will get saved and go to heaven.”
What does it mean to bear witness? To take every thought captive, whether it happens in theological circles or in the public square.
There’s a strong need for Christians to be biblically literate. The Bible is too important to be left to theologians. We have to go back to what the Bible says about all the issues around us. You should always think about it. It should be second nature.
What does God’s Word say here? That’s number one for me, making every thought captive to obey Christ, regardless of what ideas are discussed—social justice, university education, or the media.
Christians must be able to relate the Word of God to the everyday issues they face, whether personal or social. That is very important but not commonly practiced. People like “canned” Bible studies and are shallow in their grasp of the Scriptures.
You said in Transforming Society, “I do not like politics. Like many of that generation … of the early 1970s, the white heat I used to feel over political issues has been tempered by years of disappointment, or, perhaps, by the tiring and corrosive effect of having worked too hard and too long at social change with only marginal success.” What keeps you doing this work?
I am thankful that the Lord has kept me. I just turned 74, and most of my contemporaries are either dead or gone or have given up. Some of them say, “What can we do? We are old; we cannot go out marching the streets like we used to do. And the forces around us, like social media, are very powerful.” They feel nothing can be done.
But the meaning of the Cross is not just forgiveness of sin. The Lord Jesus did not die just to forgive us and give us a ticket to heaven. The Lord Jesus died for the redemption of the whole earth.
The missio Dei (“mission of God”) is not to secure a ticket to heaven just for us. The missio Dei is the redeeming of the whole creation, the new heaven and the new earth.
And we are being asked to participate in the remaking of that earth. That is my missional task: Obedience to what it means to be part of God’s agenda of remaking the new heaven and the new earth. But of course, many evangelicals don’t see this because they think the world is going to fall apart. So they let go of the environment, let go of social justice, and so on.
But anything that we do in the name of Christ will contribute to this remaking of the new heaven and the new earth.
Our problem is that we are only focused on Ephesians 2:9: “not by works, so that no one can boast.” We overlook verse 10. But verse 10 says, we are saved “to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” In other words, we were chosen and elected. God has an agenda that he is inviting us to participate in.
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