By REV. LUNA L. DINGAYAN

“I tell you whenever you did this for one of the least important of these followers of mine, you did it for me!” – Matthew 25:40

First of 3 parts

Filipino-American Friendship Day

To celebrate Filipino-American Friendship Day, it is significant to reflect on the legacy of Protestant faith in our country. If there is any concrete result of American colonization in our country it is no other than the introduction of Protestantism. To have a better understanding and appreciation of Protestant witness in our country, we have to understand it in its own historical context.

Protestant faith was introduced in our country as a companion of American colonialism. The Philippine Revolution against Spain was already two years old when the U.S. declared war against Spain in 1898, sending Admiral Dewey into Manila Bay. In the guise of helping the revolutionaries get rid of their Spanish colonial masters, the American forces came over and stayed put. A three-year Filipino-American War (1898-1902) followed with casualties of 600,000 in a population of 7 million. The Aguinaldo leadership surrendered, and with brutal repression the U.S. annexed the Philippines as a colony.

Some historical analysts would rather understand the Battle of Manila Bay as a “mock battle” with the occupation of the Philippines as its main goal. For not too long after that, the imperialist designs of the U.S. began to unfold. In 1932, Reinhold Niebuhr, a distinguished American theologian, aptly remarked: “Though the little junta, of which Theodore Roosevelt and Senator Lodge were leaders, had carefully planned the campaign of war so that the Philippines would become ours, the fiction that the fortunes of war had made us unwilling recipients and custodians of the Philippine Islands was quickly fabricated and exists to this day”.

This impression was strengthened by the “Divine Comedy” which President McKinley put up for a group of Methodist clergymen who visited him at the White House. He said to them, “I walked the floor of the White House night after night until midnight. And I am not ashamed to tell you, Gentlemen, I went down on my knees and prayed to the Almighty God for light and guidance more than one night. And one night it came to me this way – that there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, as our fellowmen for whom Christ died.”

As shown by subsequent historical events, all these pious words about humanitarianism, civilization, and peace were meant to mask the economic and strategic motives behind the American colonization of the Philippines. Parker Thomas Moon, a historian on colonial policy, wrote about the real guidance McKinley got on that fateful night. He said, “The decision to colonize the Philippines did not come quite so suddenly or so mysteriously, as the President’s words would indicate. Mr. McKinley communed not only with his conscience, but also with his advisers. Divine light and guidance had to be confirmed with detailed reports on the economic and strategic value of the Islands before the final decision was made. “

There were three groups that lobbied for the annexation of the Philippines to the U.S. These groups included the trading companies looking for Asian markets, the advocates of U.S. naval power in the Pacific, and the Protestant mission boards. All these groups embodied the economic, political, and religious interest of the U.S. Their mutual interdependence suggests that the mission boards tacitly acknowledged their role in the total colonization effort, even if they appeared to have come to teach the Filipinos the meaning of “true Christianity”.

In his study about Providence and Politics Behind Protestant Missionary Beginnings in the Philippines, Gerald Anderson, a renowned American church historian, said that the first American Protestant missionaries in the Philippines arrived in 1898 under the banner of Manifest Destiny, the idea of divine mandate to expand and wield power and to justify the U.S. colonization program.

Continued next week