The SWS survey said that 1 out of every 11 Catholics considers the possibility of changing religions. It seems not too surprising. Not surprising too is the idea that religiosity is waning even here. Why shouldn’t it if it is waning everywhere else in the planet? The clergy has, of course, questioned the veracity of the survey results. Which pointless act will only be interpreted to reveal a latent insecurity leading even to a possible lack of faith. Surveys tell us how most people perceive things. They are hardly ever oracles of truth itself. To get at that, we would have to use other modes of inquiry.
Is religiosity waning? Consider contemporary times. Everything is waning here and now. Why not religiosity itself?
We cannot of course exactly know why. But we can make a good appraisal leading to possible good guesses. You might ask, what good are good guesses? In the absence of anything better, they are not so bad. They can make for good reading.
About a decade ago, people predicted we were coming to the death of art. They had other predictions as well. One of them being the death of reading. Which for them suggested the death of books. And there must have been many who also predicted the death of religion. Art, reading, books and religion would have been dead by now if they were ever going to die at all. That these persist up to now only shows how off the mark the “good guessers” were.
No, they will not die just yet. Consider how even the most esoteric and exotic belief systems persist to this day. Even paganism is still out there. From time to time, its advocates might even claim a resurgence. But just like everything else, it will be waning in some sort of way or another. And while we cannot absolutely know why, we can point to obvious changes in the world to help us understand how.
We have come of course to the age of information and we are only now beginning to understand what changes will come. But from the very start we always guessed it will change the world profoundly. And we might have guessed as well that it would change especially those human institutions that operated through highly centralized monolithic systems.
We are well past the monarchic system. We have a modicum of democracy now. And even if in the Philippines the feudal system is still there. It is there only in the sense of waning feudal values. The age-old Filipino family structure is not the same as it was only a few decades ago. It will not be the same decades from now when we will have scattered ourselves even more all over the globe in search of the better life.
It is this concept of a “better life”, which is undergoing the greatest change of all. It would be good to survey especially how contemporary Filipinos visualize this “better life.” The literature always predicted that now would be an age of fragmentation. The old visions we held for how things ought to be are repeatedly being put to question.
We used to think that humans especially human institutions like states and religions could expand as much as they wished. We needed only newer lands to colonize and tap for their riches. Now we know with a certainty we have far exceeded the limits of that. We can grow but only to some sustainable extent. After which, we should consider ourselves lucky to conserve whatever we have already and make the most of that.
We might have guessed that in the Philippines, even the religion of the majority would reach its optimum point of expansion. It should now consider itself fortunate to be able to conserve what it already has by making its faithful more faithful and a bit better off. It would do well to work at improving the institutions that sustain it especially its clergy. In the course of doing this, it will lose some of its faithful. That much might as well be accepted.
But the institution itself while it may wane along with everything else will not likely die. It might become smaller but smaller is not necessarily worse. Smaller can be better. Especially when you consider how the fact of smallness may also improve the church’s sense of being a true spiritual community working to sustain itself inside an ever changing spiritless world.