No virtue in zealotry
The Philippines is a nation of faith. This is not a prescriptive statement – it’s not meant to deny the reality of atheist or agnostic Filipinos, or to claim they are in any way less ‘Filipino’ than their neighbors. It is merely a statement about how central faith has been in our society, and the way it has been used – sometimes abused – to create a sense of identity where one did not exist before, as with the Spanish colonizers and evangelists.