The rise of religions in PH
I HAVE written an article before about religion and I cannot help but write another one. Religion is a strong community foundation and it amazes me how it stands to influence our society all the more through the years. It has been separated from the State, or the government, but religion is playing a very crucial part in steering the minds and hearts of many Filipinos.
The Philippines is one of the two nations in Asia that has a substantial portion of the population professing the Catholic faith, aside from East Timor, and the third largest in the world after Brazil and Mexico. The Philippines is predominantly a Catholic nation but various other religions have grown so much that the number of their followers is no more far off than the number of Roman Catholics. Statistics in 2015 showed that an estimated 84 of 103.8 million Filipinos are Catholics, which means 19.8 million are non- Catholics. But back in the ’80s and even the early ’90s, the Catholic population is around 90 million. What has gone wrong actually is not the decline of the profession of the Catholic faith but the propagation and the rise of different religions in the country – the independent Catholic denominations: Iglesia Filipina Independiente, Iglesia ni Cristo, Seventh- Day Adventist Church, United Church of Christ in the Philippines, and the Evangelicals – aside from the Protestants and the Restorationists.
The axis of religious affiliation and demography today is shifting. New forces are on the rise. Traditional bastions of religious authority are on the wane. Ordinary people have a greater voice in the churches than they used to – a time of great change and discovery. The genesis of the reformation and its historical development are helpful i n comprehending t he whys and wherefores of what is happening in the world of religion today. As Protestantism has seen much decline in the West, the faith ( at least one branch of it) is the fastest growing in the developing world today. Protestantism continues to change lives in contemporary times. Indeed, over the recent decades the number of its adherents has grown substantially. Since the 1970s, more than 40 percent of Guatemala’s population is now Protestant. Its story is a microcosm of a broader “Protestant awakening” across
Latin America and the developing world.
Independent Catholic denominations such as the Feast of Bro. Bo Sanchez, Jesus is Lord Church of Bro. Eddie Villanueva, Victory Christian Fellowship of Bro. Manny Carlos, Christ Commission Fellowship of Dr. Peter Tan- Chi, and others are gaining a huge number of attendees each passing year, thus, learning about the different religions makes students aware about the society they live in. They will have this full grasp of how diverse and multicultural the society has become, and yet there is interdependence and interrelatedness between different people, families, cultures, and more particularly the religions that influence their perspective and decisions in life. This social science topic helps students recognize the benefits and challenges of living in a world with multiple teachings and ideologies. This awareness helps them to understand the importance of democracy, rights and freedoms and the fact that to live and coexist peacefully, everyone needs to respect, trust and balance the various opinion, values, attitudes, lifestyles, cultures, practices, and ideologies existing in society. (