Beyond the Separation of Church and State: Catholicism, US Imperialism, and the Philippines in Recent Historiography

Following the teleology of the emergence of the nation-state, the writing of Philippine history has been periodized according to colonial transitions. At the defeat of Spain in the Spanish–American War in 1898 and the failure of Filipino revolutionaries to defend the nascent First Philippine Republic, the United States, then an emerging overseas imperial power, wrested control of the islands. Characterized as White, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant, the US took over a population that was Brown, Filipino, and predominantly Catholic. As the promoter of the modern imperial secular, the US prioritized the establishment of the separation of church and state in the Philippines.

This review essay looks at recent works on American imperialism and the Roman Catholic Church in the Philippines and shows a historiographical departure from the previous Rankean approach to the topic—distinguished by high political and diplomatic concerns—toward an examination of other facets of American imperialism and Catholicism, such as political culture, religious performance, and race. I argue that, contrary to the current consensus among Philippine specialists, new historiography has demonstrated that the Roman Catholic Church did play a major role in the establishment of American imperialism in the early twentieth century on the cultural and political fronts. Moreover, new works have shown the pivotal role of the (Catholic) Philippines in the imperial narrative of the (Protestant) US. The Philippines, therefore, is not merely a case study of American global imperialism but its sine qua non.

The “Secularization” Narrative

The literature from which Tisa Wenger (2017), Katherine Moran (2020), John T. McGreevy (2016), and Deirdre de la Cruz (2015) depart can be characterized as “traditional” historiography, that is, the writing of “history as it happened.” The influence of nineteenth-century historian Leopold von Ranke looms large in the histories of Catholicism and American imperialism prior to the 2010s not only in method but also in consequence: the focus on political figures, whose papers are well archived, yields the traditional “political histories” or the histories of “big men.” The earliest scholarly essay related to the issue was published in the Yale Law Journal by Simeon E. Baldwin (1902, 7), who regarded the Taft mission to Rome—which negotiated the purchase of large tracts of friar lands in the Philippines—as an anomalous event in the history of international law.

By the late 1940s to the 1960s, historians working primarily on the Roman Catholic Church took a keen interest on the issue. John Farrell (1947, 1950, 1951), for example, devoted three long essays in the Catholic Historical Review on the “background of the Taft mission,” the sources for which were the papers and letters of personages such as Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Bellamy Storer, and Abp. John Ireland. Archbishop Ireland’s papers, which were microfilmed by the Minnesota Historical Society (Jessee 1984), eventually became the sole source for a book-length biography on the prelate. Although devoting only a chapter on the “Philippine problem” in his biography of Ireland, James Moynihan (1953, 210) described the immense number of sources on the Philippines in that collection: “as one leafs through the voluminous documents which deal with the Philippine problem, one wonders how Archbishop Ireland was able to find time to deal with them.” In a similar biographical vein, Frederick Zwierlein (1956) brought to light the papers and letters of Bp. Thomas Hendrick of Cebu diocese in the Philippines in a book-length monograph loosely titled Theodore Roosevelt and Catholics. These biographies, however, did no more than present a collection of primary sources...