BY: GILBERT PILAYRE
Faith on Display: The Hollow Echo of Belief in Filipino Culture
“Hell is other people,” Jean-Paul Sartre once declared—not because of their mere existence, but because of the performance we must maintain before their gaze. So, it is with faith in Filipino culture, where belief is too often wielded as theater, a stage upon which the soul forgets to act.
To keep on brandishing one’s faith—raising it aloft like a relic on parade, reciting pieties in casual conversations, or displaying religiosity in digital spaces—is to risk eviscerating its core. Faith, when exposed incessantly to the sun of public scrutiny, can dry into husk. Its marrow lies not in its display, but in its discretion. Kierkegaard once said, “The deepest form of despair is to choose to be another than oneself.” And what is faith performatively brandished but the despair of authenticity, cloaked in the language of sanctity?
The Filipino soul is steeped in religious symbolism: rosaries swinging from rearview mirrors, crucifixes dominating living rooms, politicians invoking Divine Providence before launching vitriolic tirades. Religion, especially Catholicism, is not just embedded—it is etched into our national psyche. Yet faith, when reduced to its accessories, ceases to be existential; it becomes decorative.
One must ask: is the ubiquity of the sacred indicative of belief, or of insecurity? Faith repeated loudly can become a liturgy of compensation—overcompensating for the silence of conscience, for the absence of ethical consequence. Simone Weil wrote, “Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren.” In the Filipino context, this rings true in the cyclical hypocrisy we witness: devoutness on Sunday, corruption on Monday.
Superficial faith is deeply seductive because it offers spiritual legitimacy without existential risk. It prays without changing; it sings without listening. In Filipino life, Mary is venerated with candles and chants, while women are objectified or dismissed. The Bible is quoted passionately, but seldom applied where it is most inconvenient: in economic justice, in the defense of the marginalized, in resistance to tyranny.
But we must be fair. To critique performative faith is not to condemn faith itself. For even Sartre, whose name evokes existential dread, understood the responsibility embedded in freedom. And faith, in its genuine form, is the most radical expression of that responsibility. It is choosing to love when hate is easier, to give when greed is rewarded, to serve when power seduces.
So how then do we return to faith that liberates rather than subjugates? That questions rather than silences? That loves, not lectures? We must begin by walking away from the spotlight. The truest believers are not those who shout from pulpits or profiles, but those who listen in hospitals, who march in protests, who forgive in silence. They are the unseen saints, the nameless prophets.
Albert Camus wrote, “In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.” Perhaps this is where Filipino faith must now go—not into louder parades, but into deeper wells. Not into viral verses, but into quiet action. And in doing so, we may yet return to a form of belief that breathes.
For to keep on brandishing one’s faith—constantly waving it like a banner in public or declaring it with every word—is, indeed, to strip it of its depth and meaning. Let us instead put down the banner and live the creed.