A week ago, while visiting the Baclayon Church in Bohol, I came upon a scapular that seemed to me an unfamiliar, mystical object. Sewn on one side is the figure of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel and on the other the following words: “Whosoever dies wearing this Scapular shall not suffer eternal fire. Our Lady’s Scapular Promise.”

My mother took no notice of the object, accustomed to seeing her titas’ scapulars. But to me—a secular, non-practicing, cultural Catholic now living in the United States to undertake my PhD—the object immediately registered as an anting-anting and as a very foreign object, indeed.

The University of Washington professor and Philippine scholar Vicente Rafael wrote the seminal book Contracting Colonialism on the process and discourse around Christian conversion in the Philippines under Spanish imperialism. In his book, Rafael demonstrates the ways in which the Spanish established a hierarchy of semiotic signs, which placed the Castilian language as the necessary, exclusive mediator between the divine language of Latin and the primitive vernacular of Tagalog. This process also positioned the Spanish as the necessary mediators between God and the Filipinos, while supporting Spanish claims to civilizational superiority. Rafael shows how the Spanish translated the Tagalog world, reducing it to objects in need of both divine and imperial intervention. However, the Tagalogs were not merely passive recipients in this process.

For the Tagalogs, Rafael argues, the process of Christian conversion was a process less of internalizing colonial-Christian conventions than of evading their totalizing power by marking the differences between the Tagalog and Castilian languages and the Tagalog and Spanish interests. This is important because it highlights the Filipinos’ agency and role in this history. The Filipinos were not merely imprisoned in a hegemonic system of meaning imposed upon them by the Spanish. Rather, the Filipinos had their own understanding of the world and they interpreted Christianity through that understanding. This is what gave rise to our uniquely Philippine practice of Catholicism, which incorporates Philippine animist and indigenous practices.

For this reason, the Spanish frequently lamented the “imperfection” of Filipino conversion. Even today, many discussions of “Folk Catholicism” in the Philippines bear traces of this discourse, suggesting that the Filipinos bastardized the pure, “real” Catholicism that the West brought. Indeed, the global, foreign media still derives voyeuristic pleasure and/or horror from witnessing the yearly Philippine “barbarism” exhibited in the Via Crucis. Discussions of the “strangeness” of Filipinos nailing themselves to the cross during the Via Crucis belie a long history of self-inflicted religious suffering in the West and elsewhere in the world. As a secular academic, I take the non-existence of a “pure” or “true” Catholicism not only as an unproblematic given, but as both natural to all religions and beneficial to the endurance of Catholicism in the Philippines. As with nature, how will religion survive if it cannot adapt and evolve?

Hardly, barbaric, all cultures have adapted “universal” religions to their local contexts. In Nepal one sees a beautiful harmony between Hinduism and Buddhism in Nepalese Buddhism, and both Hindu and Buddhist believers worship at the same Buddhist temples. Why should one lament the Filipinos’ indigenization of Catholicism, which has allowed Catholicism to reflect longer-standing Philippine beliefs and practices, such as the use of anting-antings? However, accepting such religious adaptation necessarily rejects any religion’s claims to universality. In this way, it also provides a basis upon which to build greater religious tolerance and cross-cultural appreciation.

In fact, the pronounced mysticism of Philippine Catholicism has always been for me the most attractive element of the religion. I bought the scapular because I recognized in it the indigenous Filipino anting-anting. Indeed, that thought process is precisely the process of translation that Rafael describes in Contracting Colonialism. In an increasingly secular world, Catholicism continues to mean something to me not because I am Christian, but because I am Filipino. One should see in the enduring Philippine Catholicism not hegemonic Western discourses of meaning or merely a legacy of imperialism, but the Filipino agency and history that its syncretism reflects.

Nicole CuUnjieng is a PhD student in Southeast Asian and International History at Yale University.