The ‘War on Drugs’ and the Politics of Morality

Abstract

Abstract In the time of Rodrigo Duterte, the leaders of the Philippine Catholic Church were divided on the president’s controversial war on drugs. This article draws on interviews with the religious elite and explores how these divisions took shape. We argue that while they agreed that the killings would not solve the drug problem, they diverged in two respects. The first concerns the violence of the war on drugs. It may have been ‘undesirable,’ but it was ‘unavoidable.’ The second concerns their role as national leaders in speaking truth to power. Some believed it was their duty to be prophetic; others felt it was necessary to be ‘practical.’ Our article frames the discussion in terms of morality politics, the competition for values that deliberately make a distinction between ‘good’ citizens and everybody else. From this vantage point, religious leaders are moral entrepreneurs who define who lives and who does not.