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Panama has freedom of religion, but we're mostly Catholic

and here we see details of the facade at the Iglesia El Carmen on

Via España, one of Panama City's best known Catholic landmarks

"Holy Scriptures Month" and Panama's religious heritage

article and photos by Eric Jackson

At the urging of a multi-partisan group of deputies from Panama's Evangelical religious minority, the National Assembly has unanimously passed legislation to declare September "Holy Scriptures Month." An earlier proposal to declare a "Bible Month" had failed after objections that not all Panamanians hold the Bible sacred.

The opposition deputy who proposed both measures, Vladimir Herrera (MOLIRENA-San Miguelito), told La Prensa that "to me, the Holy Scriptures are the Bible. I don't know what it will be for others." The intention was a public demonstration of Christian religious piety by a legislature widely reviled as corrupt, with deputies of the PRD-Partido Popular majority caucus and those of the nation's overwhelming Catholic majority eventually unwilling to be put into a position where they could be accused of voting against the Bible.

The measure has elicited criticism in both the mainstream and alternative media and some expressions of distaste and calls for a presidential veto from within various of Panama's religious communities, but this bit of legislation hasn't prompted either support or indignation on a massive scale.

So why the minimal public reaction?

One reason is surely that most Panamanians just don't take any moral pronouncements made by politicians too seriously.

Another reason is that Panama is notoriously not a nation of readers --- less than 10 percent of the population reads newspapers, while bookstores serve an even smaller minority.

However, it's not a matter of Panama never having had a history of religious conflict or oppression --- that we have, although it's a good bet that many of the legislators have never read anything about it and didn't learn about it in school.

At Panama City's Hindu temple

In the United States, religion erupts into political disputes when it intersects with public education. In Panama, however, Catholic religious instruction has always been part of the public school curriculum, with the proviso that kids of other faiths or non-believers may be excused. In practice it's a matter of social compulsion of the less wealthy classes to either embrace or feign Catholicism or else be subtly branded as different. For wealthier kids, and for most of the children of other faiths, there are private schools.

It has been noted that Panamanian Jews, for example, are much less likely to intermarry with non-Jews, assimilate to Christianity or emigrate to Israel than Jews in most other countries. Maybe that's because more than 90 percent of this country's Jewish kids are educated in Jewish schools. If the government tries to browbeat kids into the Catholic faith through its schools, it just doesn't much affect the Jews. Similarly, a lot of Protestant kids go to Protestant schools, Muslim kids go to Muslim schools and so on, and what's left --- given that National Assembly deputies and others in similar income brackets rarely send their kids to public schools --- is an underfunded, oppressed and restless remnant that few people who are not directly involved care to fight over.

However, if our educational system tends to tribalize Panamanians by religion, that doesn't necessarily lead to widespread bigotry in society. Yes, we do have strains of religious hatred as are found anywhere else, but Panama is remarkably tolerant and is the only country other than Israel that has had two Jewish presidents --- Max Delvalle, the elected vice president who served briefly in 1968 when President Marcos Robles was impeached, and his nephew Eric Arturo Delvalle, who was installed and deposed as figurehead president by Manuel Antonio Noriega in 1987 and 1988 respectively.

Panama's first Jews? We have no good historical record of them because they were here illegally and could be tortured by priests and burned at the stake by civil authorities. They were the so-called "Crytpo-Jews," driven undeground by the Spanish Inquisition. Despite the Spanish crown's edict that all Jews and Muslims leave Spain and a subsequent ban against anyone with a Jewish or Muslim ancestor in the previous four generations emigrating to Spain's New World colonies, a lot of young people in those southern parts of Spain that were the last conquered from the Arabs had no future under the Catholic regime and did what they could to flee to the Americas. They were often helped by the newly installed Catholic aristocrats of southern Spain, who thus painlessly rid themselves of potential malcontents. There were a number of Jewish converts to Catholicism, some of whom may have privately held onto their Hebrew traditions, in the crews of Columbus's voyages of discovery.

But if Panama's first Jews feigned assimilation back in Spain in order to be allowed to move here, unlike today’s Panamanian Jewish community they tended to actually assimilate once in the Americas.

To be a Jew or a Muslim exposed as such in Panama in the 16th and 17th century would have meant trial before an Inquisition court, in Panama's early years in Lima and after 1610 in Cartagena. There were Jews prosecuted before these courts, but the main targets in Cartagena were African slaves who clung to Vodun or other West African religious traditions.

The Spanish Inquisition, religious wars and prisoners of conscience are parts

of Panama's religious legacy to ponder whenever you visit Fort San Lorenzo

By the time that the Inquisition courts were functioning in this part of the Americas, Bartolome de las Casas had published his famous expose on the oppression of the indigenous peoples by the Church and the Vatican had stripped the Inquisition of jurisdiction over the natives. With respect to indigenous communities, the Catholic Church moved to supplant local religions first by building churches on the places where communities had congregated for observances of their previous religions, and by, in addition to renaming places after Christian saints, co-opting pagan religious holidays by selecting a patron saint whose day coincided with a conquered community's important religious festival. The general massacre of indigenous resistance leaders and the importation of many indigenous slaves from Nicaragua and Venezuela by Pedrarias the Cruel also tended to disrupt indigenous languages, cultures and religions.

Those indigenous nations that fled to the hinterlands tended to keep their languages and religions. In the case of the Kunas, on the islands of the San Blas archipelago it was forbidden for any foreigner to sleep overnight on the islands or for any Catholic priest or missionary to set foot on the islands at any time for any reason. This ban on missionaries lasted until the early 20th century, when one aspect of the virtual American protectorate over the new Republic of Panama was an influx of mainly Protestant missionaries into Panama’s indigenous communities. The Baptists in particular gained a foothold among the Kunas, and other denominations have followed. To the west, the New Tribes Mission converted most the Bugle into born-agains, but their neighbors the Ngobe tended to retain their polygamous culture and some secretive and syncretist religions like the Mama Chis arose among them.

Only after the end of Spanish rule here did it become legal for Jews, Muslims or Protestants to exist in Panama.

The first openly Jewish residents were a mixture of "Portuguese" Sephardim and "English" Ashkenazim who came here from Jamaica shortly after independence from Spain.

The first Protestant church in Panama, and indeed on the Meso-American Isthmus, is Christ Church by the Sea, an Anglican church near the Washington Hotel in Colon that when it was founded in 1853 ministered to the British shipping community and American railroad managers. Three strains of Protestantism came, along with other religious influences, to Panama all at about the same time, for the building of the Panama Railroad: there were the mostly white Americans, the mostly black laborers from the British West Indies and the Chinese who mainly came from Guangzhou province but also in part came from the British crown colony of Hong Kong.

Along with the Chinese also came some Buddhism and the Confucian traditions that were not considered a religion as such that would conflict with Christianity. With time the Chinese began assimilating into Panamanian society and in many cases that meant into Catholicism. The Sacred Heart Chapel in Ancon is now home to a Chinese Catholic congregation.

Confucian filial piety in Panama City's Chinese cemetery

This legal immigration was not, however, Panama’s first experience with Protestant Christianity. Europe's religious wars of the Reformation were also fought on our soil. Francis Drake, by most accounts the exceptionally bigoted son of a Puritan farmer/preacher, considered his attacks on both sides of Panama as holy warfare against the Catholics. When Henry Morgan took Portobelo he used Catholic priests and nuns as his human shields in his attack of Fort San Geronimo, and when he took Fort San Lorenzo he massacred its defenders because they were Catholics.

(Were there any religious prisoners ever held in Fort San Lorenzo, which in addition to its use as a military bastion at the mouth of the Chagres River was from its inception in about 1575 until its abandonment in 1821 a Spanish prison? Surely after 1610 anyone being sent to Cartagena to face the Inquisition would have done time there waiting for the ship to that city, but to this reporter's knowledge that's a bit of Panamanian history about which nothing has been published. It is known, however, that Spain kept and in at least one instance executed Latin American independence activists as political prisoners there.)

Wars with religious overtones did not end in our region with the Reformation. In fact the struggle for Latin American independence was in part a struggle between free-thinking Masons, considered heretics by the Catholic Church from the time that it had suppressed the Knights Templar from which the movement arose, and the Holy See. The church received a share of Spain's revenue from its American colonies and freemasons like Simón Bolívar were inspired by the Enlightenment and would have had no use for an established state church even were the Vatican not aligned with the colonial system they were bent upon overthrowing.

Nor did the religious wars end with independence. In the 19th century independent Colombia, which then included Panama, saw seven major civil wars between Liberals and Conservatives. One of the perennial points of dispute in those never-ending wars was that the Conservatives wanted to make Catholicism the official state religion and the Liberals were for the separation of church and state.

Panama separated from Colombia shortly after the devastating 1000 Day War, with the Conservatives making the deal with the Americans and gaining control of the provisional government but the Liberals having more support in the country. Our constitutions have always recognized that Panama is a mainly Catholic country but have conceded that there will be freedom of religion. There has never been a strict separation of church and state, and the most notable examples of this has been the customary presence of the Catholic Archbishop of Panama at many important government ceremonies and the teaching of catechism in the public schools.

But with independence came the American canal effort, which in turn brought in an international work force and more religious diversity. Panama's Hindu and Muslim communities, initially arriving here by way of the then British colonies of Guyana and Trinidad-Tobago, first came as canal laborers. To this day most of the Hindus trace roots back to the states of Gujarat and Sindh, of India and Pakistan respectively. Many of the Muslims' ancestors also came from those places but that religious community has since been bolstered by Arabs arriving through South American countries and more recently by home-grown converts. There are also a few Sikhs in Panama, almost all of whom trace roots to the Punjab.

The canal made us a far more cosmopolitan place and virtually every important maritime and mercantile culture in the world set up shop here. One religious expression of this has been the establishment of a Greek Orthodox presence here. We also have Japanese Buddhists and practitioners of Shinto, and a Korean Protestant congregation with a church in Albrook.

Panama is also home to one of the major temples of the Bahai faith. Plus, despite the prolonged efforts of Christianity, remnants of West African religions such as Voodoo and Santeria exist here. We also have Mormon, Seventh Day Adventist and Rastafarian denominations here, and in many newsstands you can buy Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Spanish-language newspaper, Tiempos del Mundo.

Americans are notoriously fractious about religion, and the great racial fault line of American society expresses itself in black and white congregations. Because the Canal Zone was racially segregated this largely continued in the Zonian religious sphere, but those American congregations that have been too specifically white have mostly died out since Canal Zone times. Panama does have its racial divisions but the most important social fault line here is social class and most American denominations that have been successfully transplanted here are racially mixed because it didn’t occur to anyone that they shouldn’t be. There are, however, a number of black churches that retained that identity, and generally also with the use of Caribbean English, after the Canal Zone’s demise. Thus, for example, the Church of God in Christ, a black Pentacostalist denomination in its US home base, is a black church here, while the Assemblies of God, a white Pentacostalist denomination in the USA where it was founded, ministers to a mostly nonwhite congregation here.

Reverend Luis Veagra, of the liberal, English-speaking,

Protestant and interdenominational Balboa Union Church

at the Easter Sunrise service at the Afro-Antillean Museum

The fastest growing religions in Panama today, which generally attract people away from the Catholic fold, are the vigorously proselytizing Evangelical and Muslim denominations.

Panama's richest family, the Mottas, are Sephardic Jews. Muslims and Hindus are also represented among this country's rich and powerful. The Evangelicals are more numerous than the Jews, Muslims and Hindus combined, but wield less economic influence clout than any of those communities.

Holy Scriptures Month, however, is one example of the Evangelicals flexing their new political muscle, and the network of businesses (including broadcast networks) affiliated in one way or another with Panama City's Hosanna Temple is an example of their emerging collective economic power. Unlike in the United States, however, as a whole our Evangelicals are not particularly identified with any political party or ideology. (An Evangelical political party did contest the 1994 elections but attracted too few votes to retain its ballot status.)

In some places a mixture like Panama's would be explosive, but it's probably the strong Liberal tradition here, in its 19th century Colombian sense, that tempers our mainstream Catholicism with tolerant attitudes. Conflicts from other places --- Muslim and Hindu rivalries from the Indian subcontinent, the Hindu caste system, North American "culture wars," tensions between Arabs and Jews --- have not thrived when attempts have been made to transplant them here.

That, in the end, is why a few intellectuals politely object and most Panamanians just shrug it off as another silly political game when the legislators take on religious poses. We just don't have that much bigotry for politicians to exploit, if that's what they're trying to do. Nor are declarations from a body that nobody trusts likely to turn Panama into a nation that reads holy scriptures or anything else.