Freedom of religion in Panama

A bulletin board with Catholic religious messages at a public elementary school in Macaracas, Los Santos

Here in Panama we don't have the First Amendment to the US Constitution, part of which provides that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...."

However, as a place that once had the Spanish Inquisition and later was afflicted by decades of Colombian warfare over, among other things, whether Roman Catholicism should be the official religion of the state, Panama did come to certain decisions when it became an independent country in 1903.

One of these was a compromise between the Conservatives who were the leaders of the coup to separate from Colombia and the Liberals who represented the majority of Panamanians at that time. We would more or less recognize that Panama is an overwhelmingly Catholic country, but we would have religious freedom.

In practice that means that the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Panama is present at many of the government's important ceremonial functions, that the government often calls upon the church to mediate disputes, that the Catholic hierarchy's political pronouncements rarely single out any politician for criticism, that the Catholic media don't provide a forum for the government's critics and that catechism is taught in the public schools, with the proviso that kids may opt out if their parents don't care to have them raised Catholic.

(Here we don't have people complaining that we wouldn't have breakdowns of families, public morals, social order and general civility if only there were prayer in the public schools. We know better. We have all of those things.)

Meanwhile we have had a couple of Jewish presidents and a number of other chief executives who weren't practicing Catholics. Other religions are free to worship and seek converts. Evangelical Protestants and Muslims have been particularly vigorous and successful in their proselytism. Below we see one sign of that, the mosque in Chitre.

Photos and caption by Eric Jackson

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