The train—or any public transportation—isn’t anyone’s pulpit
Remember the city buses that ran throughout EDSA? You know, right before the pandemic created the bus carousel in the inner lane? If you frequented them, you’d know that part of the Manila bus experience is the occasional Christian preacher—you’re sitting in your seat, waiting for your vehicle to pass the traffic and get to where you’re going, and they would take advantage of everyone being trapped to deliver a quick sermon about our souls and our salvation.
The old bus system made it ideal for the preachers to do their thing: get on the bus (some with their portable mic and speaker), rattle everyone, and then make a quick exit at the next possible stop. They probably couldn’t do that anymore with today’s EDSA buses making fixed and predetermined stops, and jeeps that are too tiny, cramped, and wobbly to effectively deliver a message.
That’s probably why Ronelyn dela Fuente, a Christian evangelist who’s steadily gaining clout on social media with her stories of preaching in various places, decided to take the act to the LRT-1—where she was promptly asked by a guard to stop, posthaste.
Good sister gone bad?
It was disruptive and not allowed, she was told. So she did what any reasonable Christian would do: dela Fuente posted a rant on her Facebook account, calling the Philippines “nakakaawa” (pitiful) for not letting her share her message of salvation and help people change their “evil ways.”
This naturally prompted a backlash on social media, calling the good sister insensitive, both in the sense of violating personal space and boundaries, and disrespecting other religious beliefs. People are already struggling as it is by taking public transportation and going about their days in the oppressive capital, many have argued, and dela Fuente’s preaching is only adding to the noise.
“The MRT is a shared public space. Every passenger enters that train for one reason, to get from one place to another. Some are exhausted after a long, exhausting shift. Some are preparing themselves for a difficult day ahead. Some are carrying problems nobody knows about. Others simply want silence for a few minutes before facing whatever awaits them.
“That peace deserves respect,” says netizen Kevin Francisco on a public Facebook post in response to dela Fuente. The sentiment was echoed by many others—despite being religious themselves.
Where it’s okay to preach
The problem really isn’t the preaching itself, but rather where and how dela Fuente did it.
It’s more than likely that she knew what she was doing, too. By effectively trapping the train riders there with her while she subjected them to the supposed Word of God, she knew she was forcing them to listen to her. And if they had their headphones on, she’d be adding to the noise they were already hearing. That’s why the guard was prudent enough to cut it shortly after dela Fuente began.
This isn’t a new thing, either—something similar happened in the US earlier this year, this time on a plane just before its takeoff. That was clearly a situation from which there was no escape.
Others have argued that it would have been fine if she did this in an open public space, where people are free to leave or walk on if they didn’t want to hear what she had to say. But of course, it would not have been as effective if no one was trapped with her—to the preacher, the whole point is you have to sit there and listen to this, or else you won’t be “saved.”
Annoying on purpose
This obnoxious behavior by dela Fuente (and many others like her) reminds me of this thing I read about cults—not to claim that whichever religious denomination she belongs to is a cult, only that the behavior is cultlike.
In this often-cited Tumblr post, the claim is that religious missionaries are deliberately trained to be as annoying as possible to non-believers to increase the chances of their rejection and ostracization by the people they aim to convert, intentionally feeding the Christian persecution complex and leading the hapless saps to believe that their own organization and in-group is the safe haven amid the cruel, cruel world.
While that particular claim isn’t fully reinforced by any academic or psychology studies, one look at dela Fuente and her social media presence—and her unapologetic lack of self-awareness for what she’s doing to other people—does imply that that is the playbook she’s running.
In fact, it’s closer to the Behavior, Information, Thought, and Emotional Control (BITE) model of authoritarian control proposed by author and mental health professional Dr. Steven Hassan—in particular, the emotional control part. Under emotional control, the members of the group are taught to fear the outside world (and independent thinking), which would naturally result in viewing the in-group as safe, comfortable, and familiar.
How to deal with preachers on public transport
So what do we do now? How do we deal with these people?
It seems that they won’t be changing their ways anytime soon, as again, the intent is to be as incendiary as possible. Whether they succeed in actually converting anyone to their side might be beside the point—perhaps they just want the optics of being “persecuted” by the rest of society.
That said, the best course of action seems to be just reporting them to an authority who can get them off the vehicle, especially if they know they shouldn’t be there. For maximum harmony, make sure you tell them that it’s not about disagreeing with the Word of God (or whoever); only that people want their peace and quiet, and it’s highly un-neighborly to intrude on their personal space and time.
You might even want to quote Jesus’ own words in Matthew 6:5: “And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others.”
And if they bristle at that mere, absolutely reasonable suggestion, then that’s between them and God.
