This paper focuses on the Basic Christian Communities in the Philippines that work to counter human and environmental rights violations resulting from macro-economic development processes. While not every activist-led and mass-based people’s movement includes critical environmental issues on their agendas for social change, this paper directs its attention to the progressive Basic Christian Community movement that incorporates an environmentally concerned and team-oriented approach to problem solving at the local level. This movement is part of an international bottom-up effort to counteract some of the negative effects of global capitalism (e.g., the fragmentation of close-knit communities that were once based on sharing and the commoditization of natural and social life). The article delineates the non-dogmatic post Marxist ideology and liberation theology behind the progressive side of the Philippine Basic Christian Community movement and then examines one Basic Christian Community structure. Finally it argues that the Basic Christian Community provides a more viable approach to solving the Philippine poverty and environmental problem than top-down capitalist integration theory has to offer.

Author: Kathy Nadeau

Published by: Urban Anthropology (2005)