At 4 a.m. on August 24, 2024, in the mountains outside of Davao City on the southern island of Mindanao, 2,000 members of the Philippine National Police encircled the walled compound of a man who calls himself “the Appointed Son of God.” The 42-room headquarters of the Kingdom of Jesus Christ, the Name Above All Names, Inc., was a fortress that inspired both faith and fear. Police were there to arrest Apollo Quiboloy, the church’s founder, who holds divine aspirations and has close ties to a mighty political dynasty. The ensuing siege would last for over two weeks. By the end, scores were injured, one man was dead, and the deep rift between the nation’s two most powerful families widened even further.
The police were there to put an end to a vast global criminal enterprise led by the messianic leader who claims seven million followers, though police say the figure is more like 8,000. At the time of his arrest, he was wanted by authorities in both the Philippines and United States on charges of sexual abuse, drug smuggling, and human trafficking.
This standoff carried within it two populist legacies: that of Apollo Quiboloy and that of former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte and his daughter, Sara Zimmerman Duterte-Carpio, the country’s current Vice President. Quiboloy and Duterte senior both rose to prominence in 1980s Davao City, then known as a crucible of violence and left-wing insurgency. Over time, they built vast networks of power and influence. Their ascent was intertwined — and so too would be their unraveling.
In March of 2024, the Philippine senate summoned Quiboloy, then 74, to appear before an inquiry into his empire. Rodrigo Duterte, Quiboloy’s friend and long-time ally, had publicly urged the preacher to “get arrested” and let the situation play out. Both had decades of experience in power politics. Both knew how to work the system to their advantage. Quiboloy issued a statement that he would be willing to turn himself in if the government provided written assurance that he would not be turned over to the United States.
Three months later, when authorities tried to serve the first of several warrants on the pastor, he was nowhere to be found. His followers blasted police with water cannons. Quiboloy claimed he was the victim of a U.S. and Filipino government conspiracy to assassinate him, and posted an audio message to YouTube, promising “I will not be caught alive.”
His defiance echoed a familiar script in the modern Charismatic Christian playbook: a populist, right-wing persecution complex, where powerful religious leaders take on Jesus’ oppression as their own. Casting themselves as victims of a hostile, secular elite across continents, pastors with private jets and media empires insist they are modern-day martyrs. From American social media evangelists railing against “woke” institutions to African prophets accusing governments of conspiring with demons, this narrative turns legitimate scrutiny into spiritual warfare. In this worldview, to be investigated is to be crucified; to be arrested is to be sanctified. Quiboloy’s rhetoric — framing FBI warrants and Senate inquiries as attacks on God himself — slots him neatly into a global theology of persecution as proof of virtue.
On that humid August morning, his words were more than rhetoric. Surrounded by a police force the size of a small town, Quiboloy seemed prepared to turn the siege into standoff reminiscent of Waco. The PNP forces moved in, guided on the phone from Minnesota by Arlene Stone, a former disciple who had risen through the ranks to become a “pastoral” — one of the inner circle of young women who led aggressive evangelism and fundraising efforts. Often, their role extended to what was known as “night duty,” where they were expected to service Quiboloy’s sexual whims in obedience to “God’s will.”
The complex quickly filled with devoted members who got news of the raid. Supporters said that authorities were disrespecting “sacred grounds” and demanded they leave. Late the following night, the police set off tear gas. The scene turned violent — the church claimed that 16 protesters were injured in the first battle, while the police claimed six, with four being hospitalized. A church watchtower guard, who had reportedly gone days without sleep, died of cardiac arrest.
As the days went on, waves of fresh police officers arrived, met by increasingly defiant church members. Twenty-nine were arrested, but authorities still couldn’t locate Quiboloy. Even after three attempts, police were only able to search about half the compound. They discovered the existence of a complex underground cave system where Quiboloy was likely hiding. More troubling, there was a guard of human shields that showed no signs of surrendering.
Nor were Quiboloy’s powerful political patrons showing any signs of backing down. Six days into the siege, Vice President Sara Duterte arrived at the memorial for the deceased watchtower guard and accused the government of “demonizing” Quiboloy. In the Philippines, the President and Vice President are elected separately. However, Sara Duterte had been elected on the “UniTeam” ticket with Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos, Jr — the son of Ferdinand Marcos, a dictator who served as President from 1965 to 1986 — thus uniting the country’s two most powerful political families.
Now, that marriage of convenience was breaking down. Authorities pursued the warrants for Quiboloy’s arrest following the “dramatic collapse of the coalition between the President and Duterte family,” says Robbin M. Dagle, a lecturer at Ateneo de Manila University. “It was part of that proxy war.” A rift behind the scenes had come out in the open after the Vice-President, usually a largely ceremonial role, had sought powerful ministry positions to enact her own policy agendas. Prosecuting her family’s powerful patron was understood by many as more than upholding the rule of law.
Sara Duterte showed that her loyalty was to the family dynasty — and therefore, the embattled preacher — and not whatever was left of the governing alliance. The next day, she apologized to Quiboloy’s supporters for backing President Marcos in the 2022 election that brought them both to power. The Appointed Son of God had confirmation that the Dutertes were fully in his corner.
On September 3rd, police began digging into the cave system underneath the complex. The next day, Quiboloy issued a series of threats and demands against the Duterte and Marcos families. In response, police gave a 24-hour ultimatum: come out, or we will come in. Quiboloy and four senior female accomplices voluntarily surrendered. They were charged with human trafficking and the sex trafficking of women and children.
He was wanted for the same offences by the United States, where Quiboloy commands a following as a Christ-like figure among sections of the large Filipino diaspora in California and Hawaii. Federal prosecutors accused him of running a decades-long criminal enterprise that trafficked followers into the country using fake visas and forced marriages. Once there, members had their passports confiscated and were allegedly made to “solicit donations for a bogus charity,” the proceeds used to fund the church and the “lavish lifestyles of its leaders.”
Their surrender averted a massacre, but the siege still injured over 100 people, including 60 police officers and at least 54 church members, and led to the death of the watchman. The more telling blow, however, came afterwards. One day after Quiboloy’s surrender, President Marcos went on television and said that any belief that he had received guarantees that the country would not cooperate with US extradition requests was due to his misunderstanding of the legal process. Whether he could be handed over to the United States was “in the court's hands." For all of the preacher’s power and patronage, he would not receive any special treatment. The precise role of the United States in his arrest remains unclear. Pressure from Washington was undoubtedly present, but the political rift between the Duterte and Marcos families appears the more decisive factor. “Nothing happens coincidentally in politics here,” Dagle says.
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Quiboloy was born in Davao in 1950 to Pentecostal parents, a rarity in a largely Catholic country. They belonged to a Oneness Pentecostalism church, a sect with early American missionary roots which rejects the Trinity of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. They believed that there is only one God, Jesus Christ — something which would prove critical to Quiboloy’s later messianic theology.
During his birth, Quiboloy’s mother saw God sitting on a cloud. He told her: “That is my son.” Night turned to day as young Apollo emerged into the world. At 14, he had an End Times prophecy of a world on fire at the Second Coming of Christ. Charismatic in both the spiritual and personal sense, he was dubbed a “preaching machine” at Bible college. But the young preacher’s unorthodox views pushed the boundaries of the institutional church. After a number of disputes with church elders, in 1985, he struck out on his own with just 15 followers and founded the Kingdom of Jesus Christ.
Quiboloy’s personal style of preaching quickly attracted more. Arlene Stone, who was recruited in 1991 at the age of 15, describes him as “charming,” with a distinct ability to “draw people’s emotion” through his way with words. He was such a skilled preacher, she says, that to listen to him is to “actually believe these words as though it's what Jesus was saying.”
The new members of Quiboloy’s church were also drawn to his grandiose spiritual claims. According to Jayeel Cornelio, a sociologist of religion who has closely studied Quiboloy’s movement, the preacher’s unique theology revolves around the claim that by sacrificing his life to God, he uprooted the “serpent seed,” or man’s sin of disobedience. “When he surrendered his will fully to the Father, he became effectively a son of God,” Cornelio says. Quiboloy does not claim to be the begotten Son of God — that position is still occupied by Jesus Christ –— but rather his appointed son. He is effectively following in Christ’s footsteps — blurring the line between preacher and messiah. It’s a common thread in the global Pentecostal movement, where spiritual authority often hinges on personal anointing.
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Pentecostalism grew out of a series of religious revivals in the United States in the early 20th century. Worshippers at these meetings believed that they had experienced baptism in the Holy Spirit, which granted them spiritual gifts like divine healing — or, more famously, speaking in tongues. At this time, most other Christians believed that these supernatural spiritual gifts had been granted to worshippers in the early church, but no longer existed in the modern world.
Early Pentecostals emphasized experiential holiness over material prosperity. But in the next few decades, preachers like Oral Roberts began to teach that the gifts of the Holy Spirit did not have to be entirely spiritual. Faith healing had always been an aspect of Charismatic Christianity, and it was soon joined by the prosperity gospel: the idea that faith — or, just as often, donations to the church — would be rewarded by riches. Prosperity gospel preachers promise followers good things in the here and now, as well as the hererafter.
While Pentecostals were initially marginalized, their beliefs started to penetrate more mainstream American Protestant denominations in the 1960s. Then, in the 1970s and 1980s, globalization brought this new wave of Christianity to the developing world. In 1970, there were 58 million Pentecostals and Charismatics in the world. Today, there are 700 million. The movement’s message of personal empowerment and material uplift resonated deeply with many of the world’s poorest people. With a focus on magnetic individual leaders — often skilled media performers — rather than traditional institutions, it offered a more immediate and invigorating way of “doing church.”
The boom has replicated across cultures. In Brazil, home to the world’s largest Catholic population, Charismatic-Pentecostals surged from just 3% in 1980 to over 30% today. It’s become the faith of the favelas, where people working multiple jobs at ungodly hours can attend services from sunrise to midnight and can be seen placing their wallets on Bibles and praying for relief. In Nigeria, the movement exploded in the aftermath of civil war and successive economic crises, offering promises of health and wealth that stood in stark contrast to the failures of the state and the stagnation of traditional churches. It was a similar story in the Philippines, where widespread disenchantment with the political order and the Catholic Church’s entrenched role in society left many souls ripe for renewal.
Quiboloy built his following through both prophecy and performance: claims of everyday miracles, promises of prosperity, and an unshakable belief in his own divinity. Followers recall “miracle rain” where they stayed dry despite a downpour, heavenly fragrances wafting around the preacher, divine protection, and answered prayers. He offered — and asked — everything of a garden-variety health-and-wealth preacher, and then some. And after freeing himself from accountability by leaving denominational strictures, as most in the Spirit-led tradition now tend to do, he became a classic case of a Charismatic preacher gone rogue.
Quiboloy grew his church and media ministry, amassing properties and personal wealth. By the mid-1990s, he was a televangelist of national renown, specializing in charming poor and desperate young women — often converts from staid and bureaucratic Catholicism. At its core, the prosperity gospel is the concept that if you sow material blessings through your faith, you reap a harvest in return. The more you put in, the more you get back. For a rogue preacher like Quiboloy, it was not enough to claim he was divinely appointed. He had to show it. The rule for prosperity preachers is that “if you can name it, you can claim it.” The promotion you just got? Reward for tithing to church each week. Your mother’s recovery from illness? A special blessing from the pastor who has a direct line to God, the Almighty speaking to him and through him.
It’s why, Cornelio says, “Quiboloy's church embodies success in different forms: his religious compound, his garden paradise, his school, and his media empire.” KOJC’s compound was a manicured Eden, while its media arm, Sonshine Media Network International (SMNI), offered slick and ever-present television and radio broadcasts. He was the embodiment of everything he preached — and the more people gave, the more he prospered. And the more he prospered, the more they believed.
In time, Quiboloy attracted a band of followers devoted enough to subjugate themselves to him entirely. The siege confirmed that many were prepared to lay down their lives for him. True believers weren’t only in Davao City or the Philippines — KOJC found a significant following among the nation’s diaspora working in foreign countries. Charismatic preachers are popular among foreign workers, for much the same reason that prosperity gospel tends to appeal to poor and marginalized communities around the world. Ideas of a better life can quickly take root within these small communities of people who rely on each other for material as well as cultural and spiritual nourishment, and work hard to send much of their income to family back home.
Quiboloy, and his Kingdom of Jesus Christ, built on this natural appeal in these communities with high pressure tactics to gain recruits. Filipino domestic workers in Singapore said that KOJC pressured them to tithe 90% of their incomes to their new “family,” and in particular, their new “Father.” Arlene Stone says that she didn’t “realize that when we joined the church and became a full time worker, we also gave up our freedom.” She and her sister came from a poor family. Recruited after their father passed away, they joined the church thinking that it would provide “salvation of our soul” as well as a better future, because “they promised that they will send us to school.” Stone was particularly captivated by his End Times prophecy that Jesus would return on New Year’s Eve, 1999. As is so often the case, the recruitment message was filled with urgency. Not long after joining, they were trafficked to “different parts of the Philippines to beg for money on the street — day in and out.” She recalls being “lucky if we had, like, four hours of sleep,” often left to sleep outdoors and retreating to church buildings for a shower before returning to the fold.
The considerable funds raised by Quiboloy’s recruits were used to pay for his Mindanao compound, and fund an increasingly lavish lifestyle of private jets and overseas homes. Converts were told that Quiboloy had been appointed “Owner of the Universe” and visited the biblical Apostle Paul, who not only congratulated him for his good work but regularly took him on trips to heaven. They learned that he had personally defeated Lucifer, and on April 13, 2005, Quiboloy became “the official coming of the Son of God.” In 2019, after a 6.6 magnitude earthquake had rocked the region but resulted in relatively few deaths, Quiboloy said that he had “yelled at it” to stop. People should, he said, “thank me for stopping the earthquake because otherwise many of you would be dead.”
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The Appointed Son’s rise was not thanks to God’s favor alone. It also had something to do with the political rise of Rodrigo Duterte, who would later say of Quiboloy that he “doesn’t have other friends” — at least, not a “friend he can really trust.” The foul-mouthed, iron-fisted future President was born into an influential Mindanao political family in 1945, and was working his way up in the province as a city prosecutor when the regime of Ferdinand Marcos senior — and his infamous shoe-collecting wife Imelda — was overthrown in the People Power revolution of 1986.
Appointed vice-mayor of Davao City in the aftermath, Duterte was narrowly elected mayor two years later. A controversial but popular figure, with a distinctly brash style, he waged a war on drugs which resulted in a wave of extrajudicial killings. Duterte later said he had had no qualms about “slaughtering” three million drug addicts in the country” and complained that people said he “was a cousin of Hitler.” He later apologized — not for the killings, but for the Hitler reference — stating that Israel was his arms supplier of choice.
Unlike most politicians in a pious, Rome-bound nation, Duterte harboured a personal hatred of the Catholic Church, stemming from abuse he suffered as a child from an American priest who was later convicted for his horrific crimes. He became infamous for calling both Pope Francis and President Obama “sons of whores.” Personally, he wasn’t especially religious and felt that God was "stupid" for permitting the serpent to tempt Eve in the Bible. He paid no heed to Catholic clergy who criticized him for his indiscriminate killings of alleged drug dealers and addicts. But Duterte needed a veneer of spiritual respectability, which Quiboloy was all too happy to provide. In turn, the mayor cast a protective net over Quiboloy’s burgeoning empire and regularly appeared at KOJC churches to recruit the faithful to his cause.
Duterte and Quiboloy had come together when they were both on the rise, a bond that was less about divine beliefs than temperament and political expediency. Both were sons of the southern island, looked down upon by those in the capital. Both were adored and feared in equal measures as authoritarian populists with messianic stylings. According to Dagle, while the Philippine constitution calls for a “benevolent accommodation” of religion, rather than a Jeffersonian separation of church and state, the relationship between Duterte and Quiboloy “is a perversion” of the idea. It led to a “politician trying to cover for the alleged land grabbing” of the church, while the preacher provided “spiritual legitimacy” to Duterte’s political ambitions. The mutually beneficial arrangement became an enduring friendship, and by the time Rodrigo Duterte ran for President in 2016, he was using Quiboloy’s private jet to transport him to mass rallies around the nation.
While Duterte was gaining plaudits for his tough-on-crime stance among the movement that has been dubbed the “reactionary international” — President Trump congratulated him for his “unbelievable job on the drug problem” — Quiboloy was advancing his international business empire. A second Eden had been constructed in Hawaii, where the preacher was increasingly enjoying the fruits of other people’s labor. In 2018, U.S. authorities searched Quiboloy’s private jet as he was trying to leave the island and discovered $350,000 in neatly folded $100 bills stuffed inside socks, along with military-grade rifles. They also found a “pastoral” woman on board, who claimed that it was all hers.
The silence had been broken, however, and women continued to come forward. In 2021, Quiboloy was indicted in California. His former aide turned whistleblower, Arlene Stone, was a star witness. Her sister, who had joined the church with her when they were teens and never left, denounced her in videos distributed by church social media.
While God’s Anointed Son was under investigation, so too was the former President. Duterte had stepped down peacefully — and unexpectedly — in 2022, with the family deciding to enter into a strategic alliance with Marcos to maintain national prominence from their southern base. There were also whispers that the family needed a political shield in the event Rodgrigo Duterte faced charges for his time in office. The former President continued to hold rallies at home and abroad, hurling his trademark insult — “sons of whores” — at International Criminal Court investigators. Their relationship went well beyond pastor and politician: when Quiboloy went into hiding, Duterte was named the official administrator of the KOJC’s substantial property holdings.
Duterte believed he had not only the new Messiah in his corner but secular power, too. As President, he had pulled the Philippines out of the ICC — an institution regarded as biased toward prosecuting developing world leaders. President Marcos, whose father was exiled to Hawaii after the revolution, upheld that stance, vowing not to cooperate with or recognize the ICC.
But in 2023, the court resumed its long-delayed investigation into Duterte’s bloody record, both as President and mayor of Davao City. By late 2024, with the ruling coalition split, Marcos changed course, saying he would no longer block the ICC — if Duterte was serious about his own dramatic offer to face justice. “I have nothing to hide,” Duterte told a congressional hearing. “What I did, I did for my country and for the young people. No excuses. No apologies. If I go to hell, so be it.”
Duterte was arrested in March of 2025 after returning from a rally at a KOJC church in Hong Kong. Even though he had maintained a strong base among the diaspora, like his ally, the former President found that he could no longer run from international authorities. Duterte was indicted for crimes against humanity, and became the first Asian indicted by the Court, which was supported by his old foes in the Catholic Church.
The question remains whether Duterte, much like Quiboloy, was detained due to pressure from the United States, or domestic political maneuvering. But unlike the preacher, his earthly power base proved itself resilient. In May this year, the wily political patriarch was re-elected in a landslide as mayor of Davao City from his prison cell in the Hague. Duterte’s youngest son, Sebastian, the incumbent mayor, was elected as his deputy and is expected to be his proxy.
The fates of Davao’s two prodigal sons — who for years blurred the line between church and state — once again proved inseparable. Now, they are both steadfast that they are being persecuted by secular authorities: on the one hand, it's a sign of divine holiness; on the other, confirmation of political righteousness.
Apollo Quiboloy is more than a Filipino cult leader: he’s a case study in how religion, politics, and crime are colliding in the 21st century. Having built a transnational empire from California to Qatar, he highlights that this new breed of messianic authoritarians is less about one man, and more about the changing nature of a strain of evangelical Christianity that doesn’t just want to save souls but remake the world in its image. The siege may be over, but the reckoning has only just begun.
