If you do not know, Philippines is heavily Catholic. 85 million individuals are Catholics in The Philippines and that makes up 78.8% of the country. A lot of the laws and beliefs in the country are influenced by the Catholic church. Even matters like divorce and LGBT rights are decided with the influence of the religion.
The reason why religion is getting a voice on many issues is that the politicians do not want to anger the hierarchy within the church because they are going to lose support at election time. The Roman Catholic Church still has an impact on the voting populace.
There is a law that separates state and religion. Unfortunately, on pressing issues, the religions are voicing their concern or want to be relevant to the problem.
When it comes to voting, religion has more impact to the success of any politician especially those that have huge support for religious leaders. That alone had made many bad and selfish politicians to keep sponsoring religious activities without any interest of working on themselves to become a leader with great epitome in the society.
Greed has been one of the problem of humans that had made us to keep sweeping the truth under the carpet. I don't think if religion has anything to do with gambling because their are so many religions that frown at it and never support their members to gamble. This has been one of the reason why gambling is not for everyone, we ought to stay out of it if we know that we choose religion over earthly things and activities like gambling.