Abstract
This chapter addresses the religious heterogeneity of Javanese society today. It delineates the co-evolution of Christianity and Islam in Java from the nineteenth century to the current democratic period—specifically, the interaction between Christian and Muslim organizations that are striving to achieve indigenous goals of modernity and prosperity in their respective religious idioms. Based on a critical genealogy of the mutual influence and competition between Islamizers and Christianizers, I outline the historically unprecedented present—the children of Javanist Muslims have become orthodox Muslims, whereas a great number of the offspring of mainline Protestants are becoming born-again Christians.
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Notes
- 1.
Hamka, “Beberapa tantangan terhadap Islam dimasa ini,” Pandji Masjarakat Year 4, no. 50, 1970, pp. 3–5.
- 2.
Field notes, November 27, 2009.
- 3.
Field notes, November 27, 2009.
- 4.
“Nusantara” is a Sanskrit loan word, meaning “between islands,” which refers to today’s maritime Southeast Asia.
- 5.
Cornelius van Vollenhoven’s compendia on indigenous tradition in the Netherlands Indies (1936).
- 6.
- 7.
This was a Dutch government policy in the mid-nineteenth century for its East Indies colony that required a portion of agricultural production to be devoted to export crops. Indonesian historians in general refer to it as “Compulsory Planting”.
- 8.
Prior to the European domination over the region, many Western and Muslim outsiders had portrayed the Malay archipelago as “united by an Indic tradition that had accommodated the recent advent of Islam” (Laffan 2003, 15). According to Laffan, at the societal level, whether people’s parents were Javanese, Chinese, Indian, or Arab, as long as they converted to Islam, they could freely mix in and became Jawi, the “race” of Muslims “from Persia to the Philippines” (ibid., 14).
- 9.
- 10.
In addition to Dutch missionary societies, there was a non-confessional Salatiga mission supported by Dutch and German evangelizers. Each of them only had a few hundreds converts, except one that had several thousand.
- 11.
Since the outcome of the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), the impressive success of Japan once led some Indies intellectuals to entertain the possibility that the ascendant Japanese could convert to Islam and help guard the Muslim world against European oppression (Laffan 2003, 162). A few decades later, when the Japanese fleet defeated the allegedly impregnable British strongholds from Malaya and Singapore to Ceylon and Sri Lanka in three months in 1942, the Indies subjects further realized one thing: Asians could overthrow Europeans, as long as they were equally modernized (Osborne 1985). In the end, the Japanese did not convert to Islam. But they did help Indonesians ward off the Dutch return after World War II.
During the three years of Japanese rule that began in 1942, Indonesians achieved a greater degree of political organization than had ever been seen under the Dutch. Political mobilization was implemented down to the village level. Much of what would become the first Indonesian military was trained by the Japanese authority. Sukarno and Hatta, the president and vice-president-to-be, were released from the Dutch prison and given positions of leadership by the Japanese government. It was guaranteed now that, even if the Dutch returned—which they did in 1945 in outright violation of the principle of self-determination, the Dutch would be greeted with a revolutionary army (Osborne 1985).
- 12.
Field notes, April 13, 2010.
- 13.
For parallel phenomena in the Middle East, see Eickelman and Piscatori (2004, 131).
- 14.
Field notes, January 22, 2010.
- 15.
Following Cox (1995, 310), Riesebrodt (1993, 45–46), and Robbins (2004b, 123), I separate Christian fundamentalism, which emphasizes the authority of the Bible in a literalist command to live by a strict ethical code and reject the belief in unmediated human contact with the Holy Spirit, from Pentecostalism, in which believers receive the gifts of the Holy Spirit and obtain ecstatic experiences such as speaking in tongues, healing, and prophesying.
- 16.
The earliest presence of “classical” Pentecostalism in Indonesia can be traced to the missionizing of the Bethel Temple church from Seattle, USA, in 1921. Pentecostalism remained a marginal denomination, although limited evidence suggested that there was an impressive growth due to the convergence between the post-1965 mass conversion and the arrival of US-based neo-Pentecostal movements in the 1970s
- 17.
It is clear that the streams within Christianity are no less heterogeneous than those flowing in Islam. In addition to Catholic churches, mainline churches, and the rising Pentecostal congregations, there are also smaller communities of Seventh-day Adventists, Baptists, and Mennonites. It is too early to say whether mainline ethnic churches will be buried in the new trend. What is certain, however, is that all of them have felt the influence of Pentecostalism.
- 18.
Between 1998 and 2003, when the central government was seemingly weak and when social order was disrupted by the Asian Financial Crisis, a cascade of severe ethno-religious violence broke out, and some small towns in Sulawesi and the Maluku islands virtually experienced a civil war between Muslims and Christians (Van Klinken 2007). In Java, paramilitary groups were formed in a response to the multi-dimensional crisis. These groups were, before the socio-economic turbulence, apolitical religious movements calling for a return to the Qu’ran and Sunna in the mid-1980s.This is related to the Salafiyya (purification) movement, found in the Middle East since the 1970s, which has its roots back in the eighteenth century. As the New Order collapsed, some of them soon mutated into militants and radicals (Hasan 2006). Some, such as the notorious Laskar Jihad, even went so far as to send members to the Ambon civil war to help local Muslims combat the Christian force in 2000 and enforced a rajm (stoning) sentence against a member who committed rape in Ambon in 2001, as proof that they were ready for the implementation of shari’a. Related studies have demonstrated the ways in which the influx of Saudi ideology coupled with partially state-led radicalization of Islam were engineered to split the pro-democracy Muslim social movements, and the effects of these ultra-conservative movements continued even after the authoritarian regime collapsed (Hefner 2000). As a result, in the realm of civil society the Indonesia public experienced a rise of extreme Muslims who openly and proudly distinguished themselves from mainstream Muslim organizations—particularly the NU and Muhammadiyah.
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Chao, EC. (2017). Generating Religiosities. In: Entangled Pieties. Contemporary Anthropology of Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48420-4_2
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