The clash that wasn’t
I’m often struck by the chasm between the significance of a country and the attention it receives in Western media. One classic example is Indonesia, a country in every sense writ large. With 250 million people, it is by far the world’s largest Muslim nation. In fact, it has about as many Muslims as all the Arab Middle East countries combined. Yet few indeed are the nonspecialist Americans who could tell you the slightest thing about the country.
Partly, this ignorance is a matter of history. With its Dutch heritage, the country (the old Dutch East Indies) never made as much impression on the English-speaking world as did, say, India. And in recent years, Indonesia has been blessed by a tranquillity that has kept it out of global headlines. Contrary to familiar generalizations about Islam, this huge Muslim country is a functioning democracy that rarely sees the kind of chaos that so regularly makes headlines in Pakistan or Nigeria. With a trillion dollar economy—larger than Australia’s—it is also increasingly prosperous. Also, amazingly, its flourishing Christian minority is enjoying an era of rapid growth.
Nobody can pretend that Indonesia is a monument to peace and tolerance. Historically, the country is no stranger to mass violence. Its war of independence in the 1940s was a savage racial conflict, and an anticommunist purge in 1965–66 claimed half a million lives. But both those spasms were driven by secular nationalism rather than religion.
On occasion, certainly, Islamic causes have sparked violence, and the country has had its vicious terror groups and hardline Islamist militias. In some parts of the country, like the islands of Sulawesi and the Malukus, Christians have suffered terrible persecutions and forced conversions. Generally, though, Indonesia’s powerful Muslim groups eschew extremism. The country is home to the world’s two largest Islamic movements, the progressive Muhammadiyah and the conservative Nahdlatul Ulama, which between them command an astonishing 70 million members. Both preach tolerance and obedience to law. In the Christmas season, their volunteers defend churches from terrorist attacks.
All of which helps explain just how well Indonesian Christians generally are doing. Christians make up at least 10 percent of the population—some 25 to 30 million people—giving Indonesia a substantially larger Christian community than the much better known Asian success story of South Korea. While some of these churches date their origins to missions in the Dutch colonial era, most of the recent growth involves very modern charismatic denominations of a kind that would not be out of place anywhere around the Pacific Rim.
Pentecostal movements have grown spectacularly, buoyed by revivals and healing crusades from the 1960s onward and boosted by claims to charismatic gifts. They also benefited from the general withdrawal from political activism following the suppression of communism. The Pentecostal Church of Indonesia has grown from perhaps half a million members in 1980 to 3 or 4 million today.
The country’s most visible Christian entrepreneur is Stephen Tong, founder of the Indonesian Reformed Evangelical Church, which despite its name has much in common with the Pentecostal worship style. In 2008, the church opened its Messiah Cathedral in Jakarta, a classic megachurch seating 6,000, a grandiose structure that would not look out of place in Seoul or Singapore. Other megachurches flourish in Jakarta and in Surabaya, the country’s second city. Whatever may be happening elsewhere in the country, these urban Christians show no concern about hiding their activities out of fear of provoking persecution.
Despite the tolerance that has allowed the megachurches to boom, local authorities have been stingy in granting Christians the right to build new places of worship. In practice, this has caused many Christians to focus their activities on private house churches and in shopping malls, making mall churches a distinctively Indonesian contribution to Christian architecture. But even in the face of this bureaucratic obstacle race, churches persist.
It’s an open question how long Indonesian Christians can enjoy their present prosperity, and there are some worrying signs. By far the most active Christian leaders tend to belong to the Chinese minority, whom majority Indonesians sometimes scapegoat as greedy exploiters. When the nation’s economy stalls, as it did in the late 1990s, it is not difficult to mobilize attacks on Chinese (and thus on Christians, given that the faith has such a strong ethnic identification). If Indonesia suffered another economic downturn, we could easily expect a new wave of pogroms and anti-Christian violence. If that were to occur, the most likely perpetrators would be the militia group the Islamic Defenders Front, which already has an ugly track record. In theory, matters could deteriorate fast.
Yet Christians are doing far better than the normal stereotypes of interfaith tension would suggest. Somehow, newspapers never publish banner headlines announcing “World’s Largest Muslim State Fails to Persecute Christians” or “Civilizations Not Clashing!”
Comments
Letters to CC replied on Permalink
Letter from Paul Rader
While Indonesia’s Christian minority is indeed enjoying an era of rapid growth, Philip Jenkins blithely passes over the very conditions that his article “The clash that wasn’t” (July 11) says are not occurring. Pay attention to his use of the present perfect rather than present tense: “On occasion, certainly, Islamic causes have sparked violence, and the country has had its vicious terror groups and hard-line Islamist militias. In some parts of the country, like the islands of Sulawesi and the Malukus, Christians have suffered terrible persecutions and forced conversions.”
A more nearly complete picture of Christian-Muslim relations in Indonesia is found in Eliza Griswold’s The Tenth Parallel. Griswold reviews the often violent conflicts between Christians and Muslims from Nigeria in the West to the Philippines in the East. Of Indonesia she writes, “More than 400 churches in Indonesia have been bombed, burned, or forced to close by Islamic militants in recent years. It is virtually impossible for Christians to build new churches in Muslim areas. Under a law instituted in 2006, Christians may not open a new church unless certain conditions are met: there must be at least 90 church members living in the neighborhood, 60 Muslims in the neighborhood must sign a petition in favor of the new church, and the government must issue a permit. Needless to say, the government rarely does so.”
More disheartening, though, are the accounts of the massacres each side has inflicted on the other. For instance, dozens of Christians in the village of Sepe were murdered in December 2000. In retaliation, the Muslim village of Walisongo was burned. The Islamic Defenders Force routinely calls for holy war against Christian infidels; Christian publications compare Christian-Muslim relations with David and Goliath and encourage Christians to rise up and kill Goliath.
I would not call Christian-Muslim relations in Indonesia “the clash that wasn’t.” Call it “the clash that hasn’t been as bad as it could be” or “the clash that no one knows about.” But don’t contribute to the notion that it hasn’t happened--and isn’t happening still.
Paul Rader
Knoxville, Tenn.
Letters to CC replied on Permalink
Philip Jenkins replies:
Paul Rader makes fair points, and if he looks at the cover of the Griswold book he cites, he will see that I offered it a rave review. The kind of violence he stresses is also discussed at some length in successive editions of my own book The Next Christendom. I would be a fool to ignore this context, and I did not do so in this column.
Still, what amazes me is that, however delicately and nervously, Indonesia’s Christians survive and flourish, under conditions that would seem incredible in the West. And sane, reasonable Muslims go far in accounting for that reality.
John Tuggy replied on Permalink
Paul's valid points also need
Paul's valid points also need to be put into the context of, well, Indonesia itself: given the immense size, complexity, diversity, continuing poverty and resultant weak institutions of the state (police force, court systems) in Indonesia, the tensions and violence between Christians and Muslims (which are often ethic conflicts, first and foremost) is a bit more understandable. I offer this as an explanation, of course, not a justification.
Imagine if, here in the USA, we had Christians and Muslims scattered across 6000 islands (and another 12,000 or so for criminals & trouble makers to hide in), the the government at all levels working to ensure peace. And doing so with less that 5% of the resources that the US government has. That is Indonesia.