Religious Pluralism in Indonesia by Chiara Formichi;

Author:Chiara Formichi;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)
Published: 2021-09-23T00:00:00+00:00

References

Nugroho, Wisnu, ed. 2018. Ahok dan Hal-hal yang Belum Terungkap. Jakarta: Gramedia Pustaka Utama, 2018.

Santosa, Agus. 2014. The Jokowi Secrets: Bagaimana Kepemimpinan Sederhana Menyelesaikan Masalah-masalah Tak Sederhana. Yogyakarta: Gradien Mediatama.

Santosa, Agus. 2016. Ahok: Hargaku Adalah Nyawaku. Jakarta: Gramedia Pustaka Utama, 2016.

7

REGULATING RELIGION AND RECOGNIZING “ANIMIST BELIEFS” IN INDONESIAN LAW AND LIFE

Lorraine V. Aragon

This volume on religious pluralism reconsiders and dignifies the concept of animism by framing it as a parallel category to Indonesia’s six official religions: Buddhism, Catholicism, Confucianism, Hinduism, Islam, and Protestantism. Chiara Formichi’s proposal, which includes the term “Animism” (capitalized) within a list of the nationally recognized religions, in neutral alphabetic order, was remarkable. Such an inclusive classification only became imaginable, or even possible, in late 2017 when Indonesia’s Supreme Constitutional Court (Mahkamah Konstitusi or MK) ruled that the 2013 Law on Civil Administration’s specification that only official religions could be listed on citizens’ identity cards is discriminatory. In this chapter I begin to explore the complex background and implications of the 2017 legal decision for religious pluralism and parity in Indonesia. I show how the court ruling unsettles prior legal policies, which have been motivated by Dutch colonial, Cold War, and Muslim majoritarian interests that solidified particular categorical assumptions about religion and citizenship. More often than not, state policies and clerics have diminished and distanced ancestral cosmologies and minority ritual practices despite observed counterexamples where ordinary citizens have achieved advantages by cooperation through religious differences.

In the sections below, I use a variety of Indonesian historical, legal, ethno-graphic, and media examples to illustrate how state policies and actions work to control and undercut the expression of minority traditions deemed threatening to national uniformity or majoritarian precedence. The examples also highlight instances where many ordinary Indonesians, bound together through cross-cutting local ties, show ready acceptance of religious diversity, including their elders’ ancestral practices. Historical analyses of indigenous cosmologies in Southeast Asia note their unified focus on continuing relations with the dead and their ever-evolving protection of localism against imperial control (O’Connor 2003, 290–97). Analyzing Indonesia’s state of religious pluralism requires recognition of the archipelago’s historically intertwined religious and political practices of state and regional rule as well as of local understandings of precedence, everyday ecumenicalism, and conviviality across difference.

Indonesia’s national ideology of Pancasila, which obliges “belief in a Supreme God,” is potentially challenged by the 2017 decision’s implication that traditional and other minority sect beliefs—rarely deemed monotheistic—should be legally recognized on national identity cards along with Indonesia’s six official religions, all of foreign origin.1 Examining Indonesia’s history of religious and legal policies illuminates three basic points. First, Indonesia’s colonial-driven, modernist preference to rank imported scriptural religions above indigenous cosmologies makes it logically and politically challenging to reclassify regional “beliefs” (kepercayaan) as “religion” (agama). Second, the Indonesian state prefers to deny the extent to which the nation’s official religions and ancestral traditions already are interlaced within both communities and individuals. Third, Indonesian laws and state actions evidence a polarized ambivalence about whether Indonesia guarantees religious freedom—as the 1945 constitution asserts—or

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