Southeast Asian squeeze

JAKARTA—Every morning Islamic prayers break the dawn with low hums that swell and vibrate from the streets all the way up to the skyscrapers here. This cacophony of moans, mutters, and croons surges out of mosques five times a day without fail, unfurling a giant prayer rug across the city.

Religion is no private matter in Indonesia’s capital. It is a life guide increasingly affecting politics, law, and culture as the number of Islamic businesses and university organizations grows, more women cover themselves, and nearly every politician pays lip service to Islamic values.

Yet mere decades ago, religion was an afterthought for many Indonesians who shared a general understanding that people didn’t probe into one another’s religious business. Many even considered it “backward” to wear Islamic clothing and adhere to strict religious disciplines.

Today Indonesia, the nation with the world’s largest Muslim population, is experiencing an Islamic revival. But “Islamization” here is different than in Syria and Iraq. There, the Islamic State, or ISIS, is ordering Christians to convert to Islam, sign the dhimma contract—or die. Here in Indonesia, the terms are less stark, but the fundamental ideology of Islamic supremacy is the same: Convert, or accept a life of lesser rights and privilege.

Ironically, the establishment of Indonesian democracy opened a public space for Islamists to speak freely and sow their ideology. Protected by free-speech laws, these groups have grown in size, power, and sophistication. Although most Indonesian Muslims decry extremism in the Middle East, their beliefs are shifting toward conservative Islam, even as many proud Indonesians balk at the thought of an “Arabization” of Indonesia.

Some talk about forging an “Indonesian Islam”—but there’s no consensus on what that means. “Islam in Indonesia is searching for its identity, for its position in this nation,” said Bonar Coki Naipospos of the Setara Institute, a Jakarta-based democracy watchdog. The country straddles Islamic society and a secular state, but that’s the problem, Naipospos said: “Where, then, are the boundaries?”

Indonesian Christians are also stuck in limbo. They need not worry about beheadings or crucifixions—at least not yet. As a minority within a pluralistic, increasingly hostile society, they struggle with tough questions: How can they engage and influence a culture that oppresses and silences their faith? How can they live without compromising the gospel? These are not just questions for Indonesian Christians—they can apply to the secularized West, where many Christian beliefs and values are no longer socially acceptable.

Indonesia’s current “Islamic revival” is partly due to Saudi religious influence beginning in the 1970s, around the time Indonesia was making significant advances in education. Saudi Arabia has provided Indonesian students with scholarships to schools in the Middle East, built religious schools in Indonesia, disseminated religious literature, and funded Islamic organizations in Indonesia.

Sharp-eyed politicians caught on. During local election campaigns, more incumbents support Sharia-inspired laws and discriminatory policies with the hope of winning conservative Muslim votes. Even the Indonesian Socialist Party hawks “religious socialism.”

As a result, religious minorities in Indonesia—mostly Christians, Shiites, and Ahmadi Muslims—now bump into multiple legal roadblocks to religious freedom. For example, strict regulations on church construction force congregations in Muslim-heavy regions to gather illegally, even as new mosques pop up without much hassle.

The Setara Institute says religious violence is increasing. The 216 cases of violent attacks on religious minorities in 2010 grew to 244 cases in 2011 and 264 in 2012. The Wahid Institute, led by moderate Muslims, recorded 158 incidents of religious rights violations in 2014. Human Rights Watch estimates that mobs forcibly closed 1,000 churches over the last decade. Some districts even restrict Christian services in private homes.

The week before I arrived in Jakarta in October, thousands of Christians fled the Aceh Singkil region after a mob of about 700 Muslims armed with sharp weapons piled into trucks and torched a Protestant church. Militant Muslim residents of Aceh, a province with the country’s strictest form of Sharia, had vowed to demolish 10 churches for lacking proper permits.

Local authorities responded by tearing down some of the churches themselves. The national police chief later acknowledged that his team had foreseen the attack, but said the mob had outnumbered police. Few Christians in Aceh were surprised by the violence: Muslim groups had burned another Aceh church in August.

Though most perpetrators of such religiously motivated violence are nongovernmental, officials and police play both active and passive roles. Indonesian police are notoriously lead-footed in investigating reports of violence against religious minorities. In some cases, even when perpetrators of serious violations did land in court, judges allowed ridiculously lenient sentences—in essence tickling the extremists into more brazen atrocities.

After years of tripping over legal and social hurdles, some Christian groups are fighting back.

On a blisteringly hot Sunday afternoon, a group of about 100 Indonesians with sunglasses and hats hunched over bright-colored plastic stools and held their 102nd “worship demonstration” in central Jakarta’s sunny Merdeka Square.

As picnicking families and bored-looking police officers watched nearby, the congregation of the Indonesian Christian Church (GKI) Yasmin sang hymns, mindful that across the square sits Merdeka Palace, where President Joko Widodo lives. Every two weeks—even during monsoon season when a thunderstorm pelts them with acrid rain—church members drive two hours one way to the capital to stage an outdoor service. But that particular October Sunday, it was so hot I felt the pavement sizzle through the soles of my sneakers. Church members huddled under each other’s umbrellas, breathing in each other’s body odor and salty sweat. Before them, two giant banners lay across the ground, one in Indonesian, the other in English: “Save Peaceful Indonesia. Pray with GKI Yasmin for Unity in Diversity.” That phrase—Bhinneka Tunggal Ika—is Indonesia’s official national motto.

For almost eight years, GKI Yasmin has been fighting for the right to hold services in the church it built in Bogor, a city south of Jakarta, where 94 percent of the population is Muslim. The church had met the legal requirements for construction, including gathering the required number of signatures from local residents. But in February 2008, the local Bogor government revoked the church’s building permit after local Muslim groups accused church members of forging support signatures.

The day before GKI Yasmin’s first planned service at the new facility, local officials sealed the church gate. About 200 church members showed up for the service only to discover they had been locked out. So they laid out mats and held an impromptu, defiant service on the sunbaked sidewalks. But many members were angry and disappointed. They wanted an attack plan.

From then on, GKI Yasmin has been embroiled in a long series of media campaigns and legal battles that coiled all the way up to the Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of the church. But the Bogor government still refuses to allow GKI Yasmin to use its building—and the central government has made no serious efforts to implement the Supreme Court verdict.

In 2012, about 500 GKI Yasmin members held their first Sunday “worship demonstration” in front of the presidential palace. The church has been gathering at that spot ever since, attracting new participants inspired by patriotism even as it loses many more members who have grown weary of the seemingly hopeless battle. Some members complained, “We’ve done this so many times with no result. How much longer do we have to fight?” The church has also lost its home pastor due to internal disagreements about the church’s direction.

The afternoon I visited GKI Yasmin’s outdoor service, the church had invited a guest preacher from a church in Yogyakarta of the same GKI denomination. Sweltering in a black Geneva gown, Tabita Kartika Christiani preached about the importance of staying focused and how Indonesian Christians have a long road ahead. She asked the congregants, “What is your focus?” They yelled out, “We want our church back!” The preacher smiled: “Yes, stay focused on that. But don’t forget that only God can help us, not the government.”

Most key members of GKI Yasmin would agree—but they’d also say God uses the efforts of human agents to change laws and governments. They’ve expanded their fight to include political rights and have joined other religious groups in interfaith movements. They turned down an offer to build the church in a different neighborhood. Spokesman Bona Sigalingging explained why in an email: “What kind of citizen are we in GKI Yasmin? Third- or fourth-class citizens with no equal rights [with] our Muslim fellow citizens who should be pushed away here and there as the majority group wishes? NO WAY!” He said the fight would continue “until this beloved country of ours recognize[s] us as citizens of the Republic of Indonesia with equal constitutional rights.”

Other Christian communities choose to find common ground with the majority of Muslims in Indonesia who want religious harmony and tolerance.

Matius Ho, executive director of Leimena Institute, a nonprofit that engages church leaders in public affairs, is one of them. Ho and his team have traveled to various villages over the islands of Indonesia and met with both Christian and Muslim leaders.

One Muslim village leader in Maluku, a province with a significant population of Christians, said both the Muslims and Christians on his island are “fanatics,” but they get along because both believe they should “love one another as you love yourself.” Then he pointed to the newly renovated mosque in his village: Christians, he said, had the honor of placing the alem (the crescent and star symbol) on top of the minaret.

Another island, Alor, features both Immanuel Mosque and Ismail Church, because Christians and Muslims had helped build—and name—each other’s worship buildings. Ho cites this cooperation as a good thing: “These people we talked to were not nominal Christians and Muslims, but religious leaders who studied their scriptures. Yet they see that it’s OK for Muslims to help build churches, and vice versa.”

But if that Muslim leader really did study his Quran, he would also know that the Islamic “Golden Rule” only applies to fellow Muslims: The Quran has plenty of verses that preach abuse of non-Muslims. Christians too, must ask this tricky question: Is it biblical for Christians to help build and christen a place of idolatry in the name of religious tolerance?

I asked Ho this question, and he countered with another: “How then can two different religions live side by side? We cannot only have one approach. Living in Indonesia raises a lot of questions that Christians should ask, especially Westerners who take their majority status for granted.”