The Politics of Religion in Indonesia

Syncretism, Orthodoxy, and Religious Contention in Java and Bali

Michel Picard, Rémy Madinier, Michel Picard, Rémy Madinier

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781138844506
• eBook ISBN: 9781136726392
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Social Sciences

Indonesia is a remarkable case study for religious politics. While not being a theocratic country, it is not secular either, with the Indonesian state officially defining what constitutes religion, and every citizen needing to be affiliated to one of them. This book focuses on Java and Bali, and the interesting comparison of two neighbouring societies shaped by two different religions - Islam and Hinduism.

The book examines the appropriation by the peoples of Java and Bali of the idea of religion, through a dialogic process of indigenization of universalist religions and universalization of indigenous religions. It looks at the tension that exists between proponents of local world-views and indigenous belief systems, and those who deny those local traditions as qualifying as a religion. This tension plays a leading part in the construction of an Indonesian religious identity recognized by the state. The book is of interest to students and scholars of Southeast Asia, religious studies and the anthropology and sociology of religion.

Part 1

Java

Map 2 Map of Java (courtesy Ade Pristie Wayho, École française d’Extrême-Orient, Jakarta)

1 The Catholic politics of inclusiveness

A Jesuit epic in Central Java in the early twentieth century and its memory

Rémy Madinier

If Indonesia today, despite being the world’s largest Muslim country, is a religious state, but not an Islamic one, this is mainly due to the historical alliance between a nationalist wing (essentially Muslim) and representatives of the Archipelago’s Christian minority. The role the latter played, between May and August 1945, during the hectic debates which led to the definition of the nation’s religious ideology, is now well documented.¹ In several regions, the Christian minority threatened to secede from an Indonesian Republic which would declare an Islamic state. The nationalist wing led by Sukarno, also very reluctant to base the new Republic exclusively on Islam, took these declarations as an excuse for shelving the so-called Jakarta Charter on the eve of independence. The ‘loss’ (kehilangan) of this compromise, which proposed the application of sharia to the Muslim population, earned the nationalists and their Christian allies the lasting enmity on the part of the Islamists (Feillard and Madinier 2006: 163–4).

Disproportionate to their total number in the former Dutch colony, the influence of Christians in these debates was due, of course, to their massive presence in certain parts of the Archipelago: representing just over 5 per cent of the total population in 1945, they were the local majority in several regions of the thinly populated but extensive East.

However, the Christian contribution to the definition of Indonesia’s religious identity did not find its way only through power struggle and confrontation. The ‘Belief in the One and only God’, the religious compromise that would later become the first Pancasila principle, reflected a deep-rooted religious reality, mainly elaborated in Java and later diffused to the entire area of Indonesia. The spiritual vision, which inspired Sukarno on the day he delivered his famous speech of June 1945, was not simply the fruit of his imagination but reflected a spiritual and much broader consensus (Bonneff et al. 1980). Its formulation found its roots in what had been masterfully described by historian Merle Ricklefs as a ‘mystic synthesis’ elaborated from the sixteenth century onwards between a Hindu-animist substratum and Islam (Ricklefs 2006). Later, from the mid-nineteenth century, this Javanese religious spirituality was enriched with Christian religious elements, which were slowly adopted from European circles where until then they had been confined.

Such an encounter between Javanism and Christianity spread across various Christian proselytizing groups. As for the Protestants, European missionaries as well as Indo-European pious lay persons and some indigenous religious leaders contributed to the spread of Christianity in a disorderly and often competitive manner. In the case of Catholics, on the other hand, the Jesuits played the decisive role in this development. Back in the Netherlands Indies since 1859, the Society of Jesus was formally charged with the mission in 1893. In 1896, the first three Jesuits settled in Central Java, on the margins of the European environment. The work of one of them, Franciscus van Lith, who spent 25 years (1896–1921) among the Javanese, deserves special attention, both for the profusion of documentation he left and for the prominent role attributed to him by the Indonesian Catholic memory.

When van Lith arrived in Muntilan, a small town of Central Java, some 30 km north of Yogyakarta, the number of Catholics in Central Java totalled only a few hundred natives. Forty years later, the 28,877 non-European Catholics of the Apostolic Vicariate of Batavia appearing in the 1939 statistics were almost all living in this area. Today, with half a million Catholics (and more or less the same number of Protestants) in the Archdiocese of Semarang, Christians living in the Indonesian province of Central Java and the Special Region of Yogyakarta represent a rather dynamic minority in this overwhelmingly Muslim society (Suryadinata 2003; Steenbrink 2007: 355).

Central Java is thus a very rare example of mass Christianization in a Muslim area. The missionary station of Muntilan, later called the ‘Bethlehem of Java’ by the alumni of the Xavier College, took on the major role in this development (Rosariyanto 1997: 1). Under van Lith’s leadership, Muntilan became the centre of the Catholic Javanese mission during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Most of the first Javanese Catholics were baptized here, and, as we will see presently, some of them later assumed a prominent role in Indonesian society.

Despite his indisputable success, Franciscus van Lith was a very controversial figure: F.X. Satiman, the first Indonesian Jesuit, called van Lith ‘the Father of the Javanese’, but the Dutch-colonial government branded him ‘a socialo-communist priest’, Mgr Antonis van Velsen (SJ) called him ‘a dangerous man’ (Rosariyanto 1997: 2), and the Catholic politician Feber spoke of his ‘swerve to the extreme left in his later years’.² Such varied opinions can be explained by the fact that van Lith personified an acculturation model of Christianity paired with a political commitment, both aspects relatively innovative within the Dutch East Indies clergy. This earned him the enmity of many of his colleagues and conversely boundless admiration from much of the indigenous Catholic population. The Jesuit, often presented as a kind of Catholic wali sanga,³ gave birth to a considerable literature within the Catholic community, which greatly contributed to the Javanese narrative of the implementation of Catholicism.⁴ In that way, the ‘van Lith epic’, by overshadowing some elements and highlighting others, allowed Indonesians to develop a specific conception of their entry into the Catholic religion, which inscribed it in a broader spiritual history.

Thus, the study of his actions and the memorial elaboration to which it gave birth allow a very comprehensive analysis of the mechanisms implemented by missionaries and missionized alike to make Catholicism a Javanese and therefore an Indonesian religion. It allows us to follow the local implementation and reception of a ‘politics of religion’ and to identify both the theological Catholic compromises to accommodate the religious Javanese environment and the justifications addressed by van Lith to his supercilious superiors in order to make it suit the norms of the Catholic hierarchy.

Java in the late nineteenth century: a ‘Muslim fortress’ assaulted by two contending modes of Christianization

The first Jesuits who, at the very end of the nineteenth century, left the comfort of their European cities to go into the Javanese countryside, encountered a surprising situation. Everything remained to be done after the two centuries of banishment of the Catholic Church from the Netherlands Indies, but they could benefit from the remarkable experience of a Protestant proselytism that was divided into two opposing currents.

Kristen Londo versus Kristen Jowo

Due to the policies of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), the Christian community had in fact only marginally increased between the departure of the Portuguese in the early seventeenth century and the middle of the nineteenth century. After having banned Catholicism, the Company was not keen either on permitting the expansion of the Reformed religion throughout the Archipelago. With the exception of Catholic Moluccans forced to convert to Calvinism after the departure of the Portuguese, Christianity remained confined to the European community and its immediate surroundings: the majority of the indigenous Christians present in Java in the late eighteenth century were related to auxiliary Dutch troops (most of Moluccan origin). From the end of the eighteenth century, the renewal of the missionary zeal (symbolized by the birth of the Nederlandsche Zendeling-Genootschap, NZG, in 1797), the 1799 collapse of the VOC, and the involvement of the Dutch crown in religious matters (creation of the Indische Kerk in 1835) heralded a new era. It was only in 1848, however, that the first Christian missionary sent by a Dutch society arrived in Java. Missionary proselytism then in its early stage did not achieve any significant results up to the 1890s: the missionaries never did more than follow in the steps of a proselytizing movement that was largely beyond their control.

The Christianization that spread throughout Java from the 1820s onward was the result of the work of two other groups of proselytizers: the pious European or Indo-European lay persons and some remarkable indigenous religious leaders. The former, often the wives of farmers or officials, settled in small provincial towns, proposed catechism classes and managed to convert a few dozen people.⁵ Their paths often crossed those of guru ngelmu or ‘masters of wisdom’, a classic figure in the Javanese spiritual landscape at the time. The guru ngelmu, as the true incarnation of the Javanese ability to capture various religious inspirations, were often surprising personalities for whom religion was the only means of upward mobility in a rather rigid society (Guillot 1981: 70). They were by far the most important Christian proselytizers in Java throughout the nineteenth century. Such was the case of Conrad Laurens Coolen, born of a Russian-Dutch father and a Javanese mother, who preached in the Kediri area in the 1820s, or of Tunggul Wulung, a kind of hermit (pandita), who dwelt on Mount Kelud for seven years in the 1840s. In a few years they brought Christianity to several thousands of people (ibid.: 70–88). Their experiences, their successes, but also the often difficult relations they had with the European missionaries highlight many issues which were later to influence van Lith himself, as revealed by the case of one of these guru ngelmu, Kiyahi Sadrach.

Guru ngelmu were the apostles of an indigenous Christianity, who taught their disciples a syncretic religion very respectful of their original culture and were thus opposed to ‘alienating’ conversions by European missionaries. The latter indeed encouraged their flocks to abandon their past life, particularly the land they had cleared, and to adopt a Western lifestyle.⁶ Confrontation between these two kinds of Christianization led to a distinction in Javanese terminology between Christians converted by European missionaries, to be called Kristen Londo (Dutch Christians), and Kristen Jowo (Javanese Christians), converted by Javanese proselytizers (ibid.: 61–2). Such a distinction in fact made clear two different versions of the inclusion of Christianity in the religious Javanese landscape and hence two different world-views: in the first case, that of Kristen Jowo, the Christian contribution was conceived as one element among others in an inclusive Javanese spirituality. In a world focused on Java, guru ngelmu incorporated some elements of Christian doctrine but rejected others (just like Coolen, who refused baptism for his followers). In contrast, the spiritual universe of Kristen Londo recognized and even sacralized Western culture’s superiority by making it an essential element of conversion.

Regarding these two different perspectives, we can suggest a few remarks. First, this tension between two different sources of legitimacy was not specific to Christianity. Simultaneously and not coincidentally, Javanese Islam was also marked by the noteworthy confrontation between an ‘emerging abangan majority’, whose religion was deeply rooted in its cultural tradition, and ‘some versions of pious Islam’ which ‘were distancing themselves from Javanese culture’ (Ricklefs 2007: 105–6). It should also be borne in mind that Javanese society was then affected by deep changes and did not react uniformly to the various missionary initiatives. As rightly noted by Claude Guillot, the Western cultural behaviour that had caused the failure of Protestant missionaries in their rural missions during the nineteenth century can be considered one of the very reasons for their success in urban communities in the early twentieth century. They were asked to instruct the children in their care in Western science education, the only way to succeed in colonial society (Guillot 1981: 52).

The revival of the Catholic Church

As for the Netherlands Indies Catholic Church, it was still under reconstruction in 1896. At that time, the number of Catholics in the Archipelago was probably less (around 60,000) than when the Spanish had left the Moluccas, two centuries earlier. Indeed, after a short but promising moment of expansion in the eastern part of Indonesia, marked by the figure of Francis Xavier who spent two years in the Moluccas (1546–47), Catholicism had been deprived of its initially Portuguese (since 1605) and then Spanish (since 1663) protectors, and was subsequently completely forbidden by the VOC, whose representatives were dominated by Calvinists.

Only in 1808 was the Catholic Church permitted to hold services publicly again, one year after the creation of the Apostolic Prefecture of Batavia (transformed in 1842 into an Apostolic Vicariat) (Muskens 1979; Heuken 2002; Steenbrink 2003). Despite this new opening, the Roman Catholic Church started developing again only very slowly: the main concern of the first Catholic missionaries who came to Indonesia was to take care of the spiritual life of the European Catholics. Preaching the Gospel among the Javanese was not their remit. Moreover, the colonial government had adopted a neutral position in religious matters: considering that an overwhelming majority of Javanese were Muslim, it had banned missionary action directed at them, in order to prevent any possible disturbance among the population.

For all these reasons, during the first half of the nineteenth century, Catholic authorities had no hope of transforming the Javanese religious landscape, considered to be an impregnable Muslim fortress.⁷ The arrival (or rather the return) of the Jesuits in the Archipelago, after 1856, gradually changed this situation: officially in charge of the mission among the natives (the care of the European population being entrusted to the secular clergy), they started to regard Javanese Islam in a new way. Thus, as early as 1863, Martinus van den Elzen, one of the first two Jesuits who arrived in the Netherlands Indies since the departure of their Iberian predecessors, saw an opportunity for Catholi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Preface: The politics of agama in Java and Bali
• Introduction: ‘ agama’, ‘adat’, and Pancasila
• Part I: Java
• Part II: Bali
• Bibliography
• Index