Cultural secularization of Christian religion: case of indigenous Christians in Indonesia

By MUCHA Q ARQUIZA
08 March 2010

My reflection for this topic will be a quick and sweeping scan at religious perspective of Christianity on indigenous believers and Muslims in Indonesia, this is by no means deeply informed but a very broad stroke, that I could be completely mistaken or at risk of over-generalizing in this attempt. In the readings, I got the general impression that Christianization in Java generally happened in at least two sweeps: one during the missionary efforts of Dutch colonialism and two as a contingent result of anti-communist hysteria and the massive conversion happening after the fall of Sukarno regime and under the New Order when Indonesians needed to be affiliated with the government recognized religions. Christianization among Muslim Java went through a rather smooth process of negotiation, accommodation and contextualization of the mysticsm of Islam Jawa (i.e. sufi) into the new formation of protestant communities (i.e. as in the case of Partonadi’s study of Sadrach’s community), although there were also noted resistance. The dakwah and pesantren were important religious technology that were adapted by protestant missionaries in their religious prosylitization. In the case of followers of indigenous belief system, the impact of Christian conversion seem to have created ‘in-between’ faith communities where the indigenous Christian converts continued practicing their ancestral worship and animistic beliefs despite their regular membership to the Christian churches. These are the cases of Bataks, like Karo and Toba, of Sumatra and the Torajan of South Sulawesi.

Even as the Dutch colonial administration seem to favor Christianized natives in its bureaucracy, until the mid-19th century it was bent on its effort to prohibit bringing Christianity and, hence, ‘civilization’ into the Muslim communities. The reason suggested by Hefner is that the Dutch government ‘[feared] antagonizing the island’s Muslims’. Apparently, the Calvinist Dutch were not interested in saving the fallen soul of the Muslims. The latter-day success of Christian penetration among Muslims in Eastern Java was attributed to politics: that is, the relative stability of the Dutch administration and the wide spreading and rootedness of Christian communities that native Javanese themselves founded (Hefner, p.102, refer to them as Euro-Javanese mestizos). Far from being religiously inspired, Christianization efforts among Muslims were also necessary and contingent to the success of economic campaign of Dutch expansionism into the new frontiers.

Reid and Corville, documented interesting cases of Christianization among indigenous Batak and Toraja and showed how the resilience of aluk to dolo, ‘the rituals that came before’ and other indigenous beliefs such as séance and worship of the dead persisted even as the new converts have been initiated into ‘Christian life’. Further, indigenous cultural traditions that well defined the ethnic identity of Torajan were reclaimed and fortified (i.e. aside from it being indirectly encouraged by government tourism program) through reinterpretation of indigenous traditions to be consistent with Christian principle, or the ‘rationalization’ of indigenous religion. Unlike the complete conversion of Muslims to Protestant, for indigenous communities the accommodation of indigenous rituals and beliefs into Christian identity is made possible by shifting the meaning of ritual, that Corville pointed as that ‘illocutory or performative force of ritual’ to be acceptable to Christianity, for instance, sacrifice of animal to feed the spirit is not allowed, but communal meal featuring buffalo or pig meat in honor of the dead is allowed; dead spirits were not to be venerated by building houses, but effigies can be built as memorials of the dead; and, agricultural fertility rituals to the spirit of rice is deemed Christian only if it is interpreted as a post-harvest ‘thanksgiving’ ceremony.

Some observers, like Rita Smith Kibb [1], who studied the Karo Batak, explained the persistence of indigenous beliefs despite of the embeddedness of Christian faith as a form of ‘secularization’, that is, according to her, the Karo has been separating indigenous beliefs and ritual as ‘cultural’ social affairs and clan and familial celebrations (that usually were held in religiously plural setting) from the ‘religious’ Church (i.e. protestant) concerns which in recent times have become more and more individualized and private because of the fast social mobility and urbanization among the Karo. While her observation may be true that this phenomena can be considered a secularization effort, I am suggesting a slightly expanded if not diverse opinion in that this can also be viewed as the ethnic communities’ growing awareness of their indigenous religious identity and is an important preclude towards reclaiming their aluk to dolo as a legitimate religion (that is, divesting themselves of Christianity), in other words, what may be seen as mere ‘cultural development’ in secularization can be actually and is also tantamount to a movement of ‘re-conversion’ to the old faith.

As the illustrations above indicated, it is indeed easy to dismiss practices and beliefs that institutionalized religion such as Christianity do not really take seriously and consider merely “cultural”, this is why it has been easy to brand Muslim ‘fundamentalist’ practitioners as ‘backward and barbarians’ while indigenous believers as ‘polytheist, animists and uncivilized’ that deserves to be the subject of Christian salvation, renewal and even civilizing missions. In the face of current challenges, we are now seeing the resurgence of these new ‘atheisms and uncivilities’ as a threat to the stability and truth of mainstream/institutionalized religions that efforts are afresh of state and church to contain them: through legal means or laws on democracy (e.g. moderation of Islam) and anti-terrorism (or anti-discrimination, depending on which side of the fence one may be) and more importantly by civic programs promoting respectful tolerance and pluralisms to accommodate ‘other cultures’ (i.e. religions) that we do not really believe in. I subscribe to what Dr. Melba Maggay [2] said that: what we need is ‘an ecumenism of conviction, not an ecumenism of accommodation’
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[1] Kibb, R.S. Dissociated Identity: Ethnicity, religion and class in an Indonesian Scoeity. Ann Arbor:UM Press. 1999.
[2]Conference Proceedings on Religion, Human Rights and Development Cooperation. Amsterdam:IIS- CORDAID, 2007.