Religious Egoism behind the Pseudo Religious Nationalism by Timotius Wibowo

Robert W. Hefner’s article, “World Building and Rationality of Conversion”, analyzes conversion to Christianity from the “religious evolution” point of view, in which rationalization assumes to play the most important role. Observing the conversion phenomenon, Marx Weber argued that superior rationalization of world religions had attracted the people of traditional religions to choose those new ways of life (p. 7). This theory was then followed by R. Bellah and C. Geertz (p. 10).
In my opinion, however, Weber’s theory of rationalization might be too much influence by the atmosphere of 19th century world of science, in which ratio was assumed to be the answer of all problems. In fact, rationality itself has been a critical problem in world religions until now. World religions, such as Islam and Christianity, still use irrational events as the backbone of their theology and ethical-codes. Likewise, most of their followers tend to use irrational approach to deal with their life-problems.
Instead of rationalization, I suggest practical life-problems as the main agent of religious evolution and conversion. One chooses a religion, gives his or her commitment, or converts to the other one, because he or she hopes for its ability (or, power) to answer his or her problems, whether by rational or irrational manners. In other words, rationalization is only one among many strategies in using religion to answer life-problems. When rationalization fails, irrational approaches will take its place.
Using such a point of view, we now understand why Christianity (and other world religions, too) in Indonesia never wholeheartedly gives contribution to build and develop the spirit of nationalism. In fact, it is never easy for Indonesian Christians to leave their “religious egoism” behind, when they play their role in national politics. This phenomenon, which happens in recent Indonesia’s political discourse, is also true for other players of other religions. Politicians of religion-base political parties use such “religious egoism” to attract people to give their votes to them. However, for a wider national political communication, they will cover this religious egoism with a pseudo religious nationalism.