A Hardening of the Categories

Technological progress in Indonesia has had a big impact on lifestyle, especially, as in other parts of the majority world, in the cities. Over the past few decades, and in response to that change, the Majority community and the Christian minority have reacted largely in opposite ways: the one retrenching and becoming more fundamentalist and the other largely capitulating to modernity. I think there are multiple reasons for this. For one thing the Chinese community (represented disproportionately in the churches) is overwhelmingly urban.

But this alone is not sufficient to explain the difference. Despite its Reformed roots, the evangelical church in Indonesia is ill-equipped to engage with culture. The reason for this, I think, should be found in the theology of religion espoused by the Dutch missionary Hendrik Kraemer, who advocated, in the 1930s, for a compete break from traditional culture by the Indonesian church. It was, if I understand correctly, his emphasis on the ‘antithesis’ – the conflict between, as he saw it, two incommensurable systems – that led to this ideology. The consequence is that people coming from traditional religions have had to adapt to foreign ways of worship and witness. And as changes to lifestyle come along, they are ill-equipped to critique those changes and the philosophy that has given rise to them. Is this why nearly all the Christian meetings I went along to were characterised by megadecibel poppy praise songs, some complete with smoke machines? Such an uncritical acceptance of the new is surely a capitulation to modernity. It is hardly surprising that the preaching of the Word left much to be desired: I am not talking about heresy, but I am talking about error.

The Majority community are horrified. So, they get their women-folk to wear the hijab (a recent development) and chant all the more vehemently through the loud-speakers adorning their mosques. Members of one family went even further and blew themselves up in three churches earlier in the year. I am not saying that suicide bombing is the churches’ fault. I am saying that it does not all come down to satanic fanaticism.

There has been, then, a hardening of the categories. Reaching out to the Majority community has become fraught with difficulties. The days of the largely folk-religious turning to Christ, with little societal opposition, may have largely gone. It is not all bleak, however. Followers of Christ have sought to respond to this new situation in creative ways. But more of that later.