Christianity, Islam and Nationalism in Indonesia

Charles E. Farhadian

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134240623
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology

Although over eighty percent of the country is Muslim, Indonesia is marked by an extraordinary diversity in language, ancestry, culture, religion and ways of life. This book focuses on the Christian Dani of West Papua, providing a social and ethnographic history of the most important indigenous population in the troubled province. It presents a fascinating overview of the Dani's conversion to Christianity, examining the social, religious and political uses to which they have put their new religion.

Based on independent research carried out over many years among the Dani people, the book provides an abundance of new material on religious and political events in West Papua. Underlining the heart of Christian-Muslim rivalries, the book questions the fate of religion in late-modern times.

1 Conflicting visions and constructing identities
Beyond splendid isolation

Burning

In the September of 1998, during Indonesia’s worst economic crisis in decades, highland Dani Christians near the town of Wamena burned down a mosque near a historically important salt spring (air garam). A local Dani church leader explained that whereas no Muslim was present in the immediate area a mosque was built by the Indonesian government in order to “bait people” with material things like rice and clothes. In a meeting of highland Dani Christians to discuss the situation, a church leader asked, “Why do Muslims use that method of prose-lytization? The gospel enters somebody’s heart and life and then they believe. Not with material things.” The fiery charismatic Dani leader shared his strong feelings against what he believed was a concerted governmental effort to Islamize the Dani highlands:

In September 1998, I told the government, and all the chairmen that worked in Wamena, “don’t let Javanese and other non-Papuans work here. They have to be Papuans. Don’t bring their bad ( jelék) religion here.” We were mad . . . . the first assistant of the bupati of Jayawijaya [a Muslim] was leading the Muslim program. Once a Dani receives those material things from the mosque he does not know it but he is automatically considered a member of Islam . . . . [The assistant bupati] is a Javanese. Now the Papuans are mad because of the Muslim’s trick. The Irianese raised up the gospel. They shared the gospel without giving anything. And the Muslims use money. We say, “Your God is not a real God. So, you better leave this country. You can pray to him in your own country. You have to go home.” I prayed like that in front of parliament in Wamena. The people heard directly that I was praying like this; “this land is already paid for by the cross of Jesus. The gospel arrived here first. The land of Irian from end to end, the land of the Papuans, we give to God. This is to erect the cross of Jesus. This is Christian land. We don’t accept Muslims.” I prayed like that directly in front of parliament, in front of policemen and military. I told them when we were going to pray there.

Later, in a conversation with the district military commander of Wamena, the Dani church leader protested, “You came from Aceh. Your people in Aceh don’t want us Christians to bring Christianity to Aceh, why do you bring Islam to us? You go home.’ I got angry. We stood up face to face and I told him like that. I said, ‘you go back’.” A large segment of Dani Christians in fact felt threatened by the perceived Islamization of local Papuans. Native land was, in the words of a Western Dani (WD) informant, “holy land.”

On December 22, 1998, a group of Muslims burned down the house of a Dani pastor in Arso (Perlima C), a large transmigration camp in the West Papuan provincial city of Jayapura near the Papua New Guinea (PNG) border. Prior to the event, Christians from Gereja Kemah Injil Indonesia (GKII, Evangelical Tabernacle Church of Indonesia), Gereja Kristen Injili di Irian Jaya (GKI, Evangelical Christian Church of Irian Jaya), and Roman Catholic churches gathered at the Arso GKII Church for an ecumenical Christmas celebration. Religious tensions between Muslims and Christians had been burgeoning as a result of the conversion of a number of Arso Muslims to Christianity. Before the ecumenical service a group of Muslims from Arso dumped a large mound of sand and gravel in front of the door of the church in an attempt to prevent Christian worshippers from entering. Eventually, the congregation, numbering 200–300, was able to enter the church.

Fifteen minutes into the service, a group of Arso Muslims poured gasoline around the pastor’s house, which was made completely of wood. They set the house on fire, burning it entirely down. In an attempt to rescue the motorcycle, the pastor’s younger brother entered the burning building and saved the motorcycle but sustained burns on one side of his entire body. As the house burned, the congregation gathered, and many were visibly angry. The pastor, a Dani graduate of a coastal theological college decided to wait for God to build up his losses, rather than retaliate. Matius Wenda, the Dani leader of the Operasi Papua Merdeka (OPM, Free Papua Movement), was contacted in PNG about the situation and was ready to send his troops to exact revenge on the Muslim community in Arso. However, Wenda honored the pastor’s wishes to wait to see how God would answer his prayers.

The pastor believed that God would give him a better house, because he had literally lost all of his material possessions. After word was conveyed to churches in the West, donations were sent to finance the construction of a new cement house as well as the purchase of clothes and other lost material items. The pastor felt that God had answered his prayers.

In West Papua, burning is a common means of completely destroying of what is perceived as a rival. As such, it is a response of repudiation, rejection, and disapproval similar to what characterized the burning movement that blazed through WD communities in the early 1960s, serving as a potent symbol of Dani renouncement of their past religious practices. The act of burning is tantamount to turning one’s back against what is razed. In the Dani highlands, an instance of burning sheds light on the resolute desire to retain a homogeneous religious identity in West Papua, and the use of fire as a powerful public response to a perceived threat.

It is important to recognize that acts of burning were not a sebastomanic phenomenon, but rather were expressive of the desired end of the Other. Religious conflict in the highlands and in Jayapura suggested that Indonesian Muslims and Dani Christians did not inhabit a shared world except when necessary, for example in common institutions, sporting events, taxis, and public spaces.¹ Within the New Society an intriguing question was to what degree political protests stemmed from theological or socio-political conflict. Many Christians in West Papua knew theologically little about Islam, though theological colleges made efforts to teach its basic tenets and history. The same was true of Muslims – they knew little about Christianity. To what degree do political protests in West Papua stem from theological or socio-political conflict?

Indonesia’s national slogan “Unity in Diversity” (Bhinneka Tunggal Ika), however, gainsays the strong undercurrents of instability that ominously imperil the integrity of the archipelago. Some wonder if Indonesia as a unified political entity has outlived its usefulness. Others question what kind of social or political glue is necessary to hold together such a diverse nation. On the topic of Indonesian unity, Clifford Geertz says, “the call to national unity in the name of a shared ideal seems to be a wasting asset. Whatever is going to hold the place together, if, in the face of population movements, regional imbalances, and ethnic suspicions, anything is, it is not going to be settled by an ingrained sense of common identity and historical mission, or by religious, ‘Islamic State’ hegemony. It is going to be something a good deal more patchy, capricious, and decen-tered – archipelagic” (Geertz 2000). State-enforced national ideologies, a massive military infrastructure, and a centralized bureaucracy have aimed to create a unified nation of more than 200 million people. The success that this monumental project has achieved has been complicated by the region’s uneven development and religious history.

This book traces the development of modern Dani self-understanding through a consideration of the conflicting social visions of Dani, the Indonesian nation-state, Western Christian missions, and Islam. Beyond these forces lie influences from the wider world, garnered through education, contact with expatriates, and, to a lesser extent, popular media. By elucidating the discourse among Dani, Western mission, Islam, the nation-state, and the formation of new identities and social arrangements in Jayapura as a result of their mutual encounter, this study investigates the forces at work shaping Dani self-understanding as Christians in the plural world of Jayapura.

Underlying the contests for political authority and religious persuasion lie the deeper issues of moral legitimacy, trust, personal, and social identifications.Legitimacy is not a new concept among social scientists, but it has become increasingly the modus argumentum among Papuan intellectuals in their rhetorical strategies to assert their political aspirations and challenge the powers that be.This study is unique because it provides the first analysis of a highland Papuan people living in urban West Papua. While several anthropologists have studied the Dani in their indigenous environment (e.g. Heider 1969; O’Brien 1969; Hayward 1997), there are no significant social histories of the Dani under modern conditions, where the strategies of missionary religions and state ideologies that seek Dani allegiance are explored. Danilyn Rutherford’s Raiding the Land of the Foreigners: The Limits of the Nation on an Indonesian Frontier (2003) is a fine example of recent scholarship on Papuans (Biak), identity, and Indonesian nation-making, but it is not a social history, and only has a few remarks to offer about Christianity. Rutherford’s theoretically sophisticated work illumines the ambiva-lences of “nationhood” in Biak island, just north of West Papua, but, unlike the present study, it does not consider how the encounters among Christianity, Islam, nation-making, and traditional Papuan culture have provided a new perspective from which to view Indonesian/Melanesian cultures and authenticity.

Christianity and indigenous cultural confidence

Non-Western appropriation of Christianity appears to have evoked indigenous confidence on a scale that warrants a re-evaluation of what connection there might be between Western missionary contact and indigenous cultural aspirations. Among social and religious minority groups Christianity seems to play an essential role in identity-formation, particularly when these Christians are surrounded by others who are ethnically different and practice other religions. For the Dani, the tensions among Indonesian nation-state, Dani tradition, Islam, and Christianity are exacerbated by the political, economic, social, and religious realities of Indonesia, where race, ethnicity, and religion occupy an important place in the discourse about the formation of the nation-state. Culturally Melanesian, politically Southeast Asian, and Christian, in religion, modern urban Dani identity emerges in part from active involvement in the relational matrix encountered in the new urban milieu. How are emergent Dani identities formed? How have Dani utilized their religion, an increasingly indigenized form of Christianity, to navigate through severe cultural dislocation and new patterns of social organization and social interaction to reach the shores of new cultural identities that serve as vehicles for meaningful participation in the modern world? What are the rhetorical strategies and control mechanisms by which Western missions and the Indonesian nation-state endeavor to form Western-styled Christians or Indonesian citizens?

Maintaining Dani distinctives

Changes occurring in and around Dani communities located in urban Jayapura outstrip those in highland villages, where relative isolation impedes rapid modernization. Urban Dani Christian self-understanding is challenged by the severe cultural dislocation caused in part by an intensification of Western acculturation, rural to urban migration, postcolonial nation building, poverty, and new patterns of social organization and interaction that characterize modern cities.

Within this context, negotiating social and personal identities becomes an important task for the maintenance of Dani distinctives, particularly as the Dani encounter attempts by the government at Indonesianization and Islamization. How have Dani utilized and adapted Christianity in ways that may have assisted them in the pluralistic city of Jayapura? How has the Bible shaped indigenous attitudes toward the reality of God and various themes of religious belief? How have Dani rhetorical strategies utilized Christian ideals to thrust their political agendas? Recognizing that the Christian church plays a central role in the lives of Dani society, as it does for many Pacific societies, it will be critical to address how specifically the church serves as the “ideological and social cornerstone” of Dani lives and how it has, in a similar vein to other Pacific societies, “become a vehicle through which islanders are negotiating new social identities and world views” (Lockwood 1993: 15).

The quest for moral legitimacy

Western missions, Islam, Indonesian nation-state, and Dani individual and society function as narratives whose designers and speakers search continually for moral legitimacy through a variety of discursive and nondiscursive means in the context of their mutual encounter. Deeply involved in the relational matrix are the employment of rhetorical strategies, the competition between state and mission ideologies, and institutional-building apparatuses that reflect political, economic, and social allegiances, with the aim of reconfiguring Dani personal and social identities in line with the imagined ideal and its constituent “truth system” (Hefner 1993a: 17).

Each player in the encounter forwards its distinctive vision, with attending institutions, commitments, social orders, symbols, lifestyles, along with strategies for implementation. Each extends, whether explicitly or implicitly stated, an ideological vision equipped with a specific history, prejudice, and promise, promoted and sustained within rationalizing institutions and standardizing canons. Each vision aims naturally for the standardization, dissemination, and “rationalization” of its implicit ideals. Issues of identity are brought to bear at each level of encounter, from the “purely” visional to the quotidian tumble of life. It must be said, however, that no vision is an unadulterated, purely rational image of the present and future condition. Rather, each vision and those who cohere to it are fraught with inconsistencies and irrationalities, a reflection more of the messiness of human nature than of its weakness or passivity. Finally, the concept that animates this study is that the emergence of the church, the creation of a new social sphere, plays a primary role in the construction of modern Dani individual and social identity, thus offering an alternative moral authority as well as the structures and strategies to reconceptualize the self within a meaning-generating transethnic community that “affirms a transcendent ideal” and “becomes the clarion call for the redemptive transformation of the social world” (Hefner 1993a: 13). A new social space, like its counterpart, national culture and identity, “hinges on the production of new persons endowed with strong individualism and bundled together into larger social entities (e.g. class, region) by virtue of categorical identities as opposed and in addition to relational identities” (LiPuma 1997: 61).Understanding the function of the church in personal and social Dani life is important because, similar to some other Oceanic groups, the urban Dani community appears to be “nearly always established through the initial creation of a church with its own minister” (Yengoyan 1995: 341).

Multiple identities and single self

A supposition of the study is that individual human actors consist of a single self with multiple identities that depend in part upon context. Even within traditional social conditions, identities are marked by pluraformity (see Gellner 1983: 13). Identities are demonstrable through the complexity of contexts, which act like social collages, mixing and blending various social worlds, and moral commitments. When is a particular identification advantageous? In which context does each identification surface? Multiple identities are reflective of an offshoot of one responding-self in contexts of multiple encounters. Dani take advantage of various associative identifications, giving rise to complex moral orientations that require blending, adding, subtracting, balancing, and experimenting with new information and commitments.

Dani may identify with the nation-state as they participate in the state educational system (identifying as “Indonesians”), yet inside the doors of the church may identify themselves as Christians. To visitors from Papua New Guinea, they may self-ascribe as Melanesian. Dani employ religion pragmatically. If religion is “true” then it must be helpful in practical ways, so Dani give up certain things in place of other things in a process of continual negotiation, of rejection and acceptance, give and take. What is kept and what is discarded depends on what happens and when. Melanesians can hold con...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• PLATES
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• ABBREVIATIONS
• 1: CONFLICTING VISIONS AND CONSTRUCTING IDENTITIES BEYOND SPLENDID ISOLATION
• 2: THE WESTERN MISSION ENTERPRISE AND THE NEW ORDER’S NEW SOCIETY INSTILLING THE VISIONS
• 3: JAYAPURA AND TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE NEW SOCIETY DOWN FROM THE MOUNTAIN
• 4: SECULARIZING SOCIETY THE STRUGGLE OF CHRISTIANITY IN WEST PAPUA
• 5: THE VISION OF THE CHURCH THE NEW JERUSALEM
• 6: THE DESECULARIZATION OF DANI RELIGIOSITY AND IDENTITY “ALL IN THE MAKING”
• 7: CONCLUSION BEYOND MISSION CHRISTIANITY
• APPENDIX A
• APPENDIX B
• APPENDIX C
• APPENDIX D
• GLOSSARY
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHy