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The Indonesian state is founded on the doctrine of Pancasila, which includes belief in one God and a commitment to national unity. Every citizen is obliged to follow one of five faiths. For many decades this ideology helped to promote stability, harmony and equality between different religious communities, including Christians and Muslims.
But the 1980s saw the beginnings of Islamisation, and the economic crisis of the late 1990s precipitated serious violence by Islamic extremists against Christians, including in some areas a full-scale campaign of ethnic cleansing. In Central Sulawesi and the Maluku Islands hundreds of churches and thousands of homes were destroyed; according to some estimates 30,000 Christians were killed and about half a million driven out.
Conditions for Christians in these areas have eased, but they remain under pressure in the many places where there are Muslim majorities. The long-term goal of the extremists is to bring the whole of Indonesia under the rule of shari‘a law, and following a prolonged Islamist insurgency the territory of Aceh has already achieved a measure of autonomy from the national government and has introduced elements of shari‘a. In Papua the army has burned a number of Christian villages and killed their inhabitants, and in a policy called “transmigration”, Javanese Muslims have been encouraged to settle in the western part of the province, which is now a Muslim-majority area and is to be granted special autonomy. The same policy is now being applied to the Malukus.
According to official figures, Christians are now over 10% of the Indonesian population of nearly 240 million, though the churches believe that the real proportion may be significantly higher. But the country also has the world’s largest Muslim population.
