Bulletin N°44

Indonesia represents one of the most diverse religious and spiritual nations in the world. Home to over 209 million Muslims, 23 million Christians, and over 10 million combined Buddhists, Hindus, and Confucians^[1]Pew Research Center, The Global Religious Landscape. 2012., this richness is generally celebrated within official political discourse and promoted as a model of religious pluralism for both Southeast Asia and the world. The country’s motto ‘unity in diversity’ (Bhinekka Tunggal Ika) attests to the recognition of a civic and multidenominational Indonesian identity, and the Indonesian constitution guarantees religious freedom to all citizens^[2]For example, see Article 29 of the Constitution as well as the Law on Human Rights, No 39/1999 and Constitutional Amendment Article 28E.. Yet managing the nation’s vast array of faiths and religions is complex, especially given the increasingly diverse ways that individuals engage with their faith and cultivate an understanding of religious belonging.

The rise of religiously inspired vigilante groups^[3]Laurens Bakker, Organised Violence and the State: Evolving Vigilantism in Indonesia, Bijdragen tot de taal-, land-en volkenkunde, 172, 2016, pp 249-277, the emergence of transnational Islamic doctrines or evangelical Christians congregations^[4]For example, see Robert W. Hefner, "Whatever Happened to Civil Islam? Islam and Democratisation in Indonesia, 20 Years On", Asian Studies Review, 43(3), 2019, pp. 375-396., as well as the advantageous use of sectarian language by politicians^[5]IPAC, After Ahok: The Islamist Agenda in Indonesia, Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict, Jakarta, 2018. have created new challenges to the authority of Indonesia’s established religious organisations as well as for civil society more broadly. They have also contributed to an increasingly fraught environment for interfaith relations. If recent poling is to be believed, most Indonesians are influenced by religious affiliations when deciding who to vote for or which neighbourhoods to live in^[6]Eve Warburton, Deepening Polarisation and Democratic Decline in Indonesia, in Thomas Carothers & Andrew O-Donohue (Eds), Political Polarisation in South and Southeast Asia: Old Divisions, New … Continue reading. A vivid example of how this impinges on democratic freedoms occurred in 2017, when the Christian governor of Jakarta was electorally defeated and then convicted of blasphemy against Islam on the back of a sectarian campaign by an alliance of conservative Islamic preachers and opportunistic politicians^[7]For further information on the case against former governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, please see Chris Chaplin, ‘Mobilising Islam for Political Gains’. New Mandala, 15 February 2017 & IPAC, … Continue reading.

Indonesia’s emergence as a democracy over 20 years ago has thus created an unusual – but worrying – paradox. For the most part, political and civil rights are generally more secure than they were during Suharto’s authoritarian ‘New Order’ regime (1967-1998)^[8]Former Army General Suharto ruled Indonesia as President from 1968-1998. His authoritarian regime was known as the ‘New Order’ (which was established a year prior to Suharto officially becoming … Continue reading. At the same time, interfaith relations, and the rights of minorities, have also come under increased legal and political challenge, in part due to volatile public debate over how religious values, religion and spiritually should influence public values and political rights^[9]Greg Fealy & Ricci Ronit (Ed), Contentious Belonging: The Place of Minorities in Indonesia. Singapore: ISEAS Publishing, 2019. . To address the contentious ways in which religious sentiment is manipulated to undermine civic plurality, the current government of President Joko Widodo (commonly known as Jokowi) has launched an ambitious programme of moderasi beragama (religious moderation), aiming to promote moderate religious ideals that facilitate social tolerance.

Moderasi beragama is one of the most significant attempts to proactively engage with peoples’ faith as a way of solving interreligious discord, expanding upon long-established government policies of religious harmony (kerukunan) and pluralism. Whereas these latter initiatives aim to mediate between different religious communities rather than intrude into matters of faith, moderasi beragama intends to intensify the states involvement in the religious schools, places of worship, and the institutions that influence everyday religiosity. Not only does the state aim to strengthen these bodies through greater funding and logistical support, but it also seeks to ensure they promote a moderate – rather than immoderate - religious viewpoint. For a country where religion is increasingly an axis for political antagonism, moderasi beragama may offer welcome respite.

But it is not without its challenges. For one, Indonesia is not the first nation to attempt to control the ethical contours of religious life. Countries as diverse as Turkey, Egypt, as well as Saudi Arabia and Singapore (for example) all play a role in mediating the religious life of their citizens^[10]See for instance, Rebecca Penny, The Constitutionalisation of Religious Harmony in Singapore. Australian Outlook. Australian Institute of International Affairs, 2020; Martin Van Bruinessen, The … Continue reading. In fact, Indonesia already has an array of private and public religious institutions. These range from government bodies like the national Ministry for Religious Affairs to locally based pseudo-government organisations like Interreligious Harmony Forums or Ulama councils. There are also a wide range of established civic organisations such as the ten Catholic archdioceses across the country, the Communion of Indonesian Churches (protestant), and the Islamic organisations Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah; all of which manage a network of mosques, churches, schools, universities, and associational programmes that represent millions of Indonesians.

The range of bodies invested in public life provides the government with allies that have well-established connections across Indonesian society and that can assist it in promoting moderation. But it simultaneously complicates such initiatives. Not all religious institutions see eye-to-eye, and they often have interests that don’t always align to short-term government policy goals. Moreover, if one accounts for the growing number of charismatic preachers who expertly use social media, religious book and lifestyle fairs, or literature to touch upon matters of faith, then the complexity of implementing moderasi beragama across the country becomes apparent.

But moderasi beragama suffers from a further challenge in that it assumes that sectarian strife derives from ‘immoderate’ religious discourses. In doing so, it ignores the complexity of everyday religion, and the way religious, social, economic, and political worlds often overlap. Indeed, the policy is overly formalistic in design, assuming that moderation, and by extension religious pluralism, are a priori principles that can be learnt through prescriptive and top-down planning. As anthropologists have long noted however^[11]For example, please see Hussein Ali Agrama, "Ethics, Tradition, Authority: Toward an anthropology of the fatwa", American Ethnologist, 37 (1), 2010, pp 2-18 and Amira Mittermaier ‘Dreams from … Continue reading, religious authority is never constant but ethically reflexive, defined as much through the relationships and experience one cultivates through personal practice as it is with one’s relationship to religious institutions and deities.

I elaborate upon this latter argument to discuss how religious pluralism is defined and promoted in Indonesia. Drawing briefly upon my ethnographic research^[12]Throughout 2022 I conducted ethnographic research exploring the meaning and roots of religious pluralism and interreligious dialogue in the city of Yogyakarta. The project was part of a larger … Continue reading, I contrast current government attempts to regulate religion with that of grassroots interfaith activists in the city of Yogyakarta. Not only do the experiences of interfaith activists illuminate the difficulty of attempting to regulate any coherent idea of religion, but they also render visible the limited ways in which the government interprets ideas of moderation, pluralism or even religion within their policy. More significantly though, the experiences of interfaith activists show that for pluralism and moderation to be truly meaningful, they cannot simply be learnt, prescribed, or politically managed. Rather, such values emerge though praxis and the often-messy ways in which individuals are forced to reformulate their ideas of faith and ethical coexistence in the fact of religious difference. For this reason, the substantive impact moderasi beragama is likely to remain limited for now.

The Roots of Moderasi Beragama

To elaborate on the complexity of defining moderation and regulating religion, it is worth reflecting on the aims and limitations of moderasi beragama. Initially formulated by Lukman Hakim Saifuddin, the Minister for Religious Affairs from 2014 to 2019, the government began prioritising moderasi beragama to counter what the government perceived to be the ‘dangers of hoaxes and slander within religious and national life.^[13]Indonesian Ministry for Communication and Information,Kemenag Terus Prioritaskan Program Pengarusutamaan Moderasi Beragama, Published 16 April 2019.’ It has since gained pace, taken up by Lukman’s successor, Yaqut Cholil Qoumas, and becoming part of the government’s National Medium Term Development Plan of 2020-2024. This allows all government Ministries funding and training to promote moderation. Civil servants – particularly at the Ministry of Religious Affairs – are increasingly provided with such training, while the government has also rolled out trainer courses for civil society activists and university students. Not confined to government or educational sectors, the government has also identified what it terms as ‘Harmony Villages’ (Desa Sadar Kerukunan) such as Pendowoharjo in Yogyakarta, as a way of promoting and awarding local level pluralism.

Moderasi beragama is not the first government initiative to protect society’s diversity. Previous administrations have gone to great lengths to promote interfaith harmony (kerukunan) and protect religious freedoms. Moderasi beragama does not replace these policies but aims to strengthen them. This includes working across an estimated 500 Religious Harmony Forums (Forum Kerukunan Umat Beragama, FKUB), which monitor religious harmony across Indonesia from the provincial to district level. Additionally, moderation is not the first intellectual endeavour to promote religious pluralism through scripture. Decades before, the prominent Islamic scholar Nurcholish Madjid argued that a modern plural society could find its roots in the Prophet Muhammad’s Charter of Madinah. Madjid established a series of educational and social programmes to promote this vision.

But moderasi beragama differs in scale and ambition, as it is arguably one of the more wholistic attempts to promote pluralism by governing religious identities on a national scale. It is aspirational in design, seeking to promote moderation as a way of fostering the country’s diversity. Based on the idea that religious identity is a fundamental part of Indonesian identity and that the state has a mediating role in orientating religion towards social wellbeing, while increasing the quality of interreligious forums and religious services^[14]Lukman Hakim Saifuddin, Moderasi Beragama: Menjaga Indonesia. Penganugerahan Gelar Doktor Kehormatan. Jakarta: Universitas Islam Negeri Syarif Hidayatullah Press, 2022.. These goals may be specific to Indonesia, yet they fit into a much larger global effort to foreground religion and religious scripture to speak to contemporary social challenges. In 2022, on the back of Indonesia hosting the G20, the Ministry of Religious Affairs organised the R20 (Religion-20), inviting religious scholars and activists from across the world to discuss how religious literacy can provide a meaningful basis for cross-congregational interactions^[15]Jonathan Benthall, Jonathan, 'R20: the G20 Religion Forum led by Indonesia', Observbatoire International Du Religieux, Bulletin No 41, January 2023.. The R20, much like moderasi beragama, attest to an emerging confidence amongst the government and its allies to promote Indonesia as a global religious power.

As moderasi beragama embraces religion as a solution to social ills rather than a problem to be dealt with, the government has leant heavily on the leaderships of Indonesia’s largest Islamic organisation Nahdlatul Ulama to explicitly outline what this may mean in terms of religious discourse. Nahdlatul Ulama, whose current chairman is Yaqut Cholil Qoumas’ brother, have played a key role in assembling a syllabus for civil servants, and have provided ‘moderation’ with a basis in Islamic jurisprudence. Explaining the concept, one of the key architects of the programme stated that it very much aligned with Nahdlatul Ulama’s image of itself as a moderate and tolerant Islamic body, as it aspired to find a middle point between alleged religious conservativism on the one hand, and liberal religious sentiments on the other^[16]Interview, Jakarta, October 2022. In clarifying this further, they noted that moderation stemmed from the Islamic concept of Wasathiyah (moderation), which relates to the idea of the Ummatan Wasathan (moderate people) within the Qur’an. According to advocates in Nahdlatul Ulama, this form of moderation represents efforts to balance relationships (tawazul) and promote tolerance (tasamuh) and peace (islah) within society. Moderation is thus meant to proactively strengthen religious cohesion and the religious character of Indonesia.

Being overly reliant on the scholasticism of Nahdlatul Ulama creates challenges, however. Moderasi beragama lacks equal involvement from religious figures from other Islamic organisations or even other religions. This is cause for concern amongst some of its key supporters. As one key proponent of moderasi beragama reflected to me during my reserch, there is fear  for its long-term sustainability, and they believed that should there be a change in political leadership then the term moderation could be redefined^[17]Interview, Yogyakarta, October 2022.. He was aware that moderasi was an elusive concept, and that grounding it in a particular idea of Wasathiyah didn’t always provide clarity. Indeed, Wasathiyah is not only promoted by Nahdlatul Ulama, but was a core value of Yusuf Qaradawi’s thinking, as it has been within Indonesia’s largest Salafi influenced organisation, Wahdah Islamiyah. Neither of these actors share Nahdlatul Ulama’s interpretation of Islamic principles.

In the absence of any doctrinal certainty, defining moderation has thus come to somewhat rely on vested social and political calculations. It overlaps with Nahdlatul Ulama’s drive to strengthen its religious influence in politics as well as counter challenges to its authority within the public sphere from transnational Islamist organisations like Hizbut Tahrir  or the Muslim Brotherhood. Dovetailing with Jokowi’s desire to curb politically motivated Islamic ‘radicalism’ – which he views as a political challenge to his own influence – protecting ‘pluralism’ and promoting ‘moderation’ becomes less about convincing society of the benefits of moderation and more about limiting public space for ‘immoderate’ religious groups. Given the emphasis is on stemming challenges to Nahdlatul Ulama or political Islam, moderation predominantly concerns intra-Islamic discord rather than Indonesia’s other major religions. A core mechanism used to define ‘immoderate views’ is to juxtapose the seemingly tolerant nature of Indonesian religious life with the image of sectarian strife and Islamism as seen in countries like Syria.

Rather than being viewed as something inherent to the way religion is governed in Indonesia, immoderate religion is often posed as an existential and foreign threat to Indonesia’s tolerant character. To the extent immoderate discourses are seen as homegrown, this is explained away as due to the infiltration of Indonesian society by Muslim Brotherhood or Salafi preachers backed by foreign donors^[18]See for example, Noorhaidi Hasan, "Salafim in Indonesia: Transnational Islam, violent activism, and cultural resistance", in Robert Hefner (ed) Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Indonesia. London: … Continue reading. Little is said of the way Salafi or Muslim Brotherhood activists have constructed a formidable infrastructure of locally funded schools, businesses, and welfare programmes^[19]Chris Chaplin, Salafism and the State: Islamic Activism and National Identity in Contemporary Indonesia. Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2021.. Instead, stories of ‘Middle Eastern’ markets^[20]CNN Indonesia. 2021. ‘https://www.cnnindonesia.com/nasional/20210204165603-20-602383/pakai-dinar-dirham-pasar-muamalah-di-sumut-tutup-sementara">Pakai Dinar-Dirham Pasar Muamalah di Sumut Tutup Sementara’ CNN Indonesia, 4 February 2021., pro-caliphate schools^[21]Riky Ferdianto, ‘https://majalah.tempo.co/read/laporan-utama/166181/seberapa-berbahaya-khilafatul-muslimin?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20220612_mbm">Khalifah di Antara Dua Khilafah’ Tempo, 11 June 2022. , and radicalisation on university campuses^[22]Imam Hamdi, ‘https://koran.tempo.co/read/berita-utama/474111/kader-intelektual-rentan-terpapar-paham-dan-jaringan-terorisme">Kader Interlektual Rentan Terpapar’, Koran Tempo, 30 May 2022.  accentuate the need to protect Indonesian harmony from the spectre of outside interference. Promoting moderation and protecting the nation from ‘immoderate’ views thus compliment security efforts to curb radicalism and political Islam; albeit how these latter terms are defined – much like moderation - depend on the government and its allies in Nahdlatul Ulama.

This is not to ignore the genuine efforts of many of moderasi beragama’s advocates to foster positive social change. Yet without adequate oversight, moderasi beragama can complement anti-democratic measures to curb the rights of anyone deemed ‘immoderate’ while also supporting the intervention of the state into the religious lives and thoughts of its people^[23]Zainal Abidin Bagir & Husni Mubarok, https://indonesiaatmelbourne.unimelb.edu.au/religious-freedom-harmony-or-moderation-government-attempts-to-manage-diversity/">Religious freedom, harmony or moderation? Government attempts to manage diversity, Indonesia at Melbourne. 30 November 2021. . To date, the policy remains overly prescriptive and formalistic in nature, as governing moderation is predominantly approached as an ideological battle between competing religious camps. Indeed, little is done to learn from the experiences of religious citizens themselves.

Plurality as Praxis: Religious Activism in Yogyakarta

The top-down approach of moderasi, leaves little space to engage with the everyday ways in which many Indonesians practice religion themselves. Everyday religious life is defined through the intimate relationships and experiences one cultivates amongst their fellow Indonesians as much as through the study of scripture. To better explore the diversity of non-governmental interfaith activism and explain the limitations of top-down attempts to govern religion, I draw on research conducted amongst Yogyakarta’s activist community throughout 2022. I engaged with approximately 32 individuals from Muslim, Christian, Catholic, Buddhist, Hindu, and indigenous faiths. These included priests, pastors, Imams as well as university lecturers, high school teachers, and established activists, although these categories easily blended into one another. A microcosm of Indonesia’s diversity, Yogyakarta is home to approximately 3 million people including a significant number of students from across the country who come to study within the city’s prestigious universities. While Yogyakarta is not averse to interreligious tension, some of Indonesia’s oldest interfaith networks, including the Institute for Interfaith Dialogue in Indonesia (Interfidei) and the Institute for Islamic and Social Studies (Lembaga Kajian Islam dan Sosial, LKiS) were formed in the city.

When reflecting on the government’s initiative to promote moderation, most of my interlocutors were generally supportive of any intention to better interreligious relations. But there were notable reservations about whether the government could truly enforce moderation from on high. As one interlocutor, who was an Islamic scholar, reflected to me ‘moderation is not about formalities and not wishing to upset competing sides, it should be about genuine interreligious dialogue.’^[24]Interview, Yogyakarta, May 2022 From their perspective, moderasi beragama was tied with an obsession with maximising the influence of a particular religious and political interests. In fact, while there was a general feeling that President Jokowi had done more than any president since Abdurrahman Wahid to protect minorities, there was concern that the policy was overly intrusive. As another scholar and interfaith activist told me ‘In my opinion, it [moderasi beragama] must be given to the [Indonesian] community…it is now controlled by the government, but the community and government need to work together’. They concluded that ‘the fact that the Ministry of Religious Affairs want to enforce [moderation] at every level is not very healthy for religious life^[25]Interview, Yogyakarta, October 2022".

The promotion of Wasathiyah as the mediating point between ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ religious view was also viewed as too narrow in defining how individuals defined the role of faith in society. As a position between two ill-defined poles, it was both negative (defined by what it was not) and too normative. Indeed, my interlocutors often reflected on multiple religious inspirations when explaining their interfaith activism. For instance, a young Catholic drew inspiration from Pope Francis’ recent advocation of Frateli Tutti, believing the concept of social fraternity was not particular to the church but had more universal appeal^[26]Interview, Yogyakarta, September 2022. A university professor drew inspiration from the Sufi concept of Wahdatul Wujud, which he believed to represent unity with all that exist, including with other religions^[27]Interview, Yogyakarta, October 2022. Meanwhile, another Islamic scholar reflected upon the work of Abdurrahman Wahid, seeing a need to distinguish contextual and universal elements in Islamic thought. As he argued, religious law (fiqih) and ethics (akhlaq) protected human dignity regardless of one’s personal belief^[28]Interview, Yogyakarta, October 2022..

These religious values were not solely a matter of doctrine or personal faith, they remained intimately connected with the worldly experiences and moral frameworks within which activists found themselves. The abovementioned individual who drew inspiration from Abdurrahman Wahid stated that until he had enrolled in university in Yogyakarta, he had almost no contact with Christians or individuals of different faiths. As he told it, ‘I had a stereotype about Christians, because I came from a poor village, and so when I saw someone who looked fancy, clean, beautiful, handsome, I immediately thought that they must be a Christian’. This is an often-repeated trope within many conservative leaning Islamic circles. As he explained further, it was only in the environment of the pro-democracy protests of 1997 that he came to recognise that Christians could also be poor or hold similar social values as himself. As he concluded, ‘they become partners, become friends, and what we became concerned about was no longer religious difference.’

For this individual, university marked the beginning of a more significant re-evaluation of their religious identity. As interfaith conflicts began to increase across Indonesia at the end of the 1990s, he travelled the country with individuals of different religions to bring religious communities together. They were candid that this didn’t always work, but they also recognised that they had become more cognisant that religion was often manipulated to create division and justify conflict. As they stated, ‘when someone says [a conflict] is about religion, then [another] religious identity will be suppressed…or if the government says it is a matter of religion, then it is [likely] not.’ Coming to terms that he himself had, during his childhood and early adulthood, held similar views about religious identity within politics, he delved deeper into the intellectualism of Abdurrahman Wahid as a source to better understand how his faith and beliefs related to others^[29]Abdurrahman Wahid (1940-2009) was Indonesia’s fourth President (1999-2001) and a former leader of Nahdlatul Ulama. He remains a revered Islamic intellectual and was known for his outspoken defence … Continue reading.

Although this interlocutor’s experience is particular, it speaks to the broader significance of distinguishing between moderation and tolerance as a public discourse on one hand, and as a position cultivated through communal experience on the other. Activists often took an experiential approach within their understanding of plurality, believing practice and encountering otherness were essential to fostering good relations. For instance, a priest from the once-conflict ridden province of Maluku described to me how he had become heavily involved in bringing Christian and Muslim communities together. He stressed the need to speak across religions by building bridges of commonality, and so assisted in organising ‘Peace Sermons.’ These events drew leaders from different faith communities together to reflect on a common issue through scripture, such as the health risks of HIV/AIDs. The intention, he noted, was that people would understand that they share common problems across religious divides, and that religious sources – regardless of denomination – could point to similarities as well as differences across faiths^[30]Interview, Jakarta, June 2022.. It had made him a strong believer in what he referred to as a ‘liquid church’^[31]Not to be confused with the US Baptist Liquid Church founded by Tim Lucas a concept where he believed theology needed to be in conversation with the experience of a community.

The experience of the priest, much like the Islamic intellectual mentioned previously, talk to a more phenomenological understanding of how plurality emerges. It forces us to reflect on the experiences that underpin the ethical moments through which individuals come to understand interfaith engagement beyond formal ideas of harmony or diversity. It is only when individuals are forced to step outside their prescribed religious registers and re-consider what is morally appropriate that plurality moves beyond the normative or abstract. Interpersonal struggles to engage with different faiths created what the anthropologist Mattingly refers to as new moral registers^[32]Cheryl Mattingly, "Ethics, Immanent Transcendence, and the Experimental Narrative Self", in Cheryl Mattingly, Rasmus Dyring, Maria Lous and Thomas Schwarz Wentzer (Eds) Moral Engines: Exploring the … Continue reading. In turn, these have led to an expansive interpretation of interfaith cohesion.

A final illustrative example of this dynamic can be found amongst activists within a local women interfaith network. Formed in 2016, this network emerged from a workshop that aimed to address the role of women in managing religious diversity in Yogyakarta. Although modest in size, this network of activists are a collective of women of varying backgrounds, experiences, and denominations – about 60% of whom are studying at the city’s universities. Initially they began by inviting each other to their houses of worship, before expanding their initiatives to deal with local gender-based violence and women’s empowerment. Faith is very much at the heart of what they do, but they do not shy away from challenging each others presumed stereotypes As one leader explained to me ‘we look for universal values in the teachings of each of our religions, but interfaith relations are not built through formal discussion but personal activities. When we meet up, it is not always clear what the purpose it, but we now joke…and to the extent you can joke about religious difference and not be offended, that is amazing^[33]Interview, Yogyakarta, October 2022’.

For this network, the aim was to promote spaces which minimise the influence of restrictive narratives of religious authority, which was often male dominated. Indeed, when describing what they were doing, these activists preferred the Indonesian term ‘iman’ (faith) rather than ‘agama’ (religion), given the latter is too dependent of how the state itself defines religion. By using iman, they intended to give space to non-traditional forms of religious authority, including indigenous faiths and stigmatised minorities. They work with a vast array of religious actors not included within government programmes to promote moderation. These include minority groups like the Ahmadiyah, disabled religious communities who are often left out of religious initiatives, as well as religious LGBT+ individuals, such as within Yogyakarta’s transgender community. The implication here is that practicing plurality and engaging with different religious positions pushes against the institutional arrangements and ethical limits that are often used to govern official ideas of religion or moderation in Indonesia.

Pluralism or Plurality?

Yogyakarta based activism arguably represents a limited segment of Indonesian society. The activities of the civil society figures I engaged with remain much smaller in scope compared to the reach of the government, and they suffer from a wide range of stigmatism and threats. They can be perceived as overtly ‘liberal’ in their religious positions, facing considerable derision from socio-conservative Islamic movements, or even occasionally from their own congregations who can view them as overly tolerant to the detriment of their own religious community’s interests. They have even come under physical and verbal attack on occasion. A poignant example was provided by a high school teacher, who recounted how her school had been attacked by Islamic vigilantes after a rumour that an Ahmadi was at the school. Upon arriving at the scene to mediate between the school and group, the then city mayor joined in support of the vigilantes^[34]Interview, Yogyakarta, October 2022.

Nonetheless, the experience of these activists’ points to the limits of governing religion and enforcing a pre-conceived notion of pluralism from on top. The government may promote pluralism across faiths, but for now this remains restricted by political interests. In some circumstance, these limitations can even hinder plurality rather than promote it. So far as moderasi beragama seeks to moderate between faiths, its only does so amongst recognised religions that exist within pre-existing political structures. For sure, moderasi beragama has the potential to foster the required social and legal environment for better interreligious engagement, and actively captures the way religion can offer a solution to social ills. But to be truly representative of Indonesia’s diverse religious field, it must move beyond prescriptive attempts to regulate moderation.

By foregrounding the need for communal experiences where plurality may emerge, activists provide a more context sensitive engagement with social diversity. As with moderasi beragama, faith and religion remain an integral aspect of Indonesian social life, but they differ as they focus on creating the debates and moments where individuals re-invent their ethical understanding of what it means to be religious in a plural society. Plurality requires dialogical and open exchange. Interfaith activists foster this dynamic, and as a leading member of one organisation put it, ‘the value of humanity is that we are all in the Qur’an, and it is Allah who wants humans to be different. If Allah wanted, He could have created humans of the same kind^[35] Interview, Yogyakarta, October 2022.’. Respecting difference – be it religious, ethnic, sexuality or gender based – is thus respecting the diversity of humanity ordained by God.