Islam and Institutional Religious Freedom in Indonesia

By emphasizing that individual religious freedom depends for its realization on complex social embeddings, the concept of institutional religious freedom provides an important corrective to conventional, individualistic approaches to religious freedom. The concept also helpfully complicates the investigation of religious freedom by encouraging analysts to recognize that different societal and civilizational traditions define religion itself in significantly different ways. Tensions such as these between different social definitions of religion and between different manifestations of institutional religious freedom have been a chronic feature of religious life in Indonesia since the establishment of the republic in 1945. This paper examines these legacies in the context of contemporary Indonesia, especially in light of ongoing disputes over the legal and ethical status of spiritual traditions (kepercayaan) long barred from full state recognition. The essay also explores the theoretical and policy implications of the Indonesian example for the analysis of institutional religious freedom in the late modern world as a whole.