The Role of Islam and Christianity in Public Space. Perspectives from Indonesia and Germany

The recent violent disruptions of Christian retreats in Sukabumi and Padang (2025) starkly expose the fragility of religious coexistence in Indonesia. Despite its celebrated reputation for tolerance, prevailing practice often reflects passive tolerance—a conditional permission granted by the majority rather than an inherent right. This sustains asymmetric power relations between religious groups, leaving minorities vulnerable to societal prejudice and restrictive state regulations, most notably the 2006 Joint Ministerial Decree on the establishment of places of worship.
Although the state’s policy of religious moderation has been promoted nationwide through strategic, multi-stakeholder programs, the fundamental right of citizens to freely practice their faith remains inadequately protected. Safeguarding the right to worship is not merely a religious policy—it is an affirmation of Indonesia’s constitutional promise, national dignity, and social cohesion. Ensuring that all houses of worship stand free from fear is essential for realizing unity grounded in justice, equality, and mutual respect.
This presentation advocates a paradigm shift: from passive tolerance to equal religious citizenship, as mandated by Article 29 of the 1945 Constitution, which guarantees freedom of religion and obliges the state to protect all faiths equally. Central to this vision is the concept of religious civility—an active ethic of mutual protection, empathy, and solidarity—rooted in local traditions such as pela gandong, menyama braya, and gotong royong. Education is key to cultivating this ethic, particularly through initiatives like a “Curriculum of Love” that instils respect for religious diversity from an early age. The paper concludes by underscoring the urgency of genuine, rights-based initiatives to secure enduring religious harmony in Indonesia.

Despite longstanding claims by cultural essentialists like Samuel Huntington, Bernard Lewis, and Elie Kedourie that Islam and democracy are inherently incompatible, Indonesia—the world’s largest Muslim-majority country—has challenged that assumption. For over two decades since the fall of Suharto’s authoritarian regime, Indonesia has managed to blend democratic governance with Islamic values. While most Indonesian Muslims continue to express strong normative support for democracy, this endorsement does not consistently translate into support for liberal democratic principles. Drawing on a nationally representative survey conducted in July 2025, this study uncovers a troubling gap: although a majority of Muslims view democracy as the best system for Indonesia, many simultaneously harbor intolerant attitudes. These include objections to non-Muslim religious practices and places of worship, resistance to non-Muslims holding political office, and strong support for majoritarian privileges in state-religion relations. The survey also finds substantial backing for Islamist policies such as compulsory hijab, the criminalization of LGBTQ individuals, and a ban on bank interest. These patterns point to a growing tide of intolerance and religious majoritarianism, which correlates with Indonesia’s ongoing democratic backsliding. As liberal values weaken, illiberal political actors increasingly exploit these sentiments to advance their electoral agendas—raising urgent questions about the future of inclusive democracy in Indonesia.

Indonesia ranks at the top as a country where most people consider religion to be very important in their lives. Religion plays a role as the most important reference in various areas of life and an important part of everyone’s identity in Indonesian society. The importance of religion makes everything related to religion an interesting issue, including the number of religious adherents. An increase in the number of members of a particular religion can be seen mostly as a threat to the existence of other religions, making religious conversion a sensitive issue in Indonesian society. Moreover, religion is not understood solely as a private or individual domain but closely related to family and society at large.
Religious conversion is an interesting phenomenon in society, where those who convert play a role in influencing public debate through many platforms. This role can either strengthen interfaith relationships, increase tension or neutral, depending on how the religious conversion is perceived by both the convert and the surrounding community. How do those who convert to another religion influence public debate including in the media, and what is the impact? These questions serve as a guide in her paper.

Religious authorities shape political landscapes worldwide in different ways: While in Indonesia over the past two decades, socially conservative religious forces have gained political influence and contributed to a growing religious nationalism, other religious actors continue to contribute to democratic education and emancipatory participatory processes.
Drawing on extensive research on the changing discourses on Islam in Indonesia in the post-1998 electoral democratization period and analysis of the mechanisms through which conservative religious movements grew and built alliances with nationalists, this presentation discusses both the challenges and opportunities that religious forces present for democratic societies. While the first part examines the structural and societal conditions that led to the political strengthening of conservative religious actors in Indonesia, the second part turns to the democratic potential of religious communities both in Indonesia and Germany.
The presentation argues that religious actors can provide important resources for democratic education. These insights are contextualized within a new practice-oriented research group on civic education and religion that focuses on Germany while building on experiences gained in Indonesia.

The hallmark of modern - in the sense of today's - democracies is the plurality of social systems (in the sense of Luhmann’s sociology) in the states in which we live. Christian political theology and political philosophy have devoted themselves extensively in recent decades to the question of how the ideological, cultural and religious plurality of citizens in democracies should be present in the public space in which the general will of the people is discursively determined.
Against this background, the paper will present some aspects of the relationship of Christianity to democracy. First, some problems that arise with a formal understanding of democracy will be presented. Then, fundamental problems that traditional constellations of Christianity entail for democracy will be discussed. This is followed by reflections on a constructive relationship of Christianity to political law on the background of Christian (Protestant) theology, which are then turned against currently present forms of religious politics. Finally, the relevance of human rights for democracy and the rule of law is discussed, again from the perspective of Christian (Protestant) theology.

This chapter examines the emotive infrastructures of governance in Yogyakarta, focusing on how religion-infused signs, sounds, and spatial arrangements work as instruments of affective discipline. Through the concept of „orders of feeling“ (Stodulka, 2019; 2022; 2024), I explore how public announcements, banners, clothing norms, and curated atmospheres shape emotional orientations towards non-normative individuals and communities. Emotives (defined here as signs, gestures, speech, and objects capable of arousing intense feeling) are deployed by religious and political authorities not merely to communicate norms but to instill them affectively. These discursive and infrastructural arrangements can evoke shame, fear, anxiety, and exclusion, and contribute to shifting feeling rules within cities.
Orchestrated campaigns promoting an image of a clean, moral, and well-mannered pious city, steeped in modernist and nationalist rhetoric, stigmatize informal livelihoods, queer subjectivities, feminist expression, and any trace of political dissent. Religious emotives appear in loudspeaker announcements, veiling practices, and banner texts targeting “immorality” and “deviance,” turning the city into a terrain of moral surveillance and affective discipline. These emotive infrastructures can produce regulations and spatial rearrangements that promote hatred, shaming, and violent exclusion while disguising political intent as religious care.
In tracing how emotives function across soundscapes, visual registers, and embodied norms, this chapter situates affect at the heart of authoritarian ‘pious’ governance. Far from passive, the targeted communities persist, contest, and reconfigure the city’s affective orders, showing that while feelings may be disciplined, they are never fully governed.

This paper aims to explore how academia can engage with the everyday interreligious and ecological practices of local communities. These practices are intended to tackle the structural causes of religious discrimination and environmental degradation, such as inadequate regulations on extractive development, industrial pollution, and market-driven consumerism. Engaging with existing studies on everyday religious environmentalism, and relying on firsthand and organizational experience from community-based participatory research conducted in Indonesia, this paper will 1) showcase the everyday critical religious environmental practices carried out by Muslim, Christian, and other religious community members, and 2) the challenges they encounter and the opportunities available to them when addressing structural practices of religious favoritism and ecologically harmful politics. In conclusion, this paper will argue that academia, particularly in the field of religious studies, is vital and can significantly contribute to promoting community involvement and structural reforms to create a resilient framework that supports interreligious and ecological justice.

Using a decolonial approach, this presentation argues that a Christian multidirectional eco-theological perspective is crucial in the interreligious public voice on the role of religion in shaping the ethics of sustainability and the formation of interfaith eco-habituation oriented toward embodied eco-healing. It offers an Indonesian Christian multidirectional eco-text of embodied healing, embedded in Christian, blue, intercultural, and ecofeminist theological perspectives that connect and respond to the interlinked questions of faith, trauma, the sea, and healing in relation to sustainability and eco-habituation. Intersecting a personal story of the sea with Christian rhetoric of healing, a story of interreligious eco-collaboration, women’s narratives of eco-trauma, and an Indonesian Indigenous healing practice for the sea, this presentation proposes a multidirectional eco-text as a source for interreligious public discourse on embodied eco-healing.

Indonesian scholarship in theology and religious studies shows a slow shift from focusing on religious moderation to focusing on religious environmentalism. This shift reflects that Indonesians seem less concerned about the threat of religious extremism and more concerned about environmental degradation. Based on recent large-scale research, I will explore awareness of Indonesians about climate change and I will re-interpret the notion of religious moderation that dominated Islamic Higher Education since the beginning of this century. Next I will reflect on the policy of promoting ‘integrated science’, combining green theology and green technology, and i will argue in favour of a ‘transdisciplinary approach’ in Islamic Higher Education in Indonesia.

Muslim women’s movements in Indonesia are central to the decolonization of religious authority, contesting narratives that have long excluded women’s voices from interpretive and leadership roles. For centuries, Islamic legal interpretation has been shaped by male-centered scholarship, reinforcing patriarchal structures and limiting women’s authority. This article examines how women Islamic scholars (ulama perempuan) contest these exclusions through fatwa-making (Islamic legal opinions) and Muslim women movements.
Based on ethnographic fieldwork and informed by gender and anthropological perspectives, the study analyzes practices at the 2017 and 2022 Congresses of Indonesian Women Ulama (Kongres Ulama Perempuan Indonesia/KUPI). Women ulama reclaim the role of fatwa-giver, asserting interpretive authority in institutions, grassroots initiatives, social movements, and media platforms. Their participation demonstrates that fatwa-making can be inclusive and transformative, disrupting established power dynamics within Islamic authority.
They also challenge dominant methodologies by embedding women’s lived experiences into textual interpretation. This contrasts with conventional approaches that privilege male-authored scholarship, encouraging critical engagement with sacred texts and exposing patriarchal bias. Fatwas thus become both theological interventions and tools for social change, empowering women to reclaim spiritual autonomy and advocate for justice. The 2017 fatwa against child marriage, which contributed to raising the legal marriage age for women in Indonesia, illustrates this capacity.
Equally significant is the cultivation of community-based authority. Rather than relying on institutional positions in mosques or madrasahs, women ulama gain legitimacy through long-standing grassroots engagement and recognition. This alternative model of authority highlights how localized Muslim women’s movements mobilize Islamic traditions to advance gender justice and broader social transformation.
By foregrounding these decolonial practices, the article shows how Indonesian women ulama reconfigure Islamic authority and situate Southeast Asia at the center of global debates on Islam, gender, and religious leadership—challenging assumptions that privilege Middle Eastern frameworks.

This contribution examines the affective and moral dimensions shaping Muslim queer and transgender lives in Aceh, Indonesia —the only province governed by Sharia law. Drawing on ethnographic data from a decade ago, it explores how transpuan (transgender women) and gay men navigated moral boundaries and social stigma in constrained spaces such as salons, cafés, and semi-private gatherings. Rather than simply resisting or submitting to dominant norms, they cultivated ethical lives through affective ties, care-based relationships, and shared moral reflection. Debates over salat attire and religious conversion illustrate how affect enabled moral participation and community-building within a tightly regulated religious context. While rooted in past ethnography, the study extends to present-day Indonesia, where religious conservatism and expanding moral surveillance now extend far beyond Aceh, intensifying precarity nationwide. Despite these challenges, Muslim queer and trans communities in the country actively create inclusive spaces of faith and belonging, emphasizing a humanitarian Islamic engagement grounded in compassion, human dignity, and cultural rootedness rather than traditional religious authority. Together, these accounts reveal the enduring entanglement of emotion, ethics, and politics, offering a nuanced understanding of how Muslim queer and trans subjectivities cultivate piety and moral boundaries while navigating the harsh realities of religiously inflected violence.

This paper elaborates on the relationship between Christian and Muslim women on the small island of Ternate, Alor Regency, East Nusa Tenggara (NTT). This research shows that Christian and Muslim women on the small island develop wisdom to survive and develop their families’ life by sharing resources for their common good and progress. On this small island, with an area of approximately 3.82 km2 and a population of around 2,300 in 2024, men generally work as sailors and women as weavers. In a patriarchal society that prioritizes historical records from a male perspective, this research focuses on women's narratives to illustrate their wisdom in managing life on the small island. The method used for this research is a qualitative one with an ecofeminist theory and Christian theology approach. Data collection techniques include observation, in-depth interviews, and document studies. The research found that their spirituality for survival and development, among other things, is manifested through a shared commitment and consistency to environmental conservation to the extent possible, sharing women's economic resources (weaving knowledge and skills), and maintaining and passing on ancestral stories as local wisdom in a critical and transformative manner. Positive cultural aspects for the common good are maintained, inherited traditions that benefit only one religious group are transformed for their common development. Borrowing the concept of Sophia mentioned Elizabeth Johnson, a Catholic feminist theologian, this study seeks to develop the concept of Wisdom in the Christian Biblical tradition into a construction of humankind, particularly women, as the Imago Sophia, the image of Wisdom. This is a theological concept that affirms God's wisdom within women while simultaneously contributing a practical ethics derived from women's wisdom for the restoration of nature.

The organization of religious education in postcolonial Indonesia largely replicated the institutional patterns inherited from the colonial period, but with a shift in the locus of religious privileging. Under Dutch colonial rule, the state promoted Christian missionary schooling while restricting the growth of Islamic institutions, exemplified by the the formal incorporation of church schools into the government system in 1831 (Hasbullah, 1995: 72–73; Suhadi et al., 2015: 13–14). After Indonesian independence, and particularly from the mid-1960s onward, state support shiftedtowards Islamic education, reflecting both the demographic dominance of Islam and the politics of national identity formation. Concurrently, the Indonesian state institutionalized a system of religious recognition, ensuring the rights to religious instruction for students of the six acknowledged religions —Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and later Confucianism- while excluding those adhering to indigenous religions. This framework simultaneously enacted exclusionary practices: students adhering to local or indigenous traditions, or to religions outside the state’s classificatory schema, were denied the right to religious education in schools. This selective recognition illustrates how postcolonial governance continued to reproduce colonial logics of religious governance, replacing one form of privileging with another while sustaining the structural marginalization of non-recognized traditions. This paper aims to analyse the policy and the practice of religious education in Indonesian since -independence, with particular attention to its continuities with colonial legacies, its shifting dynamics over time, and its contemporary practices. In doing so, the study seeks to contribute to scholarly and policy debates on how to develop a more inclusive religious education that ensures equal rights for all students in the Indonesian context.

This presentation explores the development, conceptual foundations, and current state of Islamic Religious Education (IRE) in Germany. Beginning with the historical trajectory of IRE in the context of migration and educational policy, it examines the challenges of institutionalization within the framework of the German constitution. Beyond the institutional dimension, the contribution discusses the educational aims of IRE, rooted in Islamic anthropology and theology, emphasizing knowledge, spirituality, and moral formation. It further presents recent findings from empirical and didactic research. The paper argues that the future development of IRE requires continuous scientific grounding in theology, pedagogy, and empirical research in order to strengthen its role in plural and democratic societies.

The international context broadens our perspectives: While in the Netherlands, as recently as 2017, the 80% of religiously affiliated private schools predominantly offered religious instruction from the student's own denomination, in Sweden a state system dominates, with students having been taught together for approximately 60 years (Bertram-Troost 2017, Klintborg 2022). The situation is different in Germany: since the 1960s, state schools have predominantly offered denominational religious instruction. Quite apart from the difficulties arising from secularization, the model established in the Basic Law (Section 7(3)) in 1949 leads to (organizational) difficulties, insofar as students have to be separated for religious instruction. Class structures are being dissolved, and learning groups are being temporarily reorganized.
These difficulties are being addressed in various ways: While alternative, sometimes interreligious, models have been developed in some city-states such as Hamburg, Bremen, and Berlin, as well as in Brandenburg, interfaith teaching has been introduced in some federal states for about two decades, and where possible, Islamic instruction is also provided. Recently, there has been a growing call for a further model that, for pedagogical and socio-political reasons, advocates a combination of denominational and co-curricular teaching. Often called for theoretically, this form of interfaith teaching is only practiced in a few schools. This is partly due to the legal situation. Using a few selected examples, this article discusses the didactic scope, as well as the (religious) theological opportunities and limitations of interfaith teaching. The focus is on two schools in North Rhine-Westphalia.

This article consists of an idea of new exegetical approach that can be applied to the Qur’an in the 21st century. This approach is called ‘ma‘nā-cum-maghzā Approach’. Before exploring it, I discuss the typology of Qur’an interpretations in the contemporary period in a critical way. Furthermore, I build the approach by mentioning its definition and methodical steps in detail. The main objective of this approach is to explore the historical meaning and significance of the verse(s) being interpreted and then to develop its historical significance into its dynamic significance. All aspects of this approach that include its paradigms, principles and methods are discussed here. Through this approach interpreters in the contemporary period can make significant contributions to the development of the Qur’an interpretation.

This presentation argues that ideological criticism offers a vital hermeneutical resource for Muslim–Christian relations. The Bible, when read as an ideological text, is revealed to be both a source of integration and distortion: it shapes communal identity but also legitimates domination. Recognizing this ambivalence enables Christians to confront the complicities of their scripture while retrieving liberating counter-voices. In dialogue with Muslim approaches to the Qur’an, ideological criticism provides a shared posture for interreligious hermeneutics. I illustrate this through several case studies and then draw implications for theological education, church life, and interreligious praxis in Indonesia.

This article examines the role of academic lived space and the civil sphere in fostering interreligious engagement within Indonesian university campuses and broader society. While Indonesian classrooms have long functioned as lived spaces for interreligious dialogue, grassroots initiatives have further cultivated a civil sphere conducive to mutual interreligious interaction. This study draws on case examples from the Center for Religious and Cross-cultural Studies (CRCS) at Gadjah Mada University, the MSA/DSA programs at Satya Wacana Christian University, and the hip hop music communities in Ternate-Tobelo and Ambon. Grounded in Martina Löw’s (2016) theory of space and Jeffrey Alexander’s (2006) concept of the civil sphere, this paper investigates pedagogical practices within these academic institutions and the cultural expressions of hip hop groups emerging from post-conflict regions, as avenues for interreligious engagement. Utilizing ethnographic methods, the study is based on participant observation and in-depth interviews conducted with members of interreligious communities. The findings suggest that both academic settings and civil society spaces have served as vital lived arenas for interreligious interaction in Indonesia, shifting the discourse from religious conversion to constructive interreligious conversation.

In the past 20 years, Interreligious Studies (IRS), as an academic field of study, has grown rapidly, and its proponents/ practitioners are still engaged in debating its object(s) of study, approaches and other aspects. In some understandings of the field, IRS is conceived as going beyond an academic enterprise, but also aspiring to interreligious engagement, with its more normative objective of attempting better relations between different religious groups.
My presentation will focus on such an attempt at developing interreligious studies and engagement in Indonesia, more specifically in the city of Yogyakarta, by the Indonesian Consortium for Religious Studies (ICRS), which was established two decades ago. It started as a form of interreligious dialogue between lecturers in academic settings and was later institutionalized by its member universities. My presentation will look mostly at the ideas underlying it and its challenges, and discuss how the Consortium’s experience may contribute theoretically to the global discourse of interreligious studies and engagement.

In many contexts, religious plurality is perceived either as dangerous or as fragile, depending on the assessment of the power and impact of religious actors and religious traditions. In recent decades, interreligious collaboration has become an avenue for taking a more constructive approach to religious plurality and for resisting pervasive mechanisms of exclusion. One important aspect is that the interreligious field does not only consist of religious actors and representatives, but of a significantly diverse array of actors in society, including political, cultural and academic actors. This paper will offer an analysis of different patterns of multistakeholder public engagement in plural societies, and will highlight the roles that interreligious initiatives and academic research and teaching play in these processes. The interreligious and the academia have a specific role in fostering plural democracies as they engage in constructive and critical ways with otherness and knowledge-production and strengthen the agency of diverse actors and stakeholders.