Indonesia: The country with the world's largest Muslim population does not put the word ‘Allah’ in the first principle of its constitution—and it also holds one of the darkest chapters in the history of the Chinese diaspora. Keys to the culture: Pancasila · Pribumi · Rukun · Gotong royong. Geography and history, the church, films and books, and prayer for this land.
The country with the world's largest Muslim population does not put the word ‘Allah’ in the first principle of its constitution—and it also holds one of the darkest chapters in the history of the Chinese diaspora.
Indonesia covers about 1.91 million square kilometres and has roughly 280 million people. It is the world's fourth most populous country and has more Muslims than any other nation. Yet the first number to remember is different: more than 17,000 islands stretch about 5,000 kilometres across three time zones.
This is more than a geographical wonder; it lies behind many of the country's deepest challenges. More than 300 ethnic groups and over 700 languages are spread across thousands of islands. An ‘Indonesian’ identity is not timeless; it was built in the twentieth century. The national motto, Bhinneka Tunggal Ika—Unity in Diversity—speaks directly to that task.
Population is distributed very unevenly. Java holds only about seven percent of the country's land but more than half its people, making it one of the world's most densely populated large islands. Papua, by contrast, is vast and sparsely populated, and some inland villages still have no roads. This gap helps explain persistent tension between the centre and distant regions, and why the same natural disaster can mean very different things on different islands.
Indonesia sits on the Pacific Ring of Fire. About 130 active volcanoes make earthquakes and tsunamis part of ordinary life. The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami devastated Aceh; Mount Tambora's 1815 eruption helped produce Europe's ‘year without a summer.’ People here live with a rare matter-of-fact awareness that the ground itself can move.
The climate is equatorial and tropical, alternating between rainy and dry seasons rather than four seasons. Deforestation and the expansion of oil-palm plantations are long-running disputes shared with neighbouring Malaysia.
From the seventh century, Srivijaya rose through maritime trade in Sumatra and became an important Buddhist centre in Southeast Asia. In the eighth and ninth centuries, the Shailendra and Mataram dynasties of Java left Borobudur, a Buddhist monument, and Prambanan, a Hindu one. In the late thirteenth century, Majapahit emerged in Java and extended influence across much of the archipelago. Indonesia's modern national imagination draws heavily on the remembered reach of Majapahit.
Islam arrived along trade routes from the thirteenth century onward, first in port cities and then inland. It spread mainly through trade, marriage, and Sufi teaching rather than conquest. Indonesian Islam therefore blended for centuries with local traditions, shaping the religious character that followed.
Founded in 1602, the Dutch East India Company used force and treaties to absorb the archipelago piece by piece. After the company collapsed in 1799, the Dutch state ruled directly. Colonial rule left three long shadows: a plantation and spice economy; a society ranked by ethnicity—Europeans, ‘Foreign Orientals’ including Chinese, and Indigenous people; and a system that placed Chinese people in an intermediary role. The structural resentment created by that arrangement became the ground beneath later anti-Chinese violence.
Japan occupied the islands from 1942 to 1945. Sukarno proclaimed independence on 17 August 1945, followed by four years of war with the Netherlands before Dutch recognition in 1949. Sukarno articulated Pancasila, the five state principles discussed below, and became internationally known through the Bandung Conference and the Non-Aligned Movement.
Then came one of the country's darkest periods, which must be described plainly. After an attempted coup on 30 September 1965, the military blamed the Indonesian Communist Party. A nationwide purge followed for more than a year. An estimated 500,000 to more than one million people were killed; no settled count exists, and there has never been a judicial reckoning. Victims included party members, people accused of communist ties, trade unionists, peasant organisers, and many ethnic Chinese. Suharto rose to power and began thirty-two years of the ‘New Order.’
Its policies toward Chinese Indonesians must be remembered in detail. Presidential Instruction No. 14 of 1967 restricted public expressions of Chinese culture—Chinese-language publishing, festivals, surnames, and religious activity. Chinese-medium schools across the country were closed. Confucianism lost official recognition, and Chinese people were encouraged to take Indonesian names. For thirty-two years, a community's language and names largely disappeared from public life.
The 1997 Asian financial crisis released accumulated anger. In May 1998, serious unrest in Jakarta and other cities brought mass looting and burning of Chinese shops and homes, as well as sexual violence targeting Chinese women. Official and civil-society investigations have long disputed the death toll and responsibility. Suharto fell, and Indonesia entered the Reformasi era.
The next two decades brought greater openness: East Timor voted for independence in 1999; Chinese language and festivals were gradually restored; Confucianism regained recognition after 2000 and Lunar New Year became a national holiday; regional autonomy expanded; and presidents began to be directly elected. At the same time, Islamic conservatism and local religious intolerance have also grown. History leaves Indonesia with a question: what sustains ‘Unity in Diversity’—shared conviction, or a rule that painful matters must not be named?
This chapter turns on an uncomfortable fact: Christians form an unusually large share of Chinese Indonesians, and part of that pattern was produced by pressure. Keep that sentence in view as the story unfolds.
The story begins early. Portuguese and Spanish arrivals reached the Maluku Islands in the sixteenth century, and Francis Xavier worked around Ambon and Ternate in 1546–47. This was among Christianity's earliest footholds in Southeast Asia, more than half a century before the Dutch arrived. After 1602 the Dutch East India Company brought Reformed Christianity, but the company showed little interest in mission: it cared more about spices, and churches mainly served Dutch people.
Real expansion came in the nineteenth century through Dutch and German mission societies. Their route matters: they usually went away from the heavily Muslim coasts of Java and toward inland and outer-island communities that had not become Muslim. The largest result came in northern Sumatra. German missionary Ludwig Nommensen worked among the Batak for more than forty years, and the HKBP, the Protestant Christian Batak Church, grew into one of Southeast Asia's largest Protestant bodies. Similar histories help explain today's Christian-majority regions in Papua, East Nusa Tenggara, and North Sulawesi, including Minahasa.
Then came the years after 1965. Indonesia equated atheism with communism. During the purges, having no registered religion could be dangerous. Citizens had to record one officially recognised religion on their identity cards—then Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, Hinduism, or Buddhism. Large numbers registered a religion in those years, and Christian and Hindu totals rose sharply.
Chinese Indonesians faced an added pressure. Confucianism lost recognition; some viewed Buddhism as a closed, foreign religion; and Islam was the preferred public direction. Christianity therefore became a box that could be ticked without feeling that one had to become someone else. After Chinese schools closed, church schools and organisations were among the few places where the community could still gather. This is one source of that high Christian proportion.
Both sides must be held together. Many people truly met Christ through a door that pressure had pushed open. An unworthy first motive does not cancel a real encounter; Scripture contains many people who first came to salvation because they had nowhere else to turn. Yet a religion printed on an identity card is not faith. When state policy has partly shaped an entire community's religious profile, churches must ask honestly how many members are ‘Christian’ only because there was no other acceptable box.
Churches did two kinds of things in May 1998, and both should be remembered. Some churches and religious houses opened their doors to Chinese people fleeing violence; clergy stood at entrances and refused to let attackers seize them. Other churches remained silent for years because they feared causing more trouble. Both are true.
Today, Christians make up about a tenth of Indonesia—roughly 7.5 percent Protestant and 3.1 percent Catholic—more than 28 million people, larger than the total populations of many western European countries. Conditions have nevertheless tightened in real ways. Building a church requires local permits that are often obstructed; churches in some places have been forced to close; blasphemy law and local regulations have been used against minorities. The Christian population is still growing.
A word for us: we often assume that churches must shrink where religious freedom is restricted. Indonesia is a counterexample. It is also a mirror. A church's strength is not its numbers but how many people are there because they have met Christ.