The Influence of World Religions
Already prior to the arrival of the Europeans the archipelago had been of importance to the great nations to its east and west for many centuries as a major producer of spices, precious woods, resin and gold; goods that were traded as far as Rome in the west and China in the east.
The trade to the west is presumed to have passed via India and it is interesting to note that Indian, far more than Chinese culture, exerted an obvious influence upon the islands. The international importance of the Malay empire of Srivijaya as a centre of Buddhist learning is recorded in Chinese sources of the seventh century; and the ninth-century Buddhist monument of Borobudur and its eleventhcentury Hindu counterpart, the temple complex of Prambanan, both located in central Java, still bear witness to the heights which Indian religions and cultures had reached in Java and Sumatra prior to the arrival of Islam.There is no agreement as to how Indian religions and culture came to the region. Merchants, sailors, adventurers and holy men from India and Indonesia itself are supposed to have jointly and individually helped to disseminate Indian culture in a peaceful manner. The fourteenth century Siva-Buddha cult of Java suggests that at times Buddhism and Hinduism, of which the latter proved to be more resilient as can be witnessed in present-day Bah, presented themselves jointly. However, Indian religions and values were not accepted totally or uncritically. The caste system, for example, never assumed the rigidity it had developed in India and the people of Java and Bah, to whom the Ramayana and Mahabharata are still living traditions, succeeded in combining their own mystical heritage with the new ideas. Only at court do Indic ideas and concepts seem to have been accepted to a greater degree, and, under the guidance of Indian and Indonesian priests, the royal ehte made elements of Indian culture such as script, cosmology, time-reckoning, law, court rituals, and symbols of power and authority hke the cult of the devaraja or god-king, their own.
Still, neither then nor later again when Islam arrived, was there a wholesale destruction of earlier spiritual and social traditions. Inherited values and concepts were adapted and modified to become compatible with the main principles of the newly arrived religions which in turn, too, had to adapt to their new surroundings.It has already been mentioned that groups in the islands’ interior and in eastern Indonesia tended to be least affected by cultural change and it is in the interior that people seem to have resisted most the advances of Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam. Nevertheless, it is there that in more recent times Christianity first gained a foothold. Yet, large-scale missionary efforts did not begin until the second half of the nineteenth century and were mainly confined to non-Islamic areas.
The attitude of the Dutch Reformed colonial authorities to Christian missionary activity seems to have been one of ambivalence and was much determined by the political climate at home. In the days of the VOC attempts were made to stamp out Islam locally and prospective pilgrims were banned from using the company’s ships for the voyage. From the nineteenth century onwards a more circumspect policy can be observed resulting from a government instruction of 1803 which decreed religious neutrality and which culminated in the policies adopted before the turn of the twentieth century and in the wake of the Aceh War on the advice of C. Snouck Hurgronje. It would not be wrong, however, to say that the colonial authorities generally regarded any form of Islamic activity with suspicion. As for Christian missionary activities, Bali was ‘offlimits’, while Irian Jaya, which was not formally integrated into the territory of the Dutch East Indies until the mid-nineteenth century, and which was effectively put under Dutch administration only in the 1920s and 1930s, was divided into Protestant (northern) and Catholic (southern) halves. Still it is revealing to see that in Indonesian the term Kristen (from the Dutch for Christian) refers to Protestants only whereas their Catholic fellow Christians have to be content to be known merely as Katolik.
Affiliation to a particular religious community follows ethnic lines broadly (hence the high percentage of Muslims if we remember that the Javanese, who in their overwhelming majority are Muslims, account for about 62 per cent of the population) although there are always exceptions. Most Batak groups tend to be Protestant, as do the Toraja in Central Sulawesi and the Menadonese on the northern tip of that island who, together with the Ambonese, were in contact with the Dutch for longest. In contrast, the peoples of Jakarta and its surroundings, who for centuries had been closest to the centre of colonial power, always remained Muslims. Peoples in Nusa Tenggara, the south-eastern part of Indonesia where the Portuguese first arrived and stayed longest, tend to be Catholic. In Irian Jaya the majority of people accounted for are Christians.
After 1965 Christianity is said to have made some inroads in Java, whereas Islam on the other hand is reported to have increased its numbers in some traditionally non-Islamic areas. In all perhaps 6 to 7 per cent of the population follow the Christian faith, a few are Hindus (Bah) and Buddhists, and only a small percentage of Indonesians adhere to (tribal) creeds, little influenced by the larger world of the archipelago.