An Apartheid of Souls: Religious Rationalisation in the Netherlands and Indonesia

Described in travel books as a ‘sleepy church town’, Tentena is unusual in Indonesia, a nation where ninety per cent of the population is Muslim. In Tentena, on the island of Sulawesi, the proportions are reversed. There, as in much of rural Indonesia, religion clearly demarcates distinct ethnic and class boundaries: the majority of ethnic To Pamona, the indigenous peoples of the area, converted to Protestantism under the Netherlands Missionary Society at the turn of the century. Their church synod offices dominate the town. Largely peasant farmers, the To Pamona are culturally, religiously and economically distinguishable from both the Muslim Bugis traders who live around the market quarter, and from the ethnic Chinese Pentecostal merchants whose large shops dominate the local economy. This confluence of religion and ethnic identity among the To Pamona was fostered by Dutch missionaries who sought to create a ‘people's church’ or volkskerk, of the sort they were familiar with in the Netherlands. Driven by a new respect for indigenous cultures, the missions relativised the church's tenets; they argued that different ‘nations’ like the To Pamona could have their cultures preserved within their ‘national’ churches as long as those traditions were evaluated from a Biblical perspective. This discourse on ‘culture’, and missions in the vernacular, created a ‘nationalist’ religious discourse among the To Pamona infused with the ‘emancipatory’ politics of the churches in the Netherlands. The product of these strategies of incorporation was the religious ‘pillarization’ of the peoples of the highlands of Central Sulawesi, and their division into socially autonomous ethno-religious blocks.