Abstract
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.
Highlights
The concept of institutional religious freedom provides a welcome addition to more conventional approaches that highlight individual religious freedom to the exclusion of religion’s broader social expressions
A related but less familiar benefit of the concept of institutional religious freedom is that, by reminding analysts to gaze beyond the individual, the concept encourages us to recognize that different religious traditions require and construct significantly different institutions for human flourishing
What I wish to underscore in this essay, is that we need to explore more fully the ethical and political implications of the fact that the institutions religious communities construct vary in their forms—and, in particular, how they vary in regard to the recognition and accommodation of individual and institutional religious freedoms
Summary
The concept of institutional religious freedom provides a welcome addition to more conventional approaches that highlight individual religious freedom to the exclusion of religion’s broader social expressions. The first fact is that contrary to what some proponents of human rights today assume, different religious and political traditions have very-different understandings of what constitutes a “religion” Inasmuch as this is the case, even where a religious or political community affirms some ideal of religious freedom, it may not extend full rights and protections to communities seen as not fulfilling the cultural criteria required to qualify as a proper religion. Debates over the implementation of Islamic law for Muslims living in Western Europe and North America offer a contemporary example of a similar tension These examples remind us too that once policy makers’ vision of religious freedom extends beyond the individual to institutional realities, they may well witness, and have somehow to mediate, a clash of institutional religious freedoms. Inasmuch as religious institutions allocate rights and freedoms in different ways, religious leaders and policy makers hoping to promote institutional religious freedom must be ready to devise principles for adjudicating contrasting models of institutional religious freedom and ethical flourishing
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