Fields of the Lord: Animism, Christian Minorities, and State Development in Indonesia

8. Constructing a Godly New Order

��� 8 ��� Constructing a Godly New Order T he New Order government of President Suharto promoted its human engineering programs through godly means—that is, aided by the institutions of world religion. Christianity, formerly promoted by the Dutch colonial state, became supported by the Indonesian state for many of the same reasons. Christian ethnic minorities have been viewed as population “buffers” between Muslim groups, preventing and justifying restraints on Islamic influence over national policies (Kipp 1993, 213). President Suharto’s government also gave regulatory support to Christian churches because they enhanced the state’s program of nationalism, which was based in economic development as the most essential “rite of modernization” (Peacock 1968, 6). Missions have implemented development schemes in concert with the state to extract highlanders from their localizing domestic, ritual , and political practices. Church cooperation has been cautious, however, because the churches pursue regional and transnational aims that are potentially distinct from those of the Indonesian state and the nation’s Muslim majority.1 Thus the seeds of recent Christian-Muslim tensions have been sown by state policies from the beginning of Dutch rule to the present. In the 1970s, after mass conversions to Christianity followed the anti-communist attacks that ensued upon President Sukarno’s ouster (H-J Kim 1998; Willis 1977), Muslims increasingly resented proselytizing Christians. In this chapter, I examine how Central Sulawesi Christian insti2 7 5 tutions interfaced with the development policies of President Suharto’s government. These issues set the highland case within a broader provincial context of Christian denominational competition and national political pressures in favor of world religions and modernity. The Indonesian government and Christian churches have been united by their common interests in monotheism, nuclear family-based economic growth, patriarchal domesticity, biomedicine, and intensive agriculture. These interests have led church and state to denigrate highlanders’ knowledge and skills while praising the idealized image of a modern Indonesian citizenry. In Sulawesi as elsewhere in Indonesia (Blackwood 1995; Brenner 1998), women’s roles in the family unit have been targeted to transform families into the key constituent elements of the state (Suryakusuma 1996). These human-engineering efforts have utilized a rhetoric emphasizing the internal or spiritual improvement of individuals. As a complication, the varied Christian sects that proliferated during the past decades now compete among themselves, as well as against Muslim groups, to become the essential handmaidens of economic development. Even in the face of government directives they deplore, the foreign-based missions must defer to the government in exchange for work permits. The churches thus have become entrenched in the worldly development of their congregations as these groups became subject to New Order policies and philosophies. If “backward” people in marginal places are troublesome for governments who seek control over their citizenry, governments can implement two possible strategies: move modernizing programs into the margins, or move backward people out of the margins to centers where they can be influenced more easily. The Indonesian government has tried both methods simultaneously in Central Sulawesi, with local transmigration programs supplementing village leadership and development initiatives. Christian churches are involved with both strategies for political as well as philosophical reasons. The churches 276 ��� chapter eight and government continue many cooperative patterns of social engineering established during the late stages of the Dutch colonial regime. These patterns also alienate Christian communities, usually ethnic minorities, from common ground with neighboring Muslim groups. National development proceeds vigorously, if unevenly, in highland Central Sulawesi. A village headman in Kulawi chose to spend the government’s “village help” development funds (Bantuan Desa, or BANDES) on a solar-powered television set for his own home. Meanwhile, he and his neighbors continued to use an increasingly polluted stream nearby for all washing, drinking, and toilet activities. Foreign missionaries oppose such “lopsided” development initiatives. Yet in these small ways, village headmen exercise choice in their required moves toward the government’s vision of a higher national standard of living. In most matters, the national government defines the policies of rural transformation while church leaders act as implementers , and sometimes partial financiers. The agency of local villagers often is confined to such creative acceptance of new options, or to foot-dragging, absenteeism, or other tacit forms of noncompliance (Scott 1985, 1990). In most cases, however, highlanders complied with development projects as much in the service of the Protestant God as in the service of the state. And when they shied away from the state...