1. Introduction
Indonesia is diverse in ethnicities, languages, religions, and beliefs. Given this condition, social harmony must be managed in Indonesia. However, intolerance, which disrupts harmony, especially between religious communities, has recently increased in Indonesia. Forms of intolerance can be more diminutive, including a lack of mutual understanding, less mutual respect, and less respect for differences in beliefs.
Several surveys conducted by the
Setara Institute (
2019) showed increasing intolerance among schools and students between 2007 and 2018. In addition, the number of violations of religious freedom increased from 134 cases in 2014 to 208 in 2016, and the number of intolerant actions also rose from 177 in 2014 to 270 in 2016.
One of the efforts implemented to manage and improve religious harmony was the launching of the concept and policy of religious moderation by the Indonesian Ministry of Religion. The Ministry of Religion describes the characteristics of individuals who practice religious moderation, namely if they apply religious tolerance, show national commitment, and accommodate local culture. Religious moderation aims to create a public attitude of a moderate, not extreme, understanding of religion and not glorify unlimited free-thinking in realizing a harmonious and peaceful life within the diversity in Indonesia.
Suhartawan (
2021) stated that religious moderation allows people to maximize the benefits of religious and state institutions and provides for the education of future generations, the building of cross-generational collaboration, the improvement in the quality of a more open religious understanding, and the creation of a dialogue between culture, religious and state leaders.
As a new concept and policy in Indonesia, religious moderation requires further study as research in this area is still limited.
Ali (
2020) measured religious moderation among 356 students at two universities in Kalimantan. As a result, the descriptive analysis provided the percentage of those considered religiously moderate. Ali found that although students had low levels of knowledge, participation, and experience in religious moderation, they had high levels of attitudes and behavior toward the dimensions of religious moderation: religious tolerance (91.5%), national commitment (95.6%), and accommodating local culture (94.9%). However, Ali did not determine the factors contributing to religious moderation.
In this study, we aimed to determine the factors influencing religious moderation. We examined the variables of religiosity and demographics that play an essential role in forming religious moderation.
Religious moderation is generally understood as the tolerance of a religious group toward different faiths while simultaneously refraining from liberalism. Thus, the concept of religious moderation, particularly among Indonesian Muslims, is defined using the ideas of the concept and the policy of religious moderation by the Indonesian Ministry of Religion. The Ministry of Religion describes the characteristics of individuals who apply religious moderation, namely if they show religious tolerance and national commitment and accommodate local culture.
The first variable that we hypothesized would predict religious moderation is religiosity. Religiosity generally refers to the observable concrete ways individuals or groups express the multiple dimensions of religion. Many definitions and measurements of the concept from Christian tradition have been developed since
Glock and Stark’s (
1965) five dimensions of religiosity: belief, practice, knowledge, experience, and consequence. Several conceptions and measurements of Muslim religiosity have also been formulated. For instance, Riaz
Hassan (
2007b) explicitly drew on the work of Stark and Glock to measure Muslim religious piety. In this study, for the measurement of religiosity, we used
Huber and Huber’s (
2012) model with five dimensions: intellectual, ideology, public practice, private practice, and religious experience, called the Centrality of Religiosity Scale (CRS). The dimensions are described as follows:
Intellectual refers to the social expectation that religious people tend to have religious knowledge and the frequency of thinking about religious topics. The ideological dimension refers to the social expectation that religious people tend to have faith in the existence and power of God and the plausibility of the presence or power of God. The public practice dimension refers to the social expectation that religious people participate in public rituals and communal activities and participate in public religious services and activities. The private practice dimension refers to the social expectation that religious people perform religious rituals and personal service styles such as prayer and meditation, including intensity and personal religious rituals. The dimension of religious experience refers to the social expectation that religious people tend to have some kind of contact with God, who emotionally influences a person’s life.
Regarding the concept of religiosity by
Huber and Huber (
2012), we thought that those with a high level of religiosity would have a high level of religious moderation. This means that religious intellectuality, ideology, public practice, private practice, and religious experience support someone in being a moderately religious person (high in religious tolerance, national commitment, and accommodating local culture). Conversely, we believe that religious intolerance, low national commitment, and low accommodation of local culture would be prevented if a person has high religious intellectuality, ideology, private practice, and religious experience.
Golebiowska (
2004) reported that religiosity is an essential predictor of tolerant behavior amongst people of faith, where tolerance is the concept of religious moderation. The study results show that religiosity positively and significantly affects religious moderation (tolerance).
Hoffman (
2020) also found that religious practices, one of the dimensions of religiosity, also predict religious harmony or moderation, further supporting our hypothesis.
Because religious moderation is close to religious tolerance, several researchers have examined the relationship between religiosity and tolerance, both religious tolerance and social and political tolerance. The results of these studies on the relevance of religiosity and tolerance are complex and contradictory. The results show that religiosity can either increase or decrease tolerance. Other results reveal that religiosity is not related to tolerance (
Spierings 2019). The findings may have been caused by differences in the concept of religiosity used.
Yusuf et al. (
2020) found that the level of religiosity is closely related to religious intolerance. Their analysis of the effect of socio-economic characteristics and religiosity on religious intolerance found that religiosity was the only variable at the individual level that had a statistically significant and robust relationship with all types of religious intolerance. Other factors related to intolerance included income levels, quality of work, and higher education.
By contrast,
Setiawan et al. (
2020) found that Muslim community members supported inter-religious conflicts. Religiosity plays an essential but different role in supporting inter-religious conflicts in society, including Indonesia. Different dimensions of religiosity have different connections with religious conflicts. Although religious belief has strong influences, its effect varies. Additionally, particularistic views and intertextual fundamentalism tend to support the lawful protest. Religious centrism contributes to supporting lawful and violent protests. The religious practice of religiosity is not simply related to support of inter-religious conflict; still, a rite of the passage appears to be an essential factor contributing to inter-religious conflict rather than participation in ordinary religious rituals. Conversely, religious salience harms support for violent hostility toward outgroups.
Hoffman (
2020) revealed that religious behavior in the Arab world, in general, has an ambiguous influence on tolerance. People who frequently attend mosques tend to be more intolerant of other sects than people who rarely attend. In Lebanon, the process occurs through a group identification mechanism. Attendance at mosques encourages a higher sectarian identification, making adherents feel different from other denominations. Participation in communal worship increases sectarian solidarity at the expense of sympathy for other denominations.
Conversely, private worship positively influences tolerant attitudes in the Arab world and Lebanon. “While congregational prayer tends to enhance sectarian identity and reinforce intolerance, citizens who obey individually—at least, those who pray privately—tend to be more tolerant of other sects than their less obedient counterparts.” In a sectarian environment, private religious practice substantially positively affects tolerance.
In research on various aspects of the impact of religiosity on social tolerance in the Middle East and North Africa,
Spierings (
2019) found that the degree of religious identification does not harm social tolerance except for a few cases where Islamist power is present. Under normal circumstances, those with religious beliefs tend to be more tolerant of others but less tolerant if they feel threatened or repressed. Attendance at mosques harms ethnic-religious social tolerance and even strengthens it if a conservative Islamist state coercively regulates religion and its content, such as sermons.
Hassan (
2007a) studied the level of religiosity of Muslim communities in various parts of the world and its relation to modernity, Muslim umma awareness, and intolerance (blasphemy). Hassan found that religiosity does not affect modernity, especially the Human Development Index. However, as many scholars affirmed, he found that religiosity positively affects intolerance, especially blasphemy. PPIM research has produced different results: students with a high religiosity tend to have moderate religious attitudes and behavior. Thus, religiosity has a positive effect on religious tolerance. Due to the contradictions in the previous findings on the impact of religious tolerance, we examined the effects of the religiosity variable on religious moderation in this study. We also considered several demographic variables as factors influencing religious moderation. The first demographic variable was sex (identified as male and female). Theories show that sex substantially affects religious moderation. According to
Çavdar (
2010), women show higher religious moderation than men. Sex influences one’s level of religious moderation.
Van der Jagt et al. (
2018) also reported a notable effect of sex on religious moderation, a concept of religious harmony/disharmony in that study.
The second demographic variable we hypothesized as affecting religious moderation was student organizations. We expected religious moderation to be influenced by sociology, and a student organization is one of the social constructs. We theorized that student organizations positively and significantly affect religious moderation, meaning that students involved in student organizations have higher religious moderation than those who are not. This hypothesis is supported by
Hendrastomo et al. (
2019), who showed that the more social the individual, the more moderate they are through association with a student organization.
The third and fourth demographic factors that we theorized would predict religious moderation were the economic status variables, namely parental income and the amount of allowance, respectively. We hypothesized that parental income and allowance amount would positively and significantly predict religious moderation. The higher the parental income and the higher the allowance, the higher the religious moderation. Based on the annual survey of religious harmony by the
Ministry of Religious Affairs (
2020), socio-economic factors affect the religious harmony index so that harmony can describe the religious moderation index.
4. Discussion
The research results show that religious moderation can be partly explained by religiosity and socio-economic factors.
First, we found that religiosity positively affected religious moderation. Those who had a high level of religiosity tended to have a high level of religious moderation. This means that religious intellectuality, ideology, public practice, private practice, and religious experience support a person in being moderately religious (high in religious tolerance, national commitment, and accommodating local culture).
We found that every aspect of religiosity explained by
Huber and Huber (
2012), namely intellectual, ideology, public practice, private practice, and religious experience, correlated with a religiously moderate person. Religious intolerance, low national commitment, and low accommodating local culture could be prevented if a person shows high religious intellectuality, ideology, private practice, and religious experience. Furthermore, researchers can test what dimension of religiosity is related to extremist behavior in the future.
Our findings are close to those of PPIM, showing that students with a high religiosity tend to have moderate religious attitudes and actions (
PPIM 2018). Other researchers explained religiosity as the essential variable that supports religious intolerance at the individual level.
Yusuf et al. (
2020) found that the level of religiosity was closely related to religious intolerance. Their analysis of the effect of socio-economic characteristics on religious intolerance showed that religiosity was the only variable at the individual level that had a statistically significant and robust relationship with all types of religious intolerance.
Setiawan et al. (
2020) found that members of the Muslim community tended to support inter-religious conflict. Religiosity plays an important but varying role in supporting inter-religious conflicts in society, including Indonesia. Other dimensions of religiosity have different relationships with religious conflict. Although religious beliefs significantly influence the support of religious conflict, their influence varies. Whereas some views and fundamentalism favor legitimate protest, religious centrism contributes to supporting the legitimate and violent protest. A rite of passage is a contributing factor to inter-religious conflict.
Religious practices support inter-religious conflicts, whereas religious salience reduces the support for violent hostility toward outside groups. The differences in the findings of these studies are due to differences in the concept of religiosity used. We used
Huber and Huber’s (
2012) concept of religiosity in this study.
Furthermore,
Hoffman (
2020) revealed that religious behavior in the Arab world, in general, has an ambiguous influence on tolerance. People who frequent a mosque tend to be more intolerant of other sects than those who rarely attend. In Lebanon, this process occurs through a group identification mechanism. Attendance at mosques encourages higher levels of sectarian identification, making them feel different from other denominations. Participation in communal worship increases sectarian solidarity at the expense of sympathy for other denominations.
On the other hand, private worship positively influences tolerance in the Arab world and Lebanon. It is much similar to the Indonesian context. Still, our findings confirm that one must clearly understand his religion (as described in the intellectual and ideological dimensions), have good religious practices (public and private), and experience to be more moderate in thinking and behaving. Further research is a recommendation to gain a complete understanding of these dynamics.
This study found that religiosity was not the only variable supporting religious moderation: sex also had a significant effect on religious moderation. The beta score showed that men are more moderate than women (coding 1 for men and 2 for women). This finding somewhat differs from
Huber and Krech (
2009), based on population-representative data from 21 countries, including Indonesia. Their findings show that women were slightly more pluralistic than men on the attitude level (stand. Beta +0.04), and men were somewhat more fundamentalist than women (stand. Beta −0.03). This difference should be further discussed and investigated. We suspect that men have more access to and participation in public in the Indonesian Muslim context, especially regarding religion and state participation. This may lead to men being more moderate, especially if we consider the dimension of religious moderation that we used in this research: national commitment, rejecting violence, and accommodating local culture.
In this study, parental income had a significant effect on religious moderation. The beta value was negative, meaning that when parental income increases will reduce religious moderation. Ideally, parents’ income would allow their children to receive high-quality religious education and interact with people of various religions. However, in Indonesia today, many people in the upper economic circles prefer religious/spiritual conversion, becoming fundamentalists. They send their children to inclusive schools that provide fundamentalist-based religious teachings.
The negative influence of parental income is supported by the annual survey of religious harmony by the Agency for Religious Research and Development (2019), which found that socio-economic factors affect the religious harmony index. However, these findings do not further explain which socio-economic factors influence or direction the index.
Finally, we found that student organizations and the allowance received from parents were not related to religious moderation. A student’s involvement in an organization did not influence the student’s religious status (e.g., moderate/extreme). We suggest that future studies question the value of the student organization and not just the students’ participation in an organization. The number of organizations in which students participate may also be valuable information.
Hendrastomo et al. (
2019) reported that the more social the individual, in this case, through the association with student organizations, the more moderate they are. This might be related to the number of organizations in which students participate.
The allowance amount could not explain religious moderation. This means that one may become a religious moderate regardless of their allowance. Conversely, extremists may have either a rich or poor background in the Indonesian context.