Fostering Religious Exclusivism and Political Pluralism in Indonesia Through Interfaith-based Student Community

Abstract

Religious exclusivism in some degree generally makes religious people to be intolerant, hardly to respect the diversity, or in other words religious exclusivism has produced social/political exclusivism. This is the real problem in a multi-religious nation like Indonesia. This paper is to show that rather to depend absolutely on the state to solve the problem; the grass-root have to be taught and empowered to be able to celebrate and respect the diversity, or in other word to be social/political pluralism. The challenge is how religious exclusivism can be compatible with political pluralism? This is the key for solving the problem of religious intolerance. This paper chooses Young Interfaith Peacemaker Community (YIPC) Indonesia, a relatively new interfaith-based student movement as a case study to show that in some degree religious exclusivism is compatible with social/political pluralism. This study is based on qualitative method, which data gathering is done through participant observation, interview and focus groups, as well as the documents. The findings show that the interfaith dialogue is the main means for peacebuilding among religions in YIPC. In conclusion, this study is significant to fill the gap about the effectiveness and impact of interfaith dialogue among youth. Here we found that interfaith relations in YIPC were able to make impact to those youth from social exclusivist to be social pluralist while they remained as religious exclusivists.

Keywords: Interfaith Dialogue, Interfaith Peacemaking, Political Pluralism, Religious Exclusivism, Student Movement