Number of Christians in Indonesia

Factual Questions
1

I’ve just come back from a wonderful two-week trip to Indonesia, Java and Bali specifically. What an amazing country, I’m already planning to go back next year.

It is a well-known fact that Indonesians are overwhelming Muslims, with official figures of 87% of them adhering to Islam, and only 10% to Christianity.

Yet, while it is undeniable that Islam is the majority religion, I was surprised at how visible Christians are. This observation started rather serendipitously via a… dating app. As soon as I arrived there, my account received a lot of attention. While it was undeniably pleasant, one thing that caught my eye was how many of the women identified as Christians. Of all the likes that I received, I noticed that about 45% were Muslims, 35% Christians and the remaining 20% various flavours of “other”.

I’ve been thinking about this, and can only think of a couple of tentative explanations.

  • The official figures significantly undercount the number of Christians ;
  • Christian Indonesians are much more likely to use dating apps than their Muslim couterparts ;
  • Christian Indonesians are much more likely to look for a foreign partner than their Muslim counterparts.

Frankly, I find none of these possibilities fully convincing.

The first one seems highly unlikely as it would be hard to disguise such a significant gap between figures and reality. Plus, judging by what I saw in Java, it is clear that Islam is by far the majority religion there (roughly 75% of women are veiled, calls to prayer audible five times a day, hundreds of mosques versus only a handful of churches). But who knows ?

The second one feels far-fetched and diffcult to defend.

The third one might be more likely, but I’m not sure. I’ve interacted with a lot of people there, and Christians certainly expressed feelings of distrust and fear of their Muslims counterparts. On the other hand, some Muslims, especially women, were not comfortable with what they described as an increasingly stiffling social control. So, both groups should be more or less likely to try to find a way out, but given the official figures, it’s difficult to reconcile this with the relatively even ratio I saw.

So, how many Christians are there in Indonesia ?

2

Indonesia is a country where every citizen is required to be formally affiliated with one of the officially recognised religions; this status is recorded by the government and stated on the mandatory ID cards. So you can’t be an atheist, at least not in the eyes of the government. I could imagine that some Indonesians who are not particularly religious but don’t want to be associated with the majority religion (Islam) would choose to be registered as a Christian instead.

3

29.4 million

4

I wonder how the circumstances of responding on a dating app to a visitor who is only there for two weeks plays into your experience.

5

Not to be cynical, but it seems to me there should be a fourth bullet point, at least from the standpoint of considering all possible explanations. To with:

  • People who are motivated to connect with a foreign partner, for whatever reason, may have multiple accounts on the dating app where they identify and describe themselves differently, in order to maximize their odds in making such a connection.

Basically, I am skeptical that the demographics of a dating app would be representative of the larger population in any kind of way.

6

My thoughts exactly. If you’re looking to hook up with visiting foreigners, checking off “Christian” instead of “Muslim” is likely improving your odds.

7

Right off the bat, they’re guaranteed to be skewed towards the demographic that would use an online dating app, having the settings on the app set up such that OP will be shown to them AND they clicked the like button.
For example, if the OP is a 40 year old male, looking for a female, the numbers they’re reporting are likely to be coming from primarily 30-50 year old single females that have expressed a romantic interest in the OP. And, with the ‘romantic interest’ part, if your profile or profile picture makes it obvious you’re not from the area, things like ethnic/racial issues and physical distance from where you live to where they live, will also come into play.

8

I think it would be like trying to determine the number of millionaires by using dating app claims.

9

And it may well be that Muslim women are only looking (by whatever means) for Muslim romantic partners. And may also be that the way they’re looking isn’t through dating apps at all.

What’s the demographics of an Indonesian arranged-marriage matchmaking app?

10

I lived in Aceh, Indonesia for a few years. Islam is by far the dominant religion in Aceh, but among my staff I’d say 10% or so were Christian. As for the prominence of Christianity in Indonesia, when the Dutch occupied the country, Christians were given preferential treatment including better access to education and economic opportunity, as a result Christians families still have wealth and prominence in society.

Having said that, dating apps are not any kind of indicator of the demographics of a place.

11

. . . or through different dating apps from the one the OP is on.

12

My WAG:

  1. Christianity, overall, is a religion that tends to skew towards women, worldwide. Asia is no exception.

  2. Indonesian women who want foreign partners know that they are likelier to get a Western man by listing ‘Christian’ instead of ‘Muslim.’

  3. Islam is more misogynistic than Christianity, and it wouldn’t be surprising to see women fleeing that religion and listing themselves as Christian instead.

I once dated a Christian woman from Jakarta, and she talked extensively about Islam in Indonesia.

13

To what extent does Islam try to cloister its women or control their freedoms in Indonesia, versus as is found in those more middle-eastern countries? I knew a few people who were ex-pat workers in Indonesia, and they described a moderately available prostitution economy in their area (possibly benefiting from a western male workforce). They also mentioned contract term-limit brides. (same thing only different?) It may have been exaggeration, but it sounded very different from Arabic mores.

14

First of all, I totally agree with the many comments about dating apps not being a reliable indicator of religious demographics. Still, I didn’t expect such a big difference between the official figures and what I saw there. So, I was curious what the reality was like.

Good point, I had not thought of that.

That’s another possibility, indeed.

I’m curious now. What did she tell you ?

I ended up having a date with a Muslim woman there, but interestingly, her profile didn’t mention this. She only told me when we met, and even then, only indirectly.

My ex-wife was a North Africa Muslim and my (very limited) experience of Indonesia confirms this and not just in terms of relationships. I was surprised to see that a lot of Indonesians still cling to pre-Islamic culture. A fair number of houses have painting or sculptures of Hindu gods and godesses, and I saw one of my guides quickly bow to a Buddhist statue during one of our activities. When I mentioned this to her, she told me that it was '“part of our culture and history” and that it was “important to be respectful”. This absolutely wouldn’t fly in the Middle East or the Maghreb.

15

Every time the topic of Islam came up, she would have a very negative response and go on a spiel about how bad it was, and I got the impression that Islam was one of her biggest motivations for leaving Indonesia. She’d talk about how Muslims demand tolerance and pluralism when in the minority, but then crack down and show no tolerance when in the majority. (Even though Islam in Indonesia, from what I understand, is already a lot milder than, say, Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan.) She also said that she and other non-Muslims were never safe voicing any sort of objection to Muslim behavior or deeds.

Of course, she may not have been the most unbiased speaker, but she’d lived the experience for 20+ years. She also held somewhat feminist views, which I’m sure made her clash with Islam even more, inwardly.

16

Thanks, this matches my (again, very limited) experience of Indonesians’ opinion of religious dynamics.

I’ll just add that I’ve also heard some liberal Muslims express similar sentiment with regards to what they see as the foreign, and increasingly strict interpretation of islamic law.

17

There’s what a society says its mores are, and there’s what a society actually does. The two are often very different, especially when it comes to sex. You really can’t say that a country is not restrictive of women, based on the existence of prostitution.

18

And also, when it comes to religion.

Because of that confluence, a dating app makes possibly the worst way to measure religious tendencies in a culture.

19

I don’t know the numbers, but I saw a lot of mosques in Indonesia.

But one christian church stood out in really rural Flores - a ramshackle large traditional style meeting hall/hut, decorated with a cross. Weirdly, Flores is strongly catholic in a majority Muslim nation, and being close to Hindu islands. We passed a roadside statue of Mary way out in the rurals, on the coast.

I’m going to go with early Portuguese influence, although catholicism never really caught on on the other islands. (And old-school animism is still popular.)

20

Indeed, I was very surprised in Dubai to find the street by the hotel had a number of these “escort service” advertising cards stuck here and there and under car wipers, something I associated with 1990’s London.