Respondents in Yogyakarta feel that there are limitations on building places of worship (2.56). This is true for minority groups, due to the implementation of Joint Regulation of the Minister of Religious Affairs and the Minister of Home Affairs No. 9 2006/8 2006. This regulation seems to have a powerful impact, because the requirement for agreement by both the local community and the government constrain minorities’ ability to build such places (Wijsen and Singgih, 2002:87-90). This is the item for which respondent responses show the highest disparity in standard deviation, a score of 1.24. All respondents in Ambon and Muslims in Yogyakarta tend to agree that discrimination is high in terms of limitations on observance of religious laws regarding marriage and divorce. The variability indicates that Muslims in Yogyakarta are more homogenous than other groups; the standard deviation is .99, while for Muslims in Ambon it is 1.10. Christians in Ambon are similar to Christians in Yogyakarta with a standard deviation of 1.09.
3.3.4.6. Religiosity
As discussed in the previous chapter, religiosity is a religion-based sentiment of exclusiveness in which individuals believe their religion to be the axis of everything, and that all others should be assessed with reference to it. It encompasses religiocentrism, attitudes toward religious plurality and religious fundamentalism. The measurements for these are described in more detail below.
3.3.4.6.1. Religiocentrism
At least two measurements for religiocentrism are available. The first was constructed by Ray and Doratis (1971) to measure religiocentrism and conservatism in Catholic and Protestant groups in Australia. The second was developed by Sterkens and Anthony (2008) in their study of religiocentrism among Muslims, Christians and Hindus in India. Although the former measurement has higher reliability with a Cronbach alpha score of .88 (Sterkens and Anthony has an alpha between .55 and .70), we used the latter as the basis our measurement, simply because its questions are more elaborative and more systematic and because it has already been tested in a cross-religious comparative study.
The instrument of Sterkens and Anthony (2008) consisted of three sets of questions to be asked of the three different religious groups, i.e. Christians, Muslims and Hindus. The respondents were asked to respond to a list of positive statements about their in-group and negative statements about the religious out-groups. So Christian respondents assessed their positive attitudes toward Christianity and their negative attitudes toward Islam and Hinduism; Muslims their positive attitudes towards Islam, negative attitudes toward Christianity and Hinduism, and so on for Hindus too.
The statements for each religious group consisted of fourteen items: four positive statements about the religious in-group and two sets of five items associating religious out-group members with negative characteristics. For our measurement, we selected three of the positive in-group items and three of the negative out-group ones. The positive statements were: “Christians (Muslims) show the most faith in God;” “Thanks to their religion, most Christians (Muslims) are good people;” and “Christians (Muslims) are best able to talk meaningfully about God.” The negative statements were: “Muslims (Christians) talk about doing good deeds, but they do not practise them,” “When it comes to religion, Muslims (Christians) are intolerant,” and “Muslims (Christians) are often the cause of religious conflict.”
While our measurement remained similar to this, we paraphrased the statements to an extent. For instance, in the statement “Muslims (Christians) talk about doing good deeds, but they do not practise them,” we used the word ”without” for its strong sense of irony, so that it read, “Christians (Muslims) only talk about doing good deeds without practising them.” We also refined the sentence about tolerance by adding “less”, so that it read, “When it comes to religion, Muslims (Christians) are less tolerant.” The answer categories were on a five-point Likert scale from “totally disagree’’ (1) to ”totally agree” (5). Muslim respondents were asked to react only to the positive statements about Muslims and the negative statements about Christians, and vice versa.
Table 3.23 below shows the positive attitudes towards the in-group, and Table 3.24 the negative attitudes towards the out-group. The tables show, on average, stronger levels of religiocentrism among Muslims than Christians; they value their religious in-group highly, and show higher levels of negative out-group attitudes, particularly in terms of the view that Christians only talk about doing good deeds without practising them (2.77) and that Christians are less tolerant (2.84). Nonetheless, Muslims view Christians as the cause of conflict less (2.72) than Christians consider Muslims to be so (2.78). The variability of responses to the positive statements is greater (.89-1.23), while negative attitudes towards the out- group is more homogenous among Muslims (.99-1.09) than among Christians (.93- 1.18).
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Table 3.23 Positive attitudes towards religious in-group Positive attitudes
towards in-group
Respondents
Yogyakarta Ambon Total
Mean (SD) Mean (SD) Mean (SD)
Muslims
(N=471) Christians (N=251) Muslims (N=361) Christians (N=359) Muslims (N=831) Christians (N=610)
1. Muslims/Christians show the most faith
in God (.88) 4.19 (1.12) 3.36 4.42 (.89) (.89) 4.39 (.89) 4.29 (1.11) 3.97 2. Thanks to their
religion, most Muslims/Christians are good people
3.21
(1.14) (.94) 2.74 (1.34) 3.16 (1.23) 3.20 (1.23) 3.19 (1.15) 3.01 3. Muslims/Christians
are best able to talk meaningfully about God
3.79
(1.10) (1.06) 2.75 (.84) 4.30 (1.16) 3.69 (1.03) 4.01 (1.21) 3.30
Table 3.24 Negative attitudes towards religious out-group Negative attitudes
towards out-group
Respondents
Yogyakarta Ambon Total
Mean (SD) Mean (SD) Mean (SD)
Muslims
(N=471) Christians (N=251) Muslims (N=361) Christians (N=359) Muslims (N=831) Christians (N=610)
1. Christians/Muslims only talk about doing good deeds without practising them 2.60 (.95) 2.41 (.79) (.99) 2.99 (1.00) 2.62 (.99) 2.77 (.93) 2.53 2. When it comes to religion, Christians/ Muslims are less tolerant
2.64
(.91) 2.79 (.97) (1.03) 3.12 (1.05) 2.78 ( .99) 2.84 (1.02) 2.79 3. Christians/Muslims
are often the cause
of religious conflict (.99) 2.49 (1.09) 2.73 (1.15) 3.02 (1.24) 2.81 (1.09) 2.72 (1.18) 2.78 Specifically, Muslims in Ambon have stronger religiocentric attitudes than Muslims in Yogyakarta. Not only do they value their own religious group highly (4.42); they also view Christians as less tolerant (3.12) and to be the cause of conflict (3.02). In this section, the variability of responses to the positive statements tends to be homogenous, as indicated by the standard deviation of .84, while their negative attitudes tend to vary more (SD: .99- 1.15). The Muslims in Yogyakarta are probably more tolerant because they are less prejudiced towards Christians. The mean for assessing Christians as less tolerant is relatively low (2.64), and so are their assumptions that Christians are the cause of religious conflict (2.49). Despite this
tolerance, Muslims in Yogyakarta tend to value their religious group highly, as indicated by the mean value for “Muslims show the most faith in God” (4.19) and for “Muslims are best able to talk meaningfully about God” (3.79). Their responses to the negative statements, as indicated by the standard deviation, tend to be less varied (.91- .99) than to the positive statements (.88 - 1.10).
Compared to Christians in Yogyakarta, Christians in Ambon are more religiocentric; all the means for positive attitudes towards their in-group are higher. Only in the view that Muslims are less tolerant do Christians in Ambon have slightly lower mean score (2.78). In Yogyakarta, Christians are apparently more tolerant and somewhat more critical of their own religious group than Christians in Ambon, as indicated by their tendency to moderately disagree with the claims that Christians are good people (2.74) and that Christians are best able to talk meaningfully about God (2.75). Moreover, they tend to disagree that Muslims only talk about good deeds without practising them (2.41), that Muslims are less tolerant (2.79) and that Muslims are often the cause of religious conflict (2.73). The variability of answers is also less heterogeneous, as shown by the standard deviation, which is from .79 to 1.09.
3.3.4.6.2. Attitudes towards religious plurality
Attitudes towards religious plurality involve individuals’ interpretation of other religions from the perspective of what is claimed to be true by their own religious tradition. These attitudes encompass three different models: monism, pluralism and relativism. Each model has four dimensions, namely: normative, experiential, transformative and relational. The normative dimension refers to a religion’s truth claims; the experiential dimension deals with the human being’s experience of God; the transformative dimension concerns self-realization or liberation, and the relational dimension can be viewed as the relationship of one religion to others (Anthony et al., 2005).
Our measurement for attitudes toward religious plurality stems from the research of Anthony et al. (2005), but with a number of modifications. The monism models used four similar items with small revisions to make the statements clearer. First, we changed, “The truth about God, human beings and the universe is found only in my religion” to “The truth about God is found only in my religion,” deleting “human beings” and “the universe” to avoid the triple barrel. The second item, “Other religions do not offer a true experience of God,” was reformulated to “Other religions do not provide as deep an experience of God as my religion.” The third item, “Only through my religion can people can attain true liberation,” was changed to “Compared with other religions, my religion offers the surest way to liberation.” The fourth item remained the same: “Compared with my religion, other religions contain only partial truths.”