Batak, the Amboinese, the Toraja, and the Minahas—and
among the Chinese throughout insular Southeast Asia, the
only Christian nation is the Philippines. More than 80 per-
cent of the Philippine population is Roman Catholic but an
estimated 350 distinct Christian bodies exist there today,
many of which could be termed “movements.” Most signifi-
cant, perhaps, is the Iglesia Filipina Independiente (IFI, or
Philippine Independent Church). The foundations for this
offshoot of the Roman Catholic church were laid during the
Philippine revolt against Spain in 1896, but the IFI was offi-
cially founded in 1902 by Gregorio Aglipay, who became its
first archbishop. When the Spanish were defeated, the Filipi-
no priests of the IFI took over parishes held by the friars and
achieved a membership of 1.5 million, or 25 percent of the
Christian population. Highly nationalistic, the IFI has been
known to raise the Philippine flag at the time of the consecra-
tion of the Host in the Mass.
At one time the IFI canonized José Rizal, the Filipino
novelist and nationalist martyr, and other movements, too,
deify Rizal as a Christ of the Malays. An example is Iglesia
in Cristo, founded in 1914 by Feix Manalo and now a highly
organized movement based on a special method of medita-
tion. Another Rizalist group, Lapiang Malaya, attacked the
city of Manila in 1967. Believing themselves immune to bul-
lets, they provoked the police and military into violent reac-
tion and thirty-three of them died. Such movements fuse
Christian inspiration with nativism, nationalism, and mille-
narianism, often opposed to westernization, modernization,
and oppression.
RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS AND CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY IN
INSULAR SOUTHEAST ASIA. At different periods and in differ-
ent places, these religious movements have contributed dif-
ferently. Most of them, regardless of affiliation, were inspira-
tional catalysts in giving rise to the striving for independence
and modernity that led to the more directly political nation-
alist movements that began in the early twentieth century
and culminated in the independence of these new nations
soon after World War II. Since independence, their role has
varied. In Indonesia, the Muslims have generally acted as an
oppositional force complementing the government, while
the Hindu-Buddhist streams have either fed into the Javan-
ist-oriented national culture and government or provided
personal fulfillment outside the governmental arena.
In Malaysia, the Muslims have identified more strongly
with the government, while Hindu-Buddhism has not
claimed a place in the national political culture equal to that
of Hindu-Buddhism in Indonesia. In the Philippines, Islam
has been oppositional, entrenched in the south against Chris-
tian incursions identified with the national polity; Christian-
ity has been identified more with governmental authority, al-
though Christianity, too (exemplified by such movements as
the Christians for National Liberation and church support
of Corazon Aquino during her rise to power in 1986), has
had an oppositional role. In Singapore, the Muslims have
played an oppositional role in relation to the dominant gov-
ernment party, but in this highly modernized, formally plu-
ralistic society, religious movements have not played a post-
war role equal to that in the other insular Southeast Asian
nations.
In all of these countries, religious movements were
dominant sources of nationalism and creative ferment in the
early twentieth century. Later, as the impetus toward inde-
pendence was seized by more purely political movements,
the religious movements became relatively less important.
After independence was achieved, the regimes in these coun-
tries (especially the two largest, Indonesia and the Philip-
pines) have tended to become authoritarian, while religious
movements (such as the Muslim fundamentalists) have
eclipsed the Communists and others as the locus of aspira-
tion independent of the government. The beginning of the
twenty-first century could parallel the beginning of the twen-
tieth, in that the stage is set for religious movements to re-
sume their earlier role as a reformative force independent of
the central power.
SEE ALSO Buddhism, article on Buddhism in Southeast
Asia; Christianity, article on Christianity in Asia; Gandhi,
Mohandas; Islam, article on Islam in Southeast Asia; Ta-
gore, Rabindranath.BIBLIOGRAPHY
An outstanding account of religiously grounded uprisings before
the twentieth century is P. B. R. Carey’s Babad Dipanagara:
An Account of the Outbreak of the Java War, 1825–1830
(Kuala Lumpur, 1981). Other excellent accounts for Java in-
clude Sartono Kartodirdjo’s The Peasants’ Revolt of Banten in
1888: Its Conditions, Course and Sequel; A Case Study of Social
Movements in Indonesia (The Hague, 1966). For Sumatra,
see Christine Dobbin’s Islamic Revivalism in a Changing
Peasant Economy: Central Sumatra, 1784–1847 (London,
1983).
On Budi Utomo, see Bernard H. M. Vlekke’s Nusantara: A Histo-
ry of Indonesia, rev. ed. (The Hague, 1959), pp. 348–391.
On Taman Siswa, see Ruth T. McVey’s “Taman Siswa and
the Indonesian National Awakening,” Indonesia 4 (October
1967): 128–149; on Sumarah, David Gordon Howe’s “Su-
marah: A Study of the Art of Living” (Ph. D. diss., University
of North Carolina, 1980); on kebatinan, J. A. Niels Mulder’s
Mysticism and Daily Life in Contemporary Java: A Cultural
Analysis of Javanese Worldview and Ethics as Embodied in Ka-
batinan and Everyday Experience (Amsterdam, 1975).
For Islamic reformism in Malaya and Singapore, see chapters 2
and 3 of William R. Roff’s The Origins of Malay Nationalism
(New Haven, 1967). For Indonesia, see Taufik Abdullah’s
Schools and Politics: The Kaum Muda Movement in West Su-
matra, 1927–1933 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1971); my Muslim Puri-
tans: Reformist Psychology in Southeast Asian Islam (Berkeley,
1978); and, specifically for Muhammadiyah, see Howard M.
Federspiel’s “The Muhammadijah: A Study of an Orthodox
Islamic Movement in Indonesia.” Indonesia 10 (October
1970): 57–79.
A good summary of the religious situation in the Philippines can
be found in David Joel Steinberg’s The Philippines: A Singu-
lar and a Plural Place (Boulder, Colo. 1982.)8654 SOUTHEAST ASIAN RELIGIONS: NEW RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS IN INSULAR CULTURES