States, Religion, and Democracy in Southeast Asia: Comparative Religious Regime Formation

This chapter seeks to account for the political origins of “religious regimes”—institutional relations between political authority (a secular state) and clerical authority (organized religion)—through a comparative historical analysis of three Muslim-majority Southeast Asian nations: Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei. Despite relatively similar historical, geopolitical, and sociocultural conditions—and against their original intentions—these three nations have established distinctive types of religious regimes since independence: secular-dominant (Indonesia), established-religion (Malaysia), and religious monarchy (Brunei). The chapter argues that the varying pathways adopted by these three nations are the result of state formation, specifically the ways in which secular political elites pursued and consolidated their state powers and domination during post-independence institution-building. Moreover, the chapter’s comparative analysis suggests that the type of—and timing of—religious regime formation is essential to account for the ability and willingness of late-developing democracies such as Indonesia and Malaysia to protect basic civil rights and freedom of religious (and nonreligious) communities and people. In contrast to Christian-dominant Europe, where mostly secular regimes were formed concomitantly to facilitate democratic transition and consolidation, late-developing Muslim democracies have seen the consolidation of religious regimes prior to the formation of modern state and popular democratic movements and consolidation. As a result, late-developing Muslim democracies have tended to see more aggressive religious authorities contesting and complicating the trajectories of democratic consolidation.