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lurality is a fact of our contemporary world, both on a global scale and often on the level of specific societies. Plurality is also in the very texture of Indonesia. Despite its religious diversity, Indonesia has until recently been generally known as a country where a number of great world religions meet and develop in peaceful coexistence.

For decades, diversity in Indonesia was seen as a model of harmonious relations, where people of different religious backgrounds could live and cooperate peacefully. Indonesian Muslims were among the most peaceful and tolerant of the Islamic world.

In the last decade or so, however, international media and academics have warned of rising intolerance in Indonesia. Especially since the downfall of Soeharto in 1998, radical Islam has been perhaps the most vivid and enduring image generated by Indonesia. Recently we also witnessed even more violent acts of intolerance directed to minorities in the country. Here religion has become, what Kimball said, “a lethal force”.

Of course there are many reasons for those issues and intolerance leading to conflicts (economic, social, and politics), but one of the causes I believe is religious illiteracy. I am not only talking about the very uniformed of religious traditions, I also believe that some of them are not well informed and are illiterate about their own traditions. I am wondering if Indonesians are both deeply religious and profoundly ignorant of religions.

According to the survey conducted by the Center for Islamic and Society Studies (PPIM) at Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University in Jakarta, most teachers of Islam in public and private schools in Java opposed pluralism, and even inclined to radicalism and conservatism.

The survey reveals that 68.6 percent of the respondents are against non-Muslim school principals and 33.8 percent resisted non-Muslim teachers at their schools. Some 73.1 percent of the teachers refused their non-Muslim fellows to build houses of worship in their neighborhoods.

I am sure that participants of this research “know next to nothing” about other religious traditions they are opposed to. It is common in many religious traditions that exclusivist tendencies are likely to be uninformed from within as well as from without.

Uninformed from within means they are usually deaf to alternative interpretative possibilities from inside their own tradition. Uninformed from without, means they are usually articulated with little to no experience of genuine encounters with the other, or if there is experience of the other, it is short-lived and highly negative.

The impact of this religious ignorance is actually deeper. That great pioneer of the modern discipline of the history of religions, Friedrich Max Muller, once famously wrote, “He who knows one religion knows none,” perhaps largely referring in his own scholarly context to those who aspired to become experts in the study of a particular religious tradition.

Yet today, this dictum seems to have significance well beyond the membership of the American Academy of Religion and similar scholarly societies. In today’s increasingly religiously plural social contexts, these words suggest not only that a failure to engage pluralism is an act of self-marginalization within our own social contexts. They also suggest that, without some understanding of the faith of our neighbor, the religious person (or community) living in a religiously plural society cannot even understand oneself (or itself).

Today, religious ignorance is pervasive, and certainly dangerous. In an era when the massive power that religions wield, something that no one can deny, we can ask ourselves whether one can understand any culture and history — political or social —without understanding other relevant religions.

Whether one is religious or not, understanding religion is a key to understanding other cultures. Religions have been powerful forces throughout history in any country, some times working for good and sometimes to destroy. They have inspired some of the greatest and noblest of acts; equally they have inspired some of the most ruthless brutality. They are central to much social and political history.

In addition, racial and religious prejudices are major issues in the contemporary world, including Indonesia. One major motive in the understanding of religions is to encourage knowledge and understanding between religions and cultures, based on the assumption that prejudice will be overcome if each knows more about the other.

It is hoped that the knowledge of others will result in understanding and better relations between peoples. Above all, the understanding of other religions (including diversity within religious traditions) is to enable us to “see through the spectacles” of other cultures. If someone can develop an empathetic understanding of another culture, the result will be that they are more ready to empathize with other cultures as well.

Unfortunately, the Indonesian community today lacks this basic religious knowledge. As a result, many Indonesians are too easily swayed by demagogues. This ignorance endangers our public life. Thus, we need to equip our citizens with a basic understanding of the world’s religions.

There are many reasons to expect from Indonesia’s future leaders at least minimal religious literacy, which can be cultivated in a wide variety of courses. The most obvious is a world religions course that covers, at a minimum, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Confucianism. During such a course, students would learn the basic symbols, beliefs, practices, and narratives of those religions.

We are not living in a secularized world. The world today is as fervently religious as it ever was, and in some places more so than ever.To contribute fully to the politics of the nation or the affairs of the world, we need to foster students’ basic knowledge about the world’s religions.

The writer is a visiting associate professor at ACMU and chair of Islam at the school of foreign service, Georgetown University, Washington DC.