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View all search resultsNew churches show path to religious tolerance
The government should amend or revoke regulations that discriminate against religious minorities.
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Church for all: Cars are parked outside the new Gereja Bersama Protestant Church in Citra Maja City housing complex in Lebak regency, Banten, on Dec. 7, 2025. Religious Affairs Minister Nasaruddin Umar inaugurated the church for various denominations in September of this year. (Courtesy of/Andreas Harsono)
C
hristians in a district near Jakarta will celebrate this Christmas in a new and unusual church building. Citra Maja City, a 2,600-hectare real estate development in Maja district, Lebak regency, Banten, has built a two-story multi-denominational Protestant church with the approval of the local government.
This is notable because ever since the government issued the 2006 “religious harmony” regulation, building churches in predominantly Muslim areas of Indonesia became extremely difficult.
The regulation effectively gives the local religious majority power through a Religious Harmony Forum to veto providing minority places of worship. Some nongovernmental organizations documented that during the past two decades over 1,000 churches throughout Indonesia have been shut down, sealed or burned.
Lebak has long been a hot spot for religious intolerance. Even before the religious harmony regulation, it was not possible to get a permit to build a church in the regency. Since Indonesia’s independence in 1945, not a single new church permit has been issued in the area.
In his 2021 book, Misionarisme di Banten (Missionary Work in Banten), the academic Mufti Ali wrote that French and Dutch missionaries during colonial rule had not succeeded in proselytizing among ethnic Banten in western Java because local rulers and Muslim clerics had used strict religious teaching, and sometimes violence, to discourage conversions to Christianity.
In 2022, Lebak regent Iti Octavia Jayabaya banned a Christmas celebration in a sport hall in Citra Maja City, saying that Christians should worship in “registered” Dutch-inherited churches in faraway Rangkasbitung. This was apparently in response to concerns raised by hard-line Muslim groups over the very rapid growth of Bible study groups in Maja.
According to the Religious Affairs Ministry, the Maja district has 101 mosques as of 2021, but no houses of worship for other religious groups. Various Christian denominations, for instance, used shop houses scattered around the area for their houses of prayer because they did not have a church building.
