Tolerance as an Instrument of Power?
A Public Theological Reading of Productive Intolerance in the Institutionalization of Religious Moderation
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.33550/sd.v13i2.624Keywords:
hospitality, pastoral power, productive intolerance, public theology, religious moderationAbstract
This article offers a critical public-theological reading of Indonesia’s institutionalized religious moderation and the productive intolerance accompanying it. It asks why a policy that names tolerance as an official indicator coexists with, and partly depends on, the exclusion of groups classified as deviant. Using Michel Foucault’s genealogy of pastoral power, the article analyses the moderation dispositif, from the 1965 blasphemy law and the 2006 regulation on houses of worship to Presidential Regulation 58/2023, harmony indices and digital monitoring, as a technology that shepherds citizens’ religiosity omnes et singulatim. It argues that productive intolerance is not a failure of moderation but the structural effect of a permission-based tolerance that constitutes its flock by naming the stray. In response, it constructs a theology of hospitality grounded in God as the sole Host (Lev 25:23), Christ as host and guest, and just hospitality. This theology does not reject public order but de-pastoralizes it, shifting the state from shepherd of piety to guarantor of equal rights, and the church from beneficiary of permission to host and guest in solidarity with the other.
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