INTRODUCTION

Indonesia is the most populous Muslim country in the world, with 87.18 per cent of its 260 million population embracing Islam. It is not a theocratic state, however. It should not be considered a secular state either because religion does continue to influence its policies and legislations. A more accurate description is that it is a Pancasila state. Pancasila is a Sanskrit meaning “Five Principles”, and in Indonesia, these five principles are: belief in the Almighty God; sovereignty of the people; national unity; social justice, and; humanity (Norshahril 2018, p. 40). But what makes Indonesia a Pancasila state is that it has a ministry that oversees the affairs of Indonesia's six official religions: Islam, Catholicism, Protestantism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism.

Already in 1946, the Indonesian government had established the Ministry of Religious Affairs (MORA). It was formed not to cater only to the Muslim community, but to all major religious communities in the country.

Its origins served as a compromise between competing groups in the immediate post-independent Indonesia. The declarators of Indonesia independence had backtracked on the Jakarta Charter, which spelt out the role of shariah. Indonesia's founding fathers were divided into two camps on the issue: on the one hand were those who wanted Indonesia to be an Islamic state with the Jakarta Charter as its ideological foundation; and on the other hand were those who envisioned Indonesia as a secular state (Anshari 1979). These two reached agreement on forming a Pancasila state as the middle path, and to make up for the deletion of shariah from the Constitution, they concurred that a ministry overseeing religious affairs be formed (Bowen 2013).

Today, MORA's existence is driven by the assumption that Indonesia's founding fathers agreed to its formation. MORA's main task since independence has always been to provide services for all religious groups and to uphold the freedom to believe and practise their faith. MORA does not interfere with the doctrinal aspects of any of the religions involved. However, in the last decade, there are some Indonesians who have expressed the wish to extend MORA's current position as a religiously neutral institution to one more inclined towards Islam.