Citizenship Education is Key to Religious Deradicalization

B. Herry-Priyono, Jakarta | Tue, 05/10/2011 7:00 AM | Insight - The Jakarta Post

The current predicament of religious extremism has not been entirely unforeseen. Many concerned parties — this humble writer included — have time and again forewarned the imminent advent of bigots at the gates of the nation. That the forewarnings always fell on deaf ears shows that the managers of this country have been too feeble to heed something crucial.

Now that complacency has been unsettled, what can be done? The answer forces us to confront an unpleasant fact. Have rampant injustices triggered a desperate resort to bigotry? No doubt rampant injustices have their reinforcing contributions, but why do other countries rife with injustices not resort to religious bigotry and theocratic madness?

After much soul-searching and explanation-seeking, the most I can arrive at is this tentative conclusion: The agenda of democracy currently practiced in Indonesia has utterly neglected the most essential prerequisite of democracy, i.e., citizenship. How can we understand this simple yet crucial issue?

At the heart of democracy is an idea that people are equal citizens, members of a political realm called a nation-state. The experience of citizenship is something not born with us but an outcome of a long process of education in the broadest sense. Without citizenship there is no democracy. This point has far-ranging implications. In real terms, all of us of course are not only citizens but also customers in market exchanges. We also happen to be members of certain religions, ethnic groups and perhaps yoga clubs.

While all these affiliations are precious, perhaps even considered sacrosanct, they are not required by democracy. No matter how “good” a religion is, religious affiliation is never a sine-qua-non of democracy. If this sounds too stark, I reckon it is not because this line of argument is flawed, but because our habitual belief has gone astray. In short, when it comes to living together as a nation, the most relevant principle is citizenship, not our religious affiliations, or membership in ethnic groups or paranormal clubs. This last point leads us to the predicament we are now in.

Just look around and feel the climate of public life, or zoom close into some public surveys, and we shall easily find that things have been turned upside down. Increasingly the credo that “I am first of all a citizen who by chance is a religious believer [Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, etc]” has been replaced by an attitudinal credo in which “I am above all a religious believer who by chance is a citizen”. This belief is rooted in religious fundamentalism now virulent in the country. Another growing credo is “I am first of all a customer (a seeker of cheap prices) who by chance is a citizen” — this one is rooted in an equally rampant market fundamentalism.

In the first, citizenship is eclipsed by religious creed, in the second by consumership. As such, the criterion of citizenship is brushed aside or at best treated as a mere appendix to religious affiliation or market consumership. Thus the sine-qua-non of democracy and public life is wiped out. This is a tragedy of the first order, and the prospect of our survival as a nation depends on the way we respond to this tragedy.

Sadly, the remedy will take a long time. Can we rely on the government to solve this tragedy? The answer is a resounding “no”, if because the government’s institutional networks seem to have also been infected with so much religious bigotry, or because it is too busy doing many things but sees the significance of nothing.

First, with or without government consent, it is high time for civil society groups to redirect their democratic agenda toward citizenship re-education.

The current focus on human rights or representation agendas is valuable, but citizenship re-education has now presented itself with utmost urgency. What is badly needed are not ceremonial events but a transformation of habitual attitudes. This demands civil society groups re-enter the vast territory of the grassroots that have been abandoned since the 1998 Reformasi.

Second, it is time for the government to summon the National Education Ministry and assign it with an urgent task of devising a citizenship education program. Rather than being obsessed with irrelevant projects like international schools, the ministry should be the vanguard of this citizenship re-education movement. Again, what is needed is less cognitive instruction than the appropriation of habitual attitudes in citizenship. Is this a form of nationalism? No, it is not: The virtue of citizenship is entirely different from the chauvinism of bigotry. Religious zealots can never be good citizens.

Is this citizenship education the responsibility of the government? Yes it is, or else it becomes the responsibility of no one under the sun. The government also needs to start routing out any religious bigots from all networks of its apparatus. How to do it? The question “how” belongs not to the province of words but of action. The most we can say is, to borrow an ancient dictum from Livy, periculum in mora, there is danger in delay.

The writer is a lecturer in the graduate program at the Driyarkara School of Philosophy, Jakarta.

* Gambar diunduh dari  http://blog.unila.ac.id/maulana/bahan-kuliah-pancasila/