Old and New Christianity in the Southeastern Islands
CHAPTER SEVEN OLD AND NEW CHRISTIANITY IN THE SOUTHEASTERN ISLANDS In chapters four and fi ve we have discussed the beginning of Christian com- munities in the southeastern islands that nowadays are called Nusa Tenggara Timur, NTT. Th ese are the three larger islands of Flores, Sumba and Timor, with a number of smaller ones, especially the group of Solor, Adonara, Lomblen (or Lembata), and Alor, east of Flores, and the islands of Rote and Sawu to the Southwest of Timor. With a population of 3,823,154 in 2000, it was the province with the highest percentage of Christians, 87,7%. Out of the three other provinces with a majority of Christians it was in absolute numbers and in percentage by far the most ‘Christian’ (Papua with 75,5%, North Sulawesi with 69,3% and the Moluccas, not including North Moluccas, with 50,2%). In this chapter we will see the local variations on a renewed race with Islam in the late nineteenth and early twenthieth century, the very slow transition from sixteenth and seventeenth century Portuguese and Dutch Christianity towards a modernising Christianity that accepted schools, hospitals and other aspects of modernity as part of a new culture and religion in the twentieth century. More than in Java or in Sumatra, even than in Sulawesi, in this part of Indonesia traditional religion could survive. In Flores and Timor it survived partly as a hidden tradition under the cover of formal or nominal Christianity. In Sumba traditional religion could quite strongly survive as the major reli- gious tradition of an important, however dwindling minority.
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