Religious Resurgence in Southeast Asia

Since the last decades, Southeast Asia has undergone an unprecedented upsurge in religious practice, ritual, association, and observance that defies a century of forecasts by secularization and modernization theorists of religion's immanent privatization and decline. The Philippines has seen dramatic conversion to evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity that later drove some groups of Filipino Catholics to create a quasi-Pentecostal rebranding, namely a Pentecostal-inflected movement that is officially Catholic such as El Shaddai, which has a membership of some 10 million followers, making the group the world's largest charismatic Catholic organization. In the Theravada Buddhist lands of Myanmar and Thailand, the past generation has also witnessed a steady expansion in lay devotion as well as the augmentation of militant Buddhism such as the monk-led 969 anti-Muslim Buddhist movements. Religious resurgence also takes place within Islam. Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Mindanao region of the southern Philippines have experienced dramatic religious revitalization, typified by the rise of Islamism, macrocosm-minded Islam, and transnational religious movements. This book discusses these issues. A comparative study of religious resurgence and public religion in contemporary Southeast Asia, the book aims to examine the socio-historical roots of the present-day religious boom, the links between the religious resurgence and communal conflicts, and the challenges facing religious and secular actors in the struggle for building civil democratic ideals that guarantee interreligious tolerance, peace, harmony, freedom, and citizenship for ethnoreligious minorities.