Jeremy Menchik’s wonderful new book takes the challenges of doing constructivist political science theory seriously. That is no simple task, since even the best works in the constructivist tradition often avoid the difficult work of actually defining the approach and its implications^.. What Menchik achieves is not a replacement for the grand theoretical traditions of religion and politics that he criticizes but something more useful. He provides a careful research design that produces a handful of empirically consequential mechanisms explaining why leading Indonesian Islamic organizations are sometimes more or less tolerant of non-Muslim minorities, a credible account of how these mechanisms might generalize to other times and places, and a clear examination of their normative consequences.

Conceptually, this book is a challenge to several generations of research examining the “relationship” between Islam and democracy, a political science literature that has yielded remarkably little new insight since the first challenges to the orthodoxy of secularization theory. In large part, that is because the approaches that dominate the broader field of religion and politics—rational actor theory, associated with scholars like Anthony Gill and Stathis Kalyvas, the “political theology” approach pursued by Daniel Philpott and Monica Duffy Toft, and the political culture work of Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris—tend to treat “religious actors” as possessed of relatively straightforward, fixed preferences that naturally and unproblematically shape their political behavior. In other words, they tend to foreclose the possibility that the “relationship” between faith and political outcomes is constructed through practice—the practice of being religious, living in a religious community, and participating in political life. By starting with the assumption that the relationship between theology and practice is likely to be contingent and constructed (in other words, inseparable from politics itself), Islam and Democracy in Indonesia offers a more persuasive answer to the broader question of Islam’s relationship to state politics and power.

Menchik’s particular concern within the larger Islam/democracy debate is tolerance, and its role in shaping the possibility of just and effective democracy. Indonesia, Menchik’s country of expertise, has long been lauded for its particularly “tolerant” strain of Islamic thought. Yet its most important Islamic movements and organizations have exhibited wildly different patterns of toleration toward Christians and other non-Muslims, and outright intolerance and hostility toward minority communities like the Ahmadiyah and Indonesian communists. Building out from a “most different” research design, Menchik focuses on the careers of three of Indonesia’s largest and most significant Islamic movements—Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), the Muhammadiyah, and Persatuan Islam (Persis)—each with a different theological approach, organizational history, and relationship with the Indonesian state, in order to trace the origins of tolerance and intolerance among Indonesian Muslims. The result is a set of generalizable mechanisms that explain how Islamic movements come to adopt particular patterns of toleration, emphasizing a combination of historical interactions between groups and the role of state policies toward minorities. Along the way, he argues that a shallow distinction between “tolerance” and “intolerance” masks subtler but empirically meaningful distinctions in how Islamic organizations conceptualize who “counts” as Indonesian, and who does not.

Methodologically, Menchik engages in a process of triangulation, disaggregating the question of where tolerance comes from into a set of nested hypotheses and causal tests. In one chapter, he relies on rarely consulted primary sources like organization publications, fatwas (religious edicts) issued by leading affiliated clerics, and meeting notes to build the case that much of the difference in levels of official tolerance of Christians among these organizations was driven by their initial experiences with Christian missionary activity in the early twentieth century in their respective home regions on the island of Java. Where Christian polemics attacked Islam, Muslim organizations like Persis and Muhammadiyah formed political alliances to “repel the Christian threat” (p. 37), with durable implications not only for these organizations’ contemporary rhetoric but also for the actual attitudes of their members. Another chapter relies on careful historical process tracing to explore the role of the Indonesian nationalist struggle—and Muslim groups’ incorporation in it—to unpack the puzzle of why NU’s leadership came to tolerate Hinduism (a polytheistic faith) but not Indonesian communism (no faith at all).

In another chapter, Menchik takes on the plight of the Ahmadiyah, a minority Islamic sect that faces wide global persecution by the broader Sunni community and whose members face substantial formal legal and social discrimination across Indonesia. In explaining why a group like NU might tolerate Hindus or practitioners of traditional Javanese religion (two polytheistic traditions, not “people of the book”) and reject fellow Muslims, Menchik makes one of his most important interventions, a concept he calls “godly nationalism.” Godly nationalism, “an imagined community bound by a common orthodox theism and mobilized through the state in cooperation with religious organizations in society” (p. 67), suggests that in deeply religious (and religiously plural) societies like Indonesia’s, nationalist projects can incorporate multiple religious traditions into their “imagined community” in much the same way that consociational pacts incorporate ethno-national ones—by offering them state recognition as religions. Yet this inclusion requires a parallel exclusion (“productive intolerance”), and the Ahmadiyah, who profess to be Muslims but also recognize their late nineteenth-century founder as a prophet, have become a scapegoat to the state’s need to preserve the boundaries of correct faith. As Menchik puts it, “Ahmadiyah’s exclusion allow[s] . . . the state to proclaim their commitment to a limited form of pluralism without extending religious freedom to heterodox faiths” (p. 85).

What sets Menchik’s work apart is not simply that these various pieces add up to a constructivist argument in favor of looking toward “historical and political conditions” to explain variations in tolerance, but his careful attention to the normative implications of his findings. In Chapter 6, he argues that Muslim tolerance toward non-Muslims in Indonesia is not “liberal” (in the Lockean sense) or rooted in secular ideals about freedom of conscience, but communal in orientation and grounded in the “primacy of belief over other values” (p. 145). Indonesian Muslims cannot (and will not) tolerate limits on the role of religion in public life in order to preserve the freedoms of others. The question then becomes whether or not this “communal tolerance” is an adequate building block for sustainable democracy, liberal or otherwise.

Menchik’s answer—not surprisingly, given his emphasis on tolerance—follows the thrust of an influential literature perhaps most associated with Alfred Stepan, which argues that in religiously plural societies, the best hope for stable democracy is to promote mutual respect between religious communities and state authorities, accepting religious practice as a normal part of communal life but requiring, in turn, that all faith communities recognize the fundamental legitimacy of the others in its polity. But where Menchik differs usefully from Stepan and his “twin tolerations” is in his rejection of secularism as the overarching conceptual framework into which groups like NU have to be incorporated. As he notes, “Indonesia’s Islamic organizations . . . are less interested [in] varieties of secularism than they are in varieties of religious governance” (pp. 159–60). This is an important distinction, and it is rare to see a Western social scientist both recognize its importance and own up to the difficulties in imagining what a genuinely religious democracy—particularly one that inevitably requires the partial exclusion of some communities from full participation in the body politic—might look like.

If I have a criticism of Menchik’s approach, it is that he has greater confidence in the ability of tolerance—even if divorced from liberalism—to promote democracy than I think it warrants. Part of this hesitancy comes from the fact that it is not clear that the tolerance produced by “godly nationalism” can survive external shocks or moments of extreme political uncertainty (as indeed they did not during the anticommunist violence supported by the NU and Muhammadiyah in the 1960s). But a broader source of reservation is simply the slipperiness of the concept itself. My own preference runs more toward Adam Przeworski’s “minimalist” version of democracy, in which competing forces might not necessarily possess attitudes of tolerance toward each other, but nonetheless invest in institutionalizing elections and the rule of law out of a desire never to be locked out of a chance to compete for power. In this sense, we might think of NU, Muhammadiyah, and other Indonesian Islamic organizations not so much as tolerant or intolerant (thus sidestepping the definitional complexities altogether) but as more or less willing to live with the uncertainty that comes from participating in politics in a culturally plural state. The rhetoric of godly nationalism might have just as much to do with legislating out certain sources of political uncertainty (discursive challenges to the worldviews of Sunni Muslims) as it does with insisting upon the recognition of religious values in the public sphere.

This quibble aside, this is a book that deserves to be widely read and debated not only by Indonesia scholars but also by all who study religion and democratic politics.