The Indonesian archipelago, vast and scattered, holds a sizable portion of the world's people. About a tenth of its predominantly Muslim population is Christian. At twenty-four million, eight million more than the population of the Netherlands (under which the archipelago was ‘unified’ into a colonial state), Indonesia's Christians are still fairly few when compared with populations in any of several states of sub-Saharan Africa such as Nigeria where Islam is also a consequential presence. Nor does Indonesia's Christian growth mean that the scales of world Christianity are going to tip toward south-east Asia anytime soon. Still, one only has to look to South Asia, where Christian growth in, say, Pakistan and Bangladesh (both preponderantly Muslim), has been negligible, to realise that Indonesia's numbers are far from minuscule. That it is, moreover, a remarkably diverse population, ethnolinguistically, almost goes without saying. Being ‘Catholic’ may be one kind of identity, but to be Timorese Catholic quite another. The same would hold for Protestants and Pentecostals; it makes a huge difference whether one is talking about Papuans or Javanese. Wisely, therefore, have the editors of this hefty volume avoided a title that would convey the false impression that ‘Indonesian’ Christianity has a specifiable identity, culturally, one that would be uniform from one end of the archipelago to the other. As there is no comparable study on Indonesia's multiple ‘Christianities,’ at least not one that is so ambitiously comprehensive, the editors have not only filled a lacuna, they have plugged a gaping hole.

In sheer weight, A history of Christianity in Indonesia is a behemoth, double the length of R. E. Frykenberg's Christianity in India, published by Oxford (2008) on an older, larger and – arguably – more diverse Christianity than Indonesia's. To keep their project from collapsing under its own weight, the editors attempted something more complicated than Frykenberg's chronological approach (‘From beginnings to the present’, as the subtitle says). Part i, the shortest, going up to 1800, focuses on the emergence of Catholic communities here and there throughout the archipelago during the heyday of the Portuguese overseas empire; the first two centuries of Dutch colonisation and the transplantation of Reformed Church Protestantism also fall within its purview. Part ii, the bulk of the book, starts with a broad diachronic overview down to 2005; it then switches over to a regional approach that inventories Christianity from one end of the archipelago to the other (somewhat counter-intuitively, from east to west). Part iii, thematically arranged, addresses topics as different as Indonesian theologies, ecumenical endeavours and the Chinese Christian Diaspora; my favourite is a well-illustrated chapter on Christian art unencumbered by the regionalism that otherwise runs throughout the book. The editors inform us that their large cohort of collaborators, Dutch and Indonesian (including a distinguished Muslim scholar), had no intention of writing just another ‘history of foreign missionary organizations and their personnel’; on the contrary, they aver, ‘the local factor’ (p. vii), i.e., indigenous agency or Indonesian initiative, lies at the heart of their concern, historiographically.

Indeed, some of the best material is on grassroots Christianity, that of, for example, a certain C. L. Coolen, a mestizo who founded a faith community in the early 1800s, far from Dutch Reformed Church interference. In Coolen's community, a Javanese inculturation, melding with Islam without submerging Christianity into it, can be vividly appreciated in the Sufi-inspired hymns that were sung: ‘I believe in Allah, the One / There is no God but God / Jesus Christ is the Spirit of God’ (p. 641). Still, nuggets like these lie buried in a text that is more about mission-initiated Christianity than the editors might like to admit. In great swathes of the volume, no Indonesian names occur at all; on many pages, Dutch-initiated churches and foreign-based mission societies crowd out indigenous counterparts. And even though ‘conversion’ is constantly referred to, no attempt whatsoever is made to reflect, theoretically, on the kind of process that it might be. Contributors disagree over whether or not ‘conversion’ entails a rupture with the past; over all of this there also hovers an unwillingness to reflect on the category ‘syncretism’, much invoked, sometimes pejoratively (theologically), sometimes neutrally (phenomenologically). Without a proper introduction that would address such issues, and a conclusion that might tie them up, the editors have given us an unfinished book, despite its size. Lastly, a thousand-page book needs a better index, one with more than proper names; and while I would like to think that I know where Sulawesi is, a map would really help.

John Blanco's Frontier constitutions also talks about an archipelago, the Philippine islands; that, however, is where the similarities stop. Here, ‘frontier’ refers to an area of hybridity between cultures, Spanish and indigenous. As he constructs an argument about ‘race,’ ‘identity’ and the ‘state’ in the final century of Spain's colonial rule before its ouster in the Spanish-American War, Blanco explores the role of the Catholic Church in those processes by which such things were constituted (obscurely, such processes are called ‘constitutions’). An engaging writer, Blanco displays a flair for theory; from Kant to Gramsci and with a deferential bow to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and even the Apostle Paul, he is a master of the deft segue. By the end, however, Blanco's interest in Christianity fades and he moves on to novels (José Rizal's masterpiece of 1886, Noli me tangere), art and other things of interest to scholars of comparative literature. On the way, Blanco reflects, episodically but helpfully, on ‘Christianisation,’ ‘Hispanisation’ and ‘Philippinisation’, processes comparable to ones that are found in A history of Christianity in Indonesia but skipped over lightly. Blanco's book, a quarter of the other in size, comes with a properly thematic index. Still, one goes to a book like this less for its ostensible subject matter, the Philippines, than for the theoretical model upon which it rests; for that reason, the over-weight, clunkier volume on Indonesia, chock full of unembellished historiographical standbys (names, dates, etc.), may prove the more useful resource in the long run.