National Survey on Legislative Members Perception Towards Religious Education

Using questionnaire as the instrument of data gathering, it aimed all national legislative members of the period of 2019 – 2024, who amounts to 575 persons, and thus the research is scientifically categorized as a census, instead of a survey. During approximately three months period from October 2019 to December 2019, this unprecedented study managed to gather data from 370 respondents (64.3 % out of the total 575 legislative members, with 79 female respondents – 21.4% and 291 male respondents – 78.4%). This data collection up until 64.3% was an excellent achievement because the complexity of data collection from the political elites and there had been no study before which was successful to reach more than 60% rate of complete respondent responses. Following a process of quality control of by-phone respondents’ verification and a statistical data analysis (descriptive statistics, logistics and multi-nominal regression analysis), the finding shows that majority of legislative members (53%) consider no serious issue on religious education in relations to civic values, diversity and tolerance. In addition, members who emphasizes on the importance of inclusion of civic values and respect toward diversity into religious education are relatively small, respectively 19.6% and 12.6%. Being based from Kuru’s theory (2009) which divides the responses of the state toward religious life into four types: laïcité, neutral, accommodationist and interventionist, most of legislative members are accommodationist on religious education format, interventionist on religious education facility and neutral on religious education quality. Moreover, nationalist political parties such as PDI-P and Nasdem tend to be more neutral compared to Islamic-modernist political parties such as PKS, PAN and PPP.

Geographical Scope: National

Region: UNDP Asia and the Pacific

Country: Indonesia

Theme of Research: Education Faith-based

Year Published: 2020

Responsible Entity: UNDP Indonesia