Leimena Institute: Cross-Cultural Religious Literacy and constructive engagement in Indonesia
Josh Cass, FoRB in Education Case Studies
The Cross-Cultural Religious Literacy (CCRL) programme run by Indonesia’s Leimena Institute presents a model of FoRB Education built around sustained relationship-building with government and civil society, rather than a single classroom intervention. Operating since October 2021, it has grown into a national infrastructure of training, alumni engagement, and institutional partnership, grounded throughout in a particular theoretical framing of religious literacy.
Leimena’s CCRL programme emerged for two reasons. First, in Indonesia, while considerable effort has gone into countering violent extremism (CVE), comparatively little attention has been paid to prevention. Second, religious freedom, although protected under Indonesia’s Constitution, is often perceived as a sensitive and politically loaded topic, at times associated with a “Western” agenda. To avoid perceptions of external influence, the CCRL programme was designed around Indonesia’s national motto, “Bhinneka Tunggal Ika” (Unity in Diversity): a model of positive and constructive engagement with multiple stakeholders, intended to strengthen multifaith collaboration toward a more inclusive and cohesive society.
Background and aims
To date, 11,137 educators from across Indonesia, mostly school and madrasa teachers, have graduated from a total of 76 classes of the CCRL Introductory Course. Of this, 368 were civil servants from the Ministry of Law, reflecting the programme’s expansion beyond the education sector and into the civil service more broadly.
The primary aim of the programme is to develop the CCRL competencies of educators, with the goal of fostering social capital, and trust, within Indonesia’s society. The secondary aim is to cultivate ecosystems of multifaith and multicultural stakeholders who can collaborate in promoting communities that are inclusive, cohesive, and respectful of religious and cultural diversity.
Alignment with FoRB Education Principles
The programme rests on two principal theories of change. The first is the CCRL framework which identifies three competencies:
- Personal competency concerns the ability to understand one’s own moral, epistemological, and spiritual framework.
- Comparative competency concerns the ability to understand a neighbour’s moral, epistemological, and spiritual framework as that neighbour understands it.
- Collaborative competency concerns the ability to understand the particular space in which two or more different moral frameworks meet that must nonetheless accomplish a shared task.
The second framework is Gordon Allport’s intergroup Contact Theory[1], which holds that prejudice between two groups can be reduced where their encounter is structured around four conditions: equal status, common goals, institutional support, and a shared perception of common interests and humanity between the two groups’ members.
The question of learning about the religions or beliefs of other people sits at the heart of the CCRL programme. In the Introductory Course, teachers learn about their own religion and about other religions, each taught by an adherent of that tradition. As the course is conducted online, participants can engage directly in Q&A sessions with these speakers, often for the first time in their lives, which matters particularly for sessions on Judaism, given the small size of Indonesia’s Jewish community.
In the Alumni workshops, teachers work together in groups with colleagues of different religious backgrounds, asking questions and building familiarity with one another’s traditions. The workshop curriculum also includes visits to different places of worship, for example a mosque and a church, since many Muslim teachers have never entered a church and many Christian teachers have never entered a mosque. Leimena works directly with the leaders of these places of worship, who welcome participants, introduce their traditions, and take part in open discussion.
A dedicated workshop module for CCRL Alumni introduces participants to material on rule of law, human rights, and religious freedom. This includes national documents such as Indonesia’s 1945 Constitution and the Human Rights Law, with particular attention to the articles guaranteeing these protections, alongside international instruments including the UDHR.
The programme aims to introduce teachers to the underlying principles and to create space for reflection on their own experience, surfacing and addressing prejudice collectively, so that teachers can then integrate what they have learned into their own classroom practice. As with all CCRL workshops, participants are required to develop and submit lesson plans at the end of the workshop and are invited to send recordings of themselves teaching using those principles.
Ensuring take up and engagement
Several steps have been identified as central to securing this level of engagement: building a concrete, purposeful, and effective programme that is replicable and scalable, serving as both proof of concept and showcase; selectively and actively engaging stakeholders across both civil society and government; and creating a genuine community for ongoing engagement. Many CCRL Alumni have gone on to take active roles within the programme itself, as facilitators, speakers, or co-creators of new content.
The CCRL programme is structured as a two-step training pathway, supplemented by a range of complementary activities. The first is an online introductory course delivered through a combination of live interaction via video conferencing and self-directed study through a learning management system. Leimena always partners with another institution to run each class, with the partner organisation responsible for participant recruitment. The course is also deliberately international, with instructors drawn from Indonesia and other countries, giving participants a cross-cultural experience that is often rare for teachers in their ordinary professional lives.
Educators who complete the introductory course become “CCRL Alumni” and gain access to a second step, the Alumni Program, which includes several distinct activities. The Online Upgrading Course offers short, more in-depth sessions on subjects within the CCRL framework. The Hybrid Upgrading Workshop combines an online session with an onsite workshop, training teachers to integrate CCRL principles into classroom teaching across both religious subjects (such as Quran and Hadith studies) and non-religious subjects, such as chemistry. Specific modules have been developed to support this, including CCRL-based Lesson Plans, Pluralistic Islamic Religious Education, and a module on CCRL, Religious Freedom, and Rule of Law.
Beyond the core training pathway, the programme runs International Webinars on CCRL-related themes, each typically drawing thousands of participants; a recent webinar marking Indonesia’s Pancasila Day, hosted jointly with the Ministry of Law, attracted more than 13,000 participants from 460 cities and regencies across four countries. An annual International Conference on CCRL brings together institutional partners, leaders, and scholars to deepen understanding of CCRL. The programme also produces audio and video resources for its digital library, with full access reserved for alumni, and maintains ongoing communications with alumni, journalists, and media outlets.
Collaboration is embedded in the CCRL programme’s strategy. Since its 2021 launch, Leimena has worked with more than forty institutional partners, including teacher associations, major school and madrasa foundations, universities, and religious organisations such as the Istiqlal National Mosque, the Supreme Council for Confucius Religion in Indonesia, and Muhammadiyah, one of the world’s largest Muslim organisations with more than sixty million members and thousands of affiliated schools and madrasas.
Government engagement has further extended this reach. The Ministry of Education has integrated the CCRL approach into programmes run by its Character Strengthening Center, the Ministry of Religious Affairs into its Love-Based Curriculum, and the Ministry of Law into its training programme for serving civil servants, including its four-year civil service college degree programme.
[1] Contact Theory, pioneered by Gordon Allport in his 1954 book The Nature of Prejudice, holds that direct contact between members of different groups, under the right conditions, reduces prejudice and improves intergroup relations over time.e.
