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Recognizing that the Christians in Indonesia are not a homogeneous group, this article examines the various contested spiritual, social, and political aspirations of urban Christians in the contexts of the historical trajectory of Indonesian modernity, forces of globalization and urbanization, the role of capital, and the development of Islam – the indispensable religious ‘Other’ to this minority religion in contemporary Indonesia. It sheds light on the ways in which this minority exercises agency in using political participation and social activism as a counterbalance to the growing Islamization of Indonesia, and how they strategically utilize their extensive economic, social, and political capital to navigate the treacherous waters of rising religious intolerance in the country where the world’s largest Muslim population resides. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between the sacred and the urban remains understudied. This special issue studies this relationship by focusing on urban religious aspirations in diverse globalizing Asian cities. The approach builds on the sacred geographies and sociology of secularization literatures. It is argued that religious practitioners respond to urbanization by inventing new conceptions of the urban to make sense of secularizing spaces. In turn, the secularizing spaces free up religious practitioners from the constraints of their traditions to innovate new practices to sacralize the urban spaces, in which the new conceptions of the urban play a crucial role. The direction and content of the innovations are driven by the aspirations of the religious practitioners with regard to the city and this provokes sacred politics challenging the state and capitalist market and aspirational contests to claim and control urban spaces vis-a-vis religious competitors, in which practitioners make use of state-market processes to do so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]