"For the Indonesian people who are socio-historically well known as the religious society-, religion usually plays an important and central part of social life. In fact, even for decades, Islam as one of the living religions and the largest one in Indonesia was culturally perceived as the belief and normative system giving certain divine regulations for regulating various daily life activities of the followers. Consequently, the existence and function had structurally been placed on the pivotal and determinative position.
Religion (in the case, Islam), then, was seen systemically not only as any certain social institution that functions to manage or organize the ritual activities concerning with reverence and devotion to the God in the narrow sense, but it also gave life-orientation, "frame of reference?, motivation and life-ethos, "mode of conduct?, etc. in the broad dimension of daily life activities of the followers.
The presence and dynamic growth of modern humanistic thoughts and also the rapid development of science & technology as well as the waves of modernization and the globalization process that have powerfully been taking place in our country, in fact they bring about some through-going changes of the role of Islam as a revealed religion. Islam seems to be declined in its fundamental roles and social significance. Islam, then, is only to be operated as any system which is functionally not so determinative and decisive one in the social life process.
With respect to those phenomena, this thesis investigates how far the middle-class Moslem community of Bekasi Selatan plays the role of Islam as their religion in their real life. It strictly focuses on some basic issues or variables relating to the roles of (Islamic) religious institutions, implementation of religious norms, and the quality of religious experience or cognitive system amongst the middle class of the Moslems in the research-location.
Using the qualitative methodological approach or paradigm, it is founded out some important and basic findings. First, there is a discernable change of the role or function of the (Islamic) religious institution in the society. This process of changes is typically indicated by some soda-religious phenomena occurred in the sphere of every day?s activities of those middle-class Moslems, viz, decline of the power, authorities, credibility?s, and social significance of the religious leaders, decline of religious organizational authority, popularity, and influences, and also any phenomena relating to the decrease of social participation of the followers in religious activities. Second, the religious (Islamic) norms and values which are substantively rooted in the AL-Qur'an, As-Sunnah and the ljtihad--have not already been implemented proportionally in every aspect of life whether in the aspect of politic, economic, educational, social-relation, and the life style. Third, there is process of trivialization (pendangkaIan) of the religious values and knowledge. Those values and knowledge as basic elements are not coherently internalized with their real life performances.
Based on the above findings, some inductive conclusions--by using the theoretical paradigm of secularization explicated previously -can be drawn as follow:
First, the process of secularization has been taking place in the midst of life of middle-class Moslem in Bekasi Selatan until now. In the institutional dimension, processes of secularization are manifested in the form of decline of religion, routinization process, differentiation, and disengagement of religion. In the normative dimension, such process of secularization appears in the form of process of religious transformation and desacralization of religious norms and values. While, in the cognitive or experiential level, secularization is concretized in the shape of process of segmentation and trivialization of religious values or religious system in such community.
Second, the trend of the secularization process happened in the community tended to the process of rationalization toward Islam as a religion.
Third, some dominant factors causing secularization in the middle class of Moslem in Bekasi Selatan are the lack of knowledge and understanding towards Islam as their religion besides factors of modern culture resulted in the process of modernization and development of modern philosophical thoughts."
Depok: Fakultas Ilmu Sosial dan Ilmu Politik Universitas Indonesia, 2000
