Antecedents of Religious Tolerance in Southeast Asia

Southeast Asia is home to a religiously diverse population. Malaysia and Brunei have a Muslim majority, Philippines has a large Christian population while Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia and Laos have a large Buddhist population. In recent years, the region has seen an increase in faith-based tension with communal violence in Myanmar and insurgencies in southern Thailand and the Philippines, which conspicuously exemplifies the rising religious intolerance in the region. The social dynamics at play in these instances highlight the importance of trust and tolerance within the community for a harmonious existence. The current study is a comparative analysis to gauge the factors influencing religious tolerance in Southeast Asia. The study employed the tolerance conceptual framework with the identity economics and the social comparison as the overarching theoretical framework. The findings reveal that countries in Southeast Asia experiencing religious conflict were reporting higher level of religious tolerance. Interestingly, Malaysia a country without any faith-based conflicts, was recording higher religious intolerance. This indicates that a façade of tolerance might guise the actual reality on the ground. And incidents of faith-based conflicts might be wrongly perceived as an indication of rising religious intolerance within a society.