Interreligious Marriage in Indonesia

Abstract

Indonesia – home to the world’s largest Muslim population – is an ethnically diverse archipelago with sizeable non-Muslim communities. There is a dearth of demographic study on how religions shape patterns of marriage partnerships in Indonesia. We use full enumeration data from the 2010 Indonesian Population Census to examine the incidence, regional variation, pairing patterns, and socio-demographic correlates of interreligious marriage (IRM). We derived a subset of over 47 million co-resident heads of household and their spouses from the 2010 Census. About 228,778 couples (0.5%) were enumerated as having different faiths at the time of the Census. Rates of IRM are higher in ethnically diver..