Narratives of Religious Moderation in Official Documents: A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Ministry of Religious Affairs Guidelines

Abstract

This study examines the construction of religious moderation narratives (wasathiyyah) in official documents of the Ministry of Religious Affairs of the Republic of Indonesia using Norman Fairclough's Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) framework. Religious moderation has become a strategic national policy agenda, yet how this discourse is produced, represented, and distributed through official government texts remains critically understudied. Employing Fairclough's three-dimensional model—text analysis, discursive practice, and sociocultural practice—this research analyzes official guidelines issued by the Ministry of Religious Affairs. At the text dimension, the analysis focuses on lexical choices, modality, actor representation, and argumentative structures that shape the meaning of moderation. At the discursive practice dimension, the study traces the processes of text production and consumption as well as their intertextual relation  with global (global Islam) and local (Islam Nusantara) discourses. At the sociocultural practice dimension, the moderation discourse is contextualized within power relations among the state, Islamic civil organizations, and civil society. This study is expected to reveal that the Ministry's official documents construct religious moderation hegemonically as a national consensus that neutralizes religious expressions beyond the normative boundaries set by the state. This discourse reproduces a state-centric ideology in defining "correct" Islam while marginalizing alternative religious narratives. These findings contribute to understanding how state discursive policy plays a role in negotiating religious identity in contemporary Indonesian public space.