page_title: Tobelo people
section_title: Religion
hierarchical_section_title: Tobelo people / Religion
caption_attribution_description: Nederlands: Foto. Een protestantse kerk in Tobelo
context_page_description: Tobelo people is one of the northern Halmahera peoples living in eastern Indonesia, in the northern part of the Maluku Islands and in the eastern side of North Halmahera Regency.
context_section_description: The religious affiliation of the majority is Christian Reformer, while the minorities are Sunni Muslims. On the everyday life, traditional beliefs (the vestiges of shamanism, the cult of spirits) exert a strong influence. The process of adopting Christianity among the forest Tobelo people living in the northeast of Halmahera was very lengthy and complex. Only after decades of resistance, namely in the late 1980s, did they begin to profess the Bible. However, the version of Christianity that they chose was not the one that was preached to them by the Tobelo language-speaking societies of which they maintain family and marriage ties with, but the one that was brought to this region by American missionaries. In 1999-2001, the region was engulfed by religious-ethnic violence. The end of the conflict between Muslims and Christians was laid in April 2001, when a peaceful ceremony was held in the hope that the religious conflict that had frozen the island of Halmahera would not happen again. The ceremony consisted of the adat ritual (from Indonesian, "customary law") and vowing that both sides of the conflict, Muslims and Christians, will respect each other's rights and will forever renounce violence. This ceremony was more than just a cultural manifestation. It symbolized the majority decision in the province of North Maluku to recognize adat as a guarantor of social unity and harmony in the region. Prior to this, the local government informed senior government officials and other political leaders that if they could not change the situation for a better life and facilitate the return to the region of forced relocating, then the capital of the new district of North Halmahera Regency would be another city, no longer as Tobelo. It was necessary to do something, and several leaders of influential associations decided that adat is the best solution. They believed that the resurrection of adat would change the point of identification of people from their religion (neither Christianity nor Islam) to their Tobelo ethnic identity.
caption: A Protestant church in Tobelo, 1924.
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