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154 Ahmad Fauzi Abdul Hamid and Che Hamdan Che Mohd Razali

setback in 2008, losing its parliamentary super-majority, Christian politicians
and civil-society activists have become more politically visible (Sia 2010).
Christian activism presents a unique opportunity to unite non-Malays, as
Malaysian Chinese and Indians are equally involved in Christian-based groups.
However, Article 11(4) of the Federal Constitution circumscribes Christian
outreach to Malay-Muslims, authorizing state and federal governments to
restrict the propagation of religious doctrines or beliefs among Muslims.
e presence of such a constitutional protection clause has not prevented
scaremongering about purportedly rampant Christian evangelizing among
Malays, to the point of accusing Christians of hatching a long-term plot to
install Christianity as Malaysia’s o cial religion. Causes célèbres such as the
well-publicized e ort of a Muslim convert to Christianity, Lina Joy, to have her
conversion legally acknowledged in her identity card and widespread rumours
of large-scale baptisms of Malay children raised the spectre of an impending
Muslim-Christian con ict (Ahmad Fauzi and Muhamad Takiyuddin 2014).
In that vein, in 2011, the UMNO-linked daily Utusan Malaysia implicated
DAP parliamentarian Je Ooi in a story about a supposed gathering among
priests in Penang, pledging to turn Malaysia into a Christian state (Rokiah and
Mohd Khuzairi 2011).
e presence of many Christians among the DAP leadership made DAP,
and by extension, PH, easy targets for political mudslinging by both PAS
and UMNO propagandists. A GE14 circular issued by the Malacca and
Johor Catholic diocese’s Bishop Bernard Paul, openly requesting Christians
to pray for God’s intervention in favour of change, spread like wild re over
the internet (Paul 2018), sparking o hostile accusations of Christians’ being
intent on doing whatever possible to ensure the downfall of Malay-Islamic
sovereignty. In response, PAS President Abdul Hadi Awang attacked Paul’s
call as a poisonous DAP-linked, church-backed design to retain secularism
as practised in the colonial order, by subtly subverting the constitutional
4
safeguards pertaining to Islam’s sacrosanct position and the Malay Rulers
as heads of the Islamic religion in their respective states (Abdul Hadi 2018).
Indeed, for some time, Christian leaders had considered the secular state vital
as a bulwark against Islamization that might potentially erode minority rights
in Malaysia (Yeoh 2011). In what was widely seen as a move to di use rising
tension, Archbishop Julian Leow Beng Kim of the Kuala Lumpur archdiocese
made a less provocative public call simply to make Christians’ votes count, as
participants in the country’s democratic process (Leow 2018).
In portraying the DAP as anti-Islam and pro-Christian, the BN-UMNO
ruling establishment drew upon statements by researchers linked to state

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