Jakarta — Indonesia's Religious Affairs Ministry is preparing educational materials aimed at preventing what it calls the spread of LGBTQ culture among students, with plans to insert the content into existing school curricula, starting the 2026/2027 academic year, Deputy Religious Affairs Minister Muhammad Syafi'i said on Wednesday, 22 July 2026.
Under the leadership of President Prabowo Subianto, spreading LQBTQ culture is categorized as a non-military threat. The categorization have triggered strong reactions domestically before the Religious Affairs came up with the plan to put preventing materials about it in educational materials.
According to Deputy Minister Syafi'i, the educational materials will target students from fourth grade in elementary school through senior high school. He said the ministry is not creating a new subject. Instead, the content will be inserted into subjects already being taught, such as religious education or civics.
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"We are creating educational materials. Our target is students. We are preparing materials designed to give students understanding. More specifically, we are also thinking about how to insert that material, in which subject, whether religious education, civics, or others," Minister Syafi'i said.
The policy follows Presidential Regulation No. 111 of 2025 on the General Policy of State Defense, which lists the spread of LGBTQ culture as a non-military threat to national security.
"But the spread, the creation of a culture, that is a non-military defense threat to the state," Minister Syafi'i said Monday, 20 July at the Presidential Palace complex in Jakarta.
Minister Syafi'i said the ministry has formed a special team to speed up the insertion process without a full curriculum overhaul, which he said would take too long.
"The Ministry of Religious Affairs will immediately form a team, a team that keeps working until today to insert this into the curriculum. Because changing the curriculum might take a long time. We want this to already be running this academic year. That's why the existing curriculum is being inserted with material on the dangers of LGBT culture," he explained.
Ahmad Zainul Hamdi, head of the ministry's Center for Religious Education Policy Strategy, said the material is being developed as a ministry-wide policy so it can be applied consistently across education directorates.
