Since the end of the New Order era, Indonesia has experienced a new phenomenon of rising conservatism within its society, characterized by the increasingly popular support and implementation of Sharia-themed local bylaws across the country. This research intends to find a causal effect between the symbolic threat to religious identity and rising conservatism in Indonesia’s Muslim population. The stimulus of the symbolic threat to religious identity is created by reading news articles that contained different levels of threats to religious identity, while conservatism level is measured using the Social Economic Conservatism Scale (SECS) (Everett 2013). There were 100 participants in this research, taken from a population of active bachelor’s or vocational program at the University of Indonesia. This research has a design of 3 (high threat vs. low threat vs. neutral threat) x 1 (conservatism). The hypothesis testing method used in this research is one-way Analysis of variance ANOVA. This research found a negative, yet significant effect of symbolic threat to religious identity and conservatism (F (2, 97) = 37.79, p < 0.05). Some explanations that could be offered for this result are: (1) individual differences in social identity identification; (2) previous exposure to different forms of symbolic threat to religious identity outside of this research; (3) inadequate randomization; (4) the weakness of the research stimulus compared to possible previous exposure; (5) participants’ misunderstanding of measurement instruction; and (6) different political polarization in Indonesia compared to the United States, which SECS is unable to measure properly. © 2020 by Nova Science Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved.