Registration, Cao Dai and the Highland House Churches

Vietnam does not prohibit religion; it licenses it. The Law on Belief and Religion, in force since 2018, requires a group to register its activity, then its organisation, then to be recognised, a sequence that can take years and that gives the state a decision point at each step. Sixteen religions and several dozen organisations hold recognition. The mechanism produces two recurring problems. The first is that the state recognises a body and not a faith, so where a tradition is internally divided the state effectively chooses its leadership: a Cao Dai organisation established in 1997 holds recognition and the Tay Ninh Holy See, and adherents who reject its legitimacy find that their own version of the same religion is unregistered.

The Unified Buddhist Sangha of Vietnam, displaced by the state sponsored Vietnam Buddhist Sangha in 1981, is in a comparable position. The second is geographic. Protestant Christianity spread rapidly among Hmong communities in the northwest and among Montagnard peoples of the central highlands from the 1980s, in regions where the state already treated ethnic minority organisation as a security question, and registration for those congregations has been markedly harder to obtain than for lowland ones. Reports of pressure on unregistered highland house churches, including denial of household registration, are persistent enough to be a standing feature of international assessments.