The movement did not end with Diem. Between 1964 and 1966 the Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam became the largest organised force in the south outside the army, pressing successive governments for elections and for negotiation rather than escalation, until the struggle movement in Hue and Danang was broken by force in 1966. Robert Topmiller's study argues that a genuine third position, neither Saigon nor Hanoi, existed in those years and was suppressed rather than defeated.
Out of the same circles came engaged Buddhism, the phrase associated with the monk Thich Nhat Hanh, whose School of Youth for Social Service sent young Buddhists to rebuild bombed villages and whose writing carried the idea of a practice inseparable from social action to a worldwide readership. Exiled in 1966, he was not permitted to return for thirty nine years. Vietnam's other religious bodies were drawn in too, the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao movements of the Mekong delta each maintaining their own militias and territories at points during the war.
After the fall of Saigon in 1975 the unified state placed religious life under supervision. The Unified Buddhist Church was displaced in 1981 by a state sponsored Vietnam Buddhist Sangha and its leaders were detained for decades, Catholic seminaries and schools were closed and clergy sent to reeducation, and the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao hierarchies were dissolved and later reconstituted under state charters.