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Vietnam

Also Known As Vietnamese
Asia

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Vietnamese religious life layers Mahayana Buddhism, Confucian social order and Taoist ritual over a much older stratum of ancestor veneration and tutelary spirit worship centred on the village communal house. Catholicism arrived with Portuguese and French missions in the seventeenth century and remains one of the largest Catholic populations in Asia. Two twentieth century Vietnamese religions, Cao Dai founded in 1926 and Hoa Hao Buddhism founded in 1939, together claim several million followers in the Mekong delta. Religion was heavily restricted after 1975 and has been permitted since the 1990s through state registration, currently under the Law on Belief and Religion in force from 2018. Unregistered congregations, particularly Protestant house churches among Hmong and Montagnard highlanders, continue to report pressure.

Facts
Law and State
Establishment Status
No Establishment 3
No established church; religious organisations must register with the state under the Law on Belief and Religion in force since 2018, and unregistered congregations, particularly Protestant house churches among Hmong and Montagnard highlanders, report continuing restriction.
State Funding Mechanism
Vietnam has no state funding channel to religious bodies comparable to a concordat or an endowment system. What it has instead is control: membership in the Communist Party-run Vietnam Fatherland Front is a de facto requirement for a religious organization's registration under the 2016 Law on Belief and Religion, giving the Front a role in drafting and overseeing religious policy rather than establishing any direct state funding of religious institutions. 4
Apostasy or Blasphemy Law
Vietnam has no law naming apostasy or blasphemy as an offense in those terms. What functions in their place against religious dissent is Article 331 of the Penal Code, which criminalizes abusing democratic freedoms to infringe upon the interests of the state with up to seven years in prison. Human Rights Watch documented at least 124 people sentenced under it between 2018 and February 2025, increasingly against people raising religious freedom grievances alongside land rights and corruption complaints rather than only prominent political dissidents. This is a general political-offense statute turned against religious speech, not a blasphemy law in name, and it is recorded here as exactly that. 5
Registration or Recognition Regime
Religious organisations must register with the state under the Law on Belief and Religion in force since 2018; unregistered congregations, particularly Protestant house churches among Hmong and Montagnard highlanders, report continuing restriction. 3
Ban or Official Watchlist
The government maintains no single published list of banned religions, but treats specific groups as illegal by administrative action. Authorities have called the Duong Van Minh group an illegal organization rather than a religious one, and intensive campaigns through 2022 and early 2023 led nearly 8,000 of its followers to formally renounce their faith. In September 2023 the Ministry of Home Affairs ordered local authorities to eliminate the World Mission Society Church of God, citing legal violations, and the unregistered group Ba Co Do (Church of God Loving Us) has had its gatherings disrupted as banned. State media continues to describe Falun Gong as an evil way religion. Decree 95, effective 30 March 2024 and replacing Decree 162, is the first measure to give the central government an explicit mechanism to suspend a registered religious group for serious infractions of the Law on Belief and Religion, alongside new restrictions on the foreign funding such groups may receive. 3
Concordat Basis
Vietnam has no concordat and no full diplomatic relations with the Holy See. Talks have run since 1990, and on 27 July 2023, following President Vo Van Thuong's audience with Pope Francis, the two sides signed the Agreement on the Status of the Resident Papal Representative, letting the Holy See station a resident representative and office in Hanoi for the first time since before 1975. The Vatican itself described the step as short of formal diplomatic ties. Archbishop Marek Zalewski, already serving as nuncio to Singapore, was named the resident representative that December. 6
Geography
Latitude
14.1 degrees north 2
Approximate reference point, rounded to one decimal place; a country's extent has no single center, so this coordinate is conventional, not a survey measurement.
Longitude
108.3 degrees east 2
Approximate reference point, rounded to one decimal place; a country's extent has no single center, so this coordinate is conventional, not a survey measurement.
Status
Legal Status
Religious organisations must register with the state under the Law on Belief and Religion in force since 2018; unregistered congregations, particularly Protestant house churches among Hmong and Montagnard highlanders, report continuing restriction. 3
Demographics
Religious Composition
Official figures record a large majority as following no registered religion, though folk practice and ancestor veneration are near universal; Buddhists are the largest registered group, Catholics about 7 per cent, with Cao Dai, Hoa Hao and Protestant minorities (Pew Research Center, Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020). 1
Government
Capital
Hanoi (Ha Noi) 2
Government Type
communist party-led state 2
Sovereignty Status
Sovereign UN member state 2
Established Year
1945 2
2 September 1945 (from France)
Location
Location of Vietnam Afghanistan Albania Algeria Angola Argentina Armenia Australia Austria Azerbaijan Bahrain Bangladesh Barbados Belarus Belgium Benin Bhutan Bolivia Bosnia and Herzegovina Botswana Brazil Bulgaria Burkina Faso Burundi Cabo Verde Cambodia Cameroon Canada Chile China Colombia Costa Rica Croatia Cuba Cyprus Czech Republic Democratic Republic of the Congo Denmark Dominican Republic Ecuador Egypt El Salvador Estonia Eswatini Ethiopia Federated States of Micronesia Fiji Finland France French Polynesia Gabon Georgia Germany Ghana Greece Guam Guatemala Haiti Honduras Hong Kong Hungary Iceland India Indonesia Iran Iraq Ireland Israel Italy Ivory Coast Jamaica Japan Jordan Kazakhstan Kenya Kuwait Laos Latvia Lebanon Libya Lithuania Madagascar Malawi Malaysia Mali Malta Mauritius Mexico Moldova Mongolia Morocco Mozambique Myanmar Namibia Nepal Netherlands New Zealand Nigeria North Macedonia Norway Oman Pakistan Palestine Panama Papua New Guinea Paraguay Peru Philippines Poland Portugal Puerto Rico Qatar Romania Russia Rwanda Saint Vincent and the Grenadines Samoa Saudi Arabia Senegal Serbia Sierra Leone Singapore Slovakia Slovenia Solomon Islands South Africa South Korea South Sudan Spain Sri Lanka Sudan Suriname Sweden Switzerland Syria Taiwan Tanzania Thailand Tonga Trinidad and Tobago Tunisia Turkey Uganda Ukraine United Arab Emirates United Kingdom United States Uruguay Uzbekistan Vanuatu Vatican City Venezuela Vietnam Yemen Zambia Zimbabwe
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Religion and History in Vietnam

Vietnamese religion is best described as a set of layers that most people occupy simultaneously. The base is the village: a communal house honouring a tutelary spirit, a lineage altar in every home, and death anniversaries observed for named ancestors. Above that sit the three teachings, Mahayana Buddhism, Confucian social order and Taoist ritual, which arrived during the millennium of Chinese rule and were adapted rather than adopted; the Truc Lam Zen school founded by the retired emperor Tran Nhan Tong in the thirteenth century is a distinctly Vietnamese formation.

Catholicism came with Portuguese and then French missions in the seventeenth century, and the Jesuit Alexandre de Rhodes contributed to the romanised script that eventually replaced Chinese characters as the national writing system, an outcome few missionary projects can claim. Two indigenous religions founded in the twentieth century remain substantial: Cao Dai, established at Tay Ninh in 1926, with a hierarchy modelled loosely on the papacy and a canon of spirits that includes Victor Hugo, and Hoa Hao Buddhism, founded in 1939, which teaches lay practice at home rather than in temples. Religion was severely restricted after 1975 and has been permitted through registration since the 1990s.

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.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Associated With

This source names Vietnam directly: "Religious Freedom Report on Vietnam, published June 26, 2024, relaying the Vietnamese government's March 2023 White Book on Religion figure that Cao Dai adherents make up about 1 percent of the..."

Buddhism, Religions

Mahayana Buddhism is the largest registered religion, layered over village tutelary and ancestor practice.

Source Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020Pew Research Center

This source names Vietnam directly: "Wikipedia's article on Buddhism in Vietnam, community-edited."

Source Buddhism in Vietnam (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors
Cao Dai, Sources

This source names Vietnam directly: "article on Cao Dai, the syncretic Vietnamese religion founded in 1926, reporting that by the early 1990s the religion had an estimated two million adherents in Vietnam, Cambodia, France and the..."

Source Cao Dai
Cao Đài, Religions

Cao Dai, founded at Tay Ninh in 1926, claims several million followers in the Mekong delta.

Source Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020Pew Research Center

This source names Vietnam directly: "Vietnamese settlers carried Cao Dai to Phnom Penh during the religion's own formative years, building the Kim Bien House of Gratitude, and by 1927 missionary efforts had already drawn Khmer converts."

Source Cao Dai Diaspora (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names Vietnam directly: "Constitution to be restored inside Vietnam."

This source names Vietnam directly: "Commonwealth University, recording the Vietnamese government's 1997 recognition of the Tay Ninh branch and the 1998 founding of the Caodai Overseas Mission, which united nineteen affiliated temples..."

This source names Vietnam directly: "Charles Keith's Catholic Vietnam, A Church from Empire to Nation, published by the University of California Press in 2012, is a scholarly history tracing the Vietnamese Catholic Church's development..."

Catholicism, present since the seventeenth century, accounts for roughly 7 per cent of the population, one of the largest Catholic communities in Asia.

Source Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020Pew Research Center

This source names Vietnam directly: "mainland China, Hong Kong, Korea and Vietnam wherever Confucian temple ritual has continued or been revived."

Source Sources of Chinese Tradition, Volume 1Wm. Theodore de Bary and Irene Bloom (eds)

This source names Vietnam directly: "Culture, Ritual and Revolution in Vietnam, published by the University of Hawaii Press in 2002, is a scholarly ethnography examining how the Vietnamese Communist Party's revolutionary campaigns..."

Source Culture, Ritual and Revolution in VietnamShaun Kingsley Malarney

This source names Vietnam directly: "to the bodies operating inside Vietnam."

This source names Vietnam directly: "For Vietnam it reports a substantially higher toll than earlier estimates, 3,812,000 dead between 1955 and 2002, with 3,091,000 of that total falling in the 1955 to 1975 window."

Source Fifty Years of Violent War Deaths From Vietnam to Bosnia (Obermeyer, Murray and Gakidou, 2008)Ziad Obermeyer, Christopher J. L. Murray and Emmanuela Gakidou

This source names Vietnam directly: "the movement's leadership from Vietnam through the Second World War."

Source Cao Dai (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names Vietnam directly: "is an anthropologist specializing in Vietnamese studies, and this academic book, published by University of Hawaii Press, examines the revival of goddess worship and pilgrimage in post-reform..."

This source names Vietnam directly: "of imperial China, Korea, Vietnam and, in a more limited way, Japan, combining scholarly, ritual and administrative functions in a single role."

Source Sources of Chinese Tradition, Volume 1Wm. Theodore de Bary and Irene Bloom (eds)

This source names Vietnam directly: "Keith Weller Taylor is a historian of Vietnam, and this University of California Press book is his standard scholarly history of early Vietnam, drawing on both Chinese and Vietnamese sources..."

Source The Birth of VietnamKeith Weller Taylor

This source names Vietnam directly: "the Buddhist peace movement in South Vietnam between 1964 and 1966, including the self immolations and mass protests that drew international attention to Buddhist opposition to the Vietnamese..."

This source names Vietnam directly: "Sungei Besi, Malaysia's last camp for Vietnamese boat people, issued at an event attended by Malaysian Foreign Minister Datuk Abdullah bin Haji Ahmad Badawi and UNHCR Assistant High Commissioner..."

Fought across Vietnam from the mid 1950s to 1975; every religious body in the country was reorganised under state supervision after reunification.

This source names Vietnam directly: "kin survival data from the 1991 Vietnam Life History Survey to estimate Vietnamese deaths in the war with the United States between 1965 and 1975."

Ancestor veneration and tutelary spirit worship centred on the village communal house underlie all other affiliation.

Source Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020Pew Research Center

Contains

Originated Here

The first revelations came to him while he was serving as a French colonial administrator in southern Vietnam.

Source Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference)Encyclopaedia Britannica editors

Religions Recognised Here

Cao Đài, Religions

The Vietnamese state recognises Cao Dai as a registered religion, a status the movement has not held continuously since its founding.

Source International Religious Freedom ReportUnited States Department of State, Office of International Religious Freedom

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Sources
1. Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020
Pew Research Center, Pew Research Center, 2025View the Source
2. The World Factbook (Central Intelligence Agency)
Central Intelligence Agency, Central Intelligence AgencyView the Source
3. International Religious Freedom Report
United States Department of State, Office of International Religious Freedom, US Department of State, 2023View the Source
4. State-Controlled Religion and Religious Freedom in Vietnam (USCIRF, 2024)
US Commission on International Religious Freedom, US Commission on International Religious FreedomView the Source
5. We'll All Be Arrested Soon, Abusive Prosecutions under Vietnam's Infringing State Interests Law (Human Rights Watch, 2025)
Human Rights Watch, Human Rights WatchView the Source
6. Vatican and Vietnam Agree to Open Resident Holy See Office in Hanoi (America Magazine)
America Magazine, 2023View the Source
The Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd edition
Oxford University Press, Oxford University Pressdemonym / adjectival formView the Source
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