Vietnam's Communist Government Bans Cao Dai

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

After the fall of Saigon in April 1975, Vietnam's new communist government banned Caodaism outright as part of a broader suppression of religious organizations that followed the war's end, a prohibition that held for more than two decades before it was lifted. The ban reached a religion that had grown, within a single generation of its 1926 founding, into one of the largest indigenous faiths in southern Vietnam.

The government that imposed the ban treated Caodaism the way it treated other religious organizations under the new political order, closing off open practice inside the country rather than singling the movement out for anything particular to its own doctrine. Vietnamese Caodaists who fled the country after 1975 carried the faith with them into diaspora communities that took root in North America, Cambodia, Europe and Australia.

What the ban changed for Cao Dai's spread was geography itself. A religion that had organized around a single Vietnamese holy see at Tay Ninh now had its practice divided between a homeland where it could not be openly followed and a diaspora scattered across four continents, a division that persisted for more than twenty years before Vietnam's government reversed the ban and reopened the question of what recognition inside the country would even mean.