Bringing God Along For the Ride

[rug]

August 8, 2013, 8:49 am
By LIEN HOANG

HO CHI MINH CITY — Get on a bus in Vietnam and you’ll probably see a photo of the Virgin Mary, a bodhisattva or some other deity on the dashboard, if not an altar with fruit offerings. At first I was surprised by such public displays of devotion: Religion is so personal and private, bringing it to work seems like a recipe for offending people.

Not to mention the authorities. Vietnam is usually associated with religious repression. The police have forcefully dispersed protests by religious groups that criticize the government’s land seizures. They block ceremonies and break up meetings by churches that aren’t officially recognized. These groups’ ability to organize unnerves the government.

But what often gets lost in this narrative of persecution is the peace that prevails among faiths here. And that is partly the government’s doing. State control over religious activity prevents the sort of sectarian violence that recently broke out in Myanmar and has long plagued Sri Lanka. A Burmese monk like Ashin Wirathu couldn’t roam Vietnam inciting attacks against a rival religion. Here, religions don’t pose much of a threat to each other because they’re not allowed to.

Just 16 million of Vietnam’s 86 million people adhere to a religion, according to the 2009 census. Of them, 43 percent are Buddhist and 36 percent Catholic, while others practice Protestantism, Hoa Hao (a form of Buddhism) and Cao Dai (a local religion that embraces the three major Abrahamic faiths, plus Buddha, Confucius, Laozi and even Victor Hugo.)

http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/08/bringing-god-along-for-the-ride/?_r=0

[dimbear]

1. Viet Nam is another outlier in the world scheme of things, a mostly atheist nation that isn't

rich.

Disquieting.