In God they trust - Far Eastern Economic Review

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As be enters the Ba Chua Kho temple outside Hanoi,
Nguyen
Thi Huong wearily Shuffles forward through a light mist.
Over his head he holds aloft an overflowing tray of
chicken legs, cigarettes, fake hundred-dollar bills,
joss-sticks, a few eggs, a pair of paper shoes and
three cans of beer.

Retired from his job at a state-owned company, the 48-
year-old has come in search of a change of fortune. "I
came here to pray for a better life, a successful
business for the rest of the year and maybe some gifts
from the gods," he says. On this particular Sunday, Huong
spent 200,000 dong ($18), a sizable sum in Vietnam, to
fill his offering tray. After failing to penetrate the
throngs of people crowded into the pagoda's central
building-demand is strong for divine intervention-he
places the tray in the court-yard.

Across Victnam, attendance at temples, pagodas and
churches is up, particularly among the Young. New houses
of worship are being built and traditional festivals are
increasingly popular. What's more, the pursuit of
spiritual fulfillment is enjoying favorable coverage even
in the normally dour official press.

But whether all this signals a true spiritual revival is
uncertain. Ba Chua Kho pagoda and many others like it
offer a dash of Buddhism, a pinch of Confucian ancestor
worship and, in the words of some Vietnamese observers
of
the phenomenon, bucketfuls of superstition. For many,
offerings and prayers have less to do with spiritual
uplift and more with seeking down-to-earth favours from
heaven. Huong puts it subtly when he says: "I never
considered myself a Buddhist. But I believe in Buddhism."

As for the Communist Party, having largely shed its
ideological obeisance to atheism, it now takes a mostly
benign view of expressions of piety. Although suspicion
of religious hierarchies remains widespread in
leadership circles, the government has removed many of
the official and unofficial obstacles to private worship
as it strives to identify itself more closely with
Vietnam's traditional culture. Still, some officials are
dubious about how religion squares with beer and
cigarette contributions to the local pagoda.

"Young people are not religious, just superstitious,"
says Dang Nghiem Van, who heads the Institute of
Religious Studies in Hanoi. "Before, when you went to the

pagoda it was quiet and sacred. Now you go and there is
money every-where," he says with a dismissive wave. "This
isn't religion. It's decadence." Adds Tran
Doan Lam, a researcher at the The Gioi publishing
house in Hanoi: "Most people treat the pagoda like a
tourist attraction. Some respect the pagoda's rituals
and regulations, but most don't know much about
Buddhism."

Of, the major organized religions, Buddhism has the most
adherents in Vietnam, although estimates of their number
vary widely. Thich Ming Chau, general secretary of the
officially sanctioned Vietnam Buddhist Church, suggests
60% of Vietnamese are Buddhists. Mai Thanh Hai, former
editor of Vietnam's sole Catholic newspaper, says 15%

would be closer to the truth. Van at the religious-
studies institute confesses that "no one can tell who is
a Buddhist and who isn't."

But no one disputes that many more Vietnamese are
spending time at houses of worship and participating in
village festivals. "In the late 1970s, the government
distrusted Buddhist33 because communism is against
religion," says Clau. "But Buddhism is developing more
freely now, little by little."

Some say the collapse of Communism in the former
Soviet
Union has given a boost to traditional religons in
Vietnam, "I think in the past a lot of people turned
turned to communism for their spiritual values," says a
foreign historian in Hanoi. "With the collapse of
communism and all those years of war and poverty, those
people had their world-view shaken up pretty severely."

Vietnam's economic gains of the last few years have also
helped renew interest in religious activity. Although the
country remains one of the poorest on earth, many
individual Vietnamese can now scrape together enough
money to bring offerings to tile pagoda. Better-off
communities are able to pool funds to rehabilitate
pagodas or churches.

Finally, many Vietnamese appear to have become more
religiously active simply because they are free to.
Although Victnam's various constitutions have always
protected the "right to believe" the Communist Party has
for much of its history taken a dim view of organized
religion. But more recently, support for traditional
culture and an easing of per social restrictions has
taken some of the stigma off religious activity.

But while the government has generally become more
relaxed about how individuals fulfill their spiritual
needs, Flanoi continues to treat religious hierarciiies
witli distrust, and in some cases per-seclitioii. "The
fundamental reality is that the communist authorities
still claim control over belief and religious activity,"
charged the U.S.-based Puebla Institute in a 1994 report.
"They use the harshest tactics-arrests, imprisonment,
torture, church demolitions, etc.-where they feel they
can get away with it."

In 1981, the government disbanded the Unified Buddhist
Church of Vietnam and replaced it with the more malleable
Vietnam Buddhist Church. Since then, Vietnam's leaders
have kept a careful eye on former Unified Church monks,
most of whom are now in jail or under "pagoda arrest."

"It is only Vatican propaganda that says communism and
religion cannot survive together," says researcher Van.
"But we cannot tolerate people who use religion to oppose
us." He argues that the government has the same right to
crack down on the Unified Buddhist Church as the "FBI had
in shooting David Koresh," the niessianic leader of the
Branch Davidian sect in the United States.

Suspicions of the Catholic church are even more
pronounced. Catholicism is seen by many Vietnamese
leaders as a more foreign religion than Buddhism, a view
influenced by the heavy proselytizing done by French
Catholics in the colonial period. Today, the government
continues to restrict the movement of Catholic priests,
limit the number of Vietnamese seeking to enter the
priesthood, and obstruct efforts to obtain religious
teaching materials and build or remodel churches.

Hai says there are about 2,000 priests in Vietnam serving
a congregation of roughly 6 million, abut 8% of the
population. There were over 3,000 priests in the country
before 1975, he says, but in the last 20 years the
government has allowed only 400 new priests to be
ordained.

The government has also been in a running dispute with
the Vatican over the appointment of church leaders in
Vietnam has rejected a series of papal appointments,
including the Vatican's candidate for archbishop of Ho
Chi Minh City. Several provinces are without bishops.
Says Nguyen Ngoc Lan, a former priest who remains a
staunch critic of the government: "The government wants
to give the appearance of religious freedom by letting
people go to churches and pagodas, but there is no real
freedom."

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