1 - Modernity and Re-enchantment in Post-revolutionary Vietnam

Summary

Religion in Vietnam has been thriving in recent years. Churches, pagodas and pilgrimage sites are crowded with devotees, offering signs of fervent faith and unmistakable religious vitality. Religion commands a large share of the material resources of this increasingly prosperous society. Temples are everywhere being renovated, altars are piled with magnificent sacrifices to the gods and the fees paid by individuals for a commissioned religious ceremony may exceed several times the average per capita annual income. Even as a new generation embraces a globalized cosmopolitan lifestyle, the route to the past passes through the otherworld. National leaders make incense offerings to acquit their debts to the nation's founding ancestors, soul callers establish contact with the war dead and mediums possessed by famed historical personages are patronized by the nouveau riche. Doors opened wide to encourage foreign investment and trade also facilitate the passage of foreign missionaries and the dissemination of new currents in Islam, Buddhism and Christianity to the remotest regions of the country. In early 2005, the renowned Buddhist monk Thích Nhẩt Hạnh made his first return to his homeland in thirty-nine years, speaking to huge audiences in many locations and holding dharma talks attended by Communist Party officials. Later that year, the Vatican's envoy met with state leaders, ordained a new generation of clerics and opened a new diocese. While overseas critics dispute the trend of increasing religious liberalism, religion also attracts its share of domestic critics and controversies erupt around excessive ritual expenditures, the proliferation of faith healers and conversions to evangelical Christianity among ethnic minority peoples.

Vietnam's burgeoning religious sphere challenges a number of predictions that have been made about the relevance of religion in the modern world. The religious efflorescence — occurring as it does in the context of the country's two decade-old experiment with market economics and re-integration within the global capitalist system — is at odds with predictions that religion will lose vitality with the ascendency of modern forms of capitalist rationality.