Vietnam State-Controlled Religion and Religious Freedom

This project documents how the Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) and its government exert control over religion through state-controlled religious organizations. 

The project has three main objectives.

• The first objective is to define and identify the state-controlled religious organizations and to study the influence of the government/or the VCP on the leadership and the  religious practices of these organizations. 
• The second objective is to explore and document the Vietnamese government’s past and current practice of seizing property from religious communities or transfer of ownership to the government or state-controlled religious groups. 
• The third objective is to analyze how the government uses state controlled religious organizations to control ethnic and religious minority communities, including the sidelining of minority languages and annihilating their culture.

There are six targeted state-controlled religious organizations in this research, namely the followings:

• 1997 Cao Dai Sect
• Committee of Solidarity of Vietnamese Catholics
• Evangelical Church of Vietnam-North (ECV-N)
• Evangelical Church of Vietnam-South (ECV-S)
• Vietnam Buddhist Sangha (VBS)
• Hòa Hảo Buddhist Sangha’s Central Administrative Committee