Around two-thirds of the population of Laos are Theravada Buddhists, with most of the remainder — principally among the upland ethnic minorities — following ancestral and animist traditions, and Christians accounting for roughly two per cent. The division tracks altitude and ethnicity: the lowland Lao of the Mekong valley are Buddhist, the Hmong, Khmu, Mien and other upland peoples largely are not, and the government's category of religion has never mapped comfortably onto either group.
The Stupa That Became the State Emblem
Pha That Luang in Vientiane, a gilded stupa rebuilt in 1566 by King Setthathirath on a site tradition holds to contain a relic of the Buddha, is the most important religious monument in the country and its clearest national symbol.
Its position tells the political story. In 1991, the Lao People's Democratic Republic replaced the hammer and sickle on its national emblem with an image of Pha That Luang — a communist state putting a Buddhist reliquary on its coat of arms sixteen years after taking power. The Boun That Luang festival in November, with its wax-castle offerings, processions and a week of fairground activity around the stupa, is now the largest event in the Lao calendar and is attended by senior party officials.
Buddhism as the Lowland Order
Lao Theravada Buddhism arrived from the Khmer and Mon worlds and was established as the state religion of the kingdom of Lan Xang in the fourteenth century. It follows the same textual tradition as Thailand, Cambodia, Myanmar and Sri Lanka, and Lao and Thai monastic practice are close enough that monks have historically moved between them.
The wat is the centre of the village: temple, school, meeting hall, guest house and cremation ground. Merit-making structures daily life — food placed in the alms bowls of monks each morning, donations for temple building, the sponsoring of a son's ordination — and merit accumulated is understood to affect this life and the next.
Wat Phou in Champasak, a UNESCO site, shows the longer history: a Khmer temple complex originally dedicated to Shiva, oriented on a mountain with a spring, later converted to Theravada use, with Buddhist images installed among Hindu carvings.
Calling the Souls Back
The single most characteristic Lao ceremony is not Buddhist. The baci, also called sou khuan, is performed at births, marriages, departures, returns, recoveries from illness and at the reception of guests.
It rests on the idea that a person comprises thirty-two khwan, soul-components, which can wander off and must be recalled and bound in place. Participants gather around a conical arrangement of marigolds and banana leaves, an elder recites the invocation, and everyone present ties white cotton threads around the wrists of the person being honoured, each thread carrying a spoken wish. The threads are worn for three days at least.
Monks sometimes attend, but the ritual is older than Buddhism in the region and belongs to the spirit world rather than the Pali canon. Almost every Lao Buddhist takes part in it regularly.
The Phi
Lao religious life is populated by phi — spirits of ancestors, of houses, of villages, of trees, rivers, rice fields and particular places, along with the dangerous spirits of those who died badly.
Small spirit houses stand outside homes, offices and hotels, receiving daily offerings of rice, flowers, drink and incense. Villages maintain a shrine to the phi ban, the village guardian, and annual ceremonies to it. Construction, travel and agriculture are timed with attention to which spirits might object.
The revolutionary government attempted to suppress phi worship in the 1970s as superstition holding back development. The campaign failed comprehensively. Spirit houses stand outside government ministries today.
Ordination as Education
A distinctive feature of Lao Buddhism is the number of novices — boys and young men in orange robes who are not lifelong monastics but who have ordained to obtain schooling.
For families in poor rural provinces, sending a son to a temple in Vientiane or Luang Prabang gives him accommodation, food and access to education that may not exist in his home district, and confers considerable merit on his parents. Many disrobe after a few years and return to secular life with an education they could not otherwise have had. The monastic system functions, in effect, as a parallel school network for the rural poor.
What the Pathet Lao Tried to Do
When the Pathet Lao took power in 1975 and abolished the monarchy — the king had been the traditional patron and protector of the sangha — the new government moved to bring the monastic order under party control.
Monks were required to attend political seminars, instructed to incorporate Marxist-Leninist material into their sermons, and pressed to work in production. The practice of laypeople bowing to monks was discouraged as feudal, and for a period officials discouraged the giving of alms on the grounds that monks should not be supported without labouring. Senior monks who resisted were detained or fled; several thousand crossed the Mekong into Thailand, including the Supreme Patriarch.
The policy damaged the sangha badly and achieved nothing politically. Ordinary Lao continued to give alms, and the party's attempt to use monks as ideological transmitters made the monks less credible without making the ideology more popular.
How the Party Changed Its Mind
By the mid-1980s the approach had reversed. The government began restoring temples, funding festivals, permitting ordination freely and associating itself publicly with Buddhist ceremony. Officials attend That Luang. The stupa went onto the emblem in 1991.
The reasoning was straightforward: Buddhism is the strongest available marker of lowland Lao national identity, particularly against Thai cultural influence arriving by television and radio across the Mekong, and a state short of legitimacy took what was available. The sangha remains supervised through the Lao Front for National Construction, and senior monastic appointments are not made without political agreement, but the hostility is gone.
The Rules for Everyone Else
Religious practice is regulated by decree — Decree 92 of 2002, replaced by Decree 315 in 2016 — which requires official approval for a wide range of ordinary activity: constructing a place of worship, printing religious material, holding gatherings outside approved premises, receiving foreign religious visitors and conducting activities outside one's own district.
In practice the burden falls unevenly. Buddhist activity proceeds with little friction because it is integrated with the state. Christian congregations, particularly Protestant ones in rural provinces, report a different experience: approvals withheld, church buildings ordered closed, believers pressed by village authorities to renounce their faith, and periodic detentions, often justified locally on the grounds that converts have abandoned village spirit obligations and thereby endangered the community.
Christians, and Seventeen Martyrs
The Catholic Church in Laos is small, organised in four apostolic vicariates, and concentrated along the Mekong and in the south. The Lao Evangelical Church is the largest Protestant body, with Seventh-day Adventists recognised separately; these three are the officially permitted Christian organisations.
In 2016 the Vatican beatified seventeen martyrs of Laos — six Lao and eleven European missionaries killed between 1954 and 1970 — in a ceremony held in Vientiane with government permission, the first such event in the country's history. Christianity has grown notably among some upland minorities, particularly Khmu and Hmong communities, which has at times compounded official suspicion because those groups were already politically sensitive.
Luang Prabang, and the Alms Round as Spectacle
Every morning before dawn in Luang Prabang, hundreds of monks from the town's many temples walk the streets in single file to receive sticky rice from kneeling laypeople. The tak bat is an ordinary act of merit-making performed in every Lao town, and in this one it has become a tourist attraction.
The town's inscription as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1995 brought visitors in numbers that the ritual was not designed to accommodate. Guidebooks and temple authorities now publish etiquette — do not use flash, do not stand above the monks, do not block the line, do not buy rice from vendors who prepare it badly — because the alternative was a procession photographed at arm's length by crowds.
Senior monks have periodically threatened to suspend the round in protest. It continues, and it illustrates a wider problem for Lao Buddhism: the same national and international attention that protected the temples from the state has turned parts of the practice into a performance.
Hmong Shamans and the Souls
Hmong traditional religion centres on the household: ancestors are venerated at an altar on the wall, spirits inhabit the door, the hearth and the central post, and illness is understood as soul loss or spirit affliction.
The txiv neeb, the shaman, negotiates with the spirit world in trance, seated on a bench that represents a horse, with a face covering and metal rattles, and may make an exchange offering — typically a chicken or a pig — to recover a wandering soul. Soul-calling ceremonies mark birth and recovery from illness.
These practices travelled with the Hmong diaspora after the war, and Hmong shamans work today in Minnesota, California and Wisconsin, sometimes in formal cooperation with hospitals. In Laos itself the tradition continues in the uplands alongside Buddhism, Christianity and, increasingly, the pressure of resettlement to lowland villages where the spirits of the old place cannot follow. Laos in full is our Laos country guide; the waterway the Buddhist lowlands sit along is traced in our Mekong guide, and where Laos is covers the basics.
