Most people in Vietnam belong to no organised religion: in the 2019 census 86.3% of the population declared no religion or followed folk practices that the census does not count, while 6.1% registered as Catholic, 4.8% as Buddhist, 1.0% as Hòa Hảo Buddhist, 1.0% as Protestant and under 1% as Cao Đài. Counted another way, the Government Committee for Religious Affairs put Buddhists at 13.3% and Christians at 7.6% of the population in 2023, and the Pew Research Center estimated in 2010 that 45.3% of Vietnamese follow folk religion. The Socialist Republic of Vietnam is officially an atheist one-party state, yet Article 24 of its constitution guarantees freedom of belief and states that all religions are equal before the law. Alongside the majority practices of ancestor veneration and Mahayana Buddhism, the main minority faiths are Catholicism, Protestantism, the home-grown Cao Đài and Hòa Hảo movements, and the Hindu and Muslim communities of the Cham people.
Why Vietnam's 2019 Census Counts 86% as "No Religion"
The gap between those figures is not a contradiction so much as a question of what is being measured. Vietnamese government statistics count members of religious organisations that the state recognises. A family that keeps an ancestor altar, burns incense at a pagoda during Tết and consults a spirit medium before opening a shop is not, in those terms, a member of anything. That is why the 2019 census showed Catholicism as the largest organised religion, ahead of Buddhism, even though some surveys have reported 45 to 50 million Buddhists against official counts of between 4.6 and 6.8 million.
Religious life is also regulated closely. The 2004 Ordinance on Religion and Belief, followed by Decree 22 in 2005, requires denominations to be recognised or registered, and congregations need the approval of local authorities for their activities and leaders. Hanoi recognised Baptist and Mennonite churches in 2007 and let the Assemblies of God operate from 2009, while the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had its representative committee recognised in 2016. How the party-state organises these controls is covered in our guide to the government of Vietnam.
Ancestor Altars and the Mother Goddesses of Vietnamese Folk Religion
The faith practised by the largest number of Vietnamese has no headquarters and no membership roll. Ancestor veneration is close to universal: homes and businesses keep an altar where offerings are made on death anniversaries, at the start of a new venture and above all during Tết, the lunar new year. The practice is understood as an expression of hiếu thảo, filial piety. Many people believe that ancestors who are not properly honoured become hungry ghosts (ma đói).
Older layers survive too. Birds decorate the ceremonial Đông Sơn bronze drums, and the dragon-king Lạc Long Quân is honoured as the mythical father of the Vietnamese people. The worship of mother goddesses, Đạo Mẫu, venerates figures such as Liễu Hạnh, Âu Cơ and the Trưng Sisters, and is closely tied to lên đồng, rituals in which mediums are possessed by deities. The government suppressed lên đồng as superstition before legalising it in 1987, and UNESCO inscribed the Việt beliefs in the Mother Goddesses on its Representative List of intangible heritage in December 2016. Folk religion has revived strongly since the 1980s, but because it is not a registered organisation it never appears in the official statistics.
Buddhism, from Luy Lâu to the One Pillar Pagoda
Buddhism reached Vietnam either from India in the 3rd or 2nd century BCE or from China in the 1st or 2nd century CE; historians still debate which came first. By the end of the 2nd century CE, Luy Lâu, in today's Bắc Ninh Province north-east of Hanoi, was a major Mahayana centre visited by Indian monks travelling the sea route to China, where sutras such as the Sutra of Forty-two Chapters were translated into Classical Chinese. The Indian monk Vinītaruci brought Chan (Thiền) Buddhism to Pháp Vân Pagoda in 580, and the faith flourished under the Lý and Trần dynasties, which produced Trúc Lâm, the only native Vietnamese school of Zen.
The Lý emperor Lý Thái Tông built the One Pillar Pagoda in Hanoi in 1049, a shrine raised on a single column in a lotus pond after he dreamt of the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara. Trấn Quốc Pagoda, on an islet in Hanoi's West Lake, traces its foundation to the reign of Lý Nam Đế between 544 and 548 and is the oldest pagoda in the city. Modern Vietnamese Buddhism is mostly Mahayana and devotional, mixing Pure Land chanting with Taoist and folk elements; the Khmer Krom of the Mekong Delta follow Theravada. The government's 2019 census counted 4.6 million Buddhists, while the government's "White Book" gives about 14 million for 2021, or 13.3% of the population. The new Bái Đính complex in Ninh Bình Province, built between 2003 and 2010 over 700 hectares, is now one of the largest Buddhist temple complexes in the country.
Buddhism also shaped modern politics. On 11 June 1963 the monk Thích Quảng Đức burned himself to death at a Saigon intersection in protest against the treatment of Buddhists by South Vietnam's Catholic president, Ngô Đình Diệm. The photograph of his death went round the world, and the crisis it deepened ended with the coup that toppled Diệm later that year.
Catholicism, from Hội An in 1615 to 27 Dioceses
Portuguese and Spanish missionaries arrived in the 16th century with little success, but the Jesuits who followed did better. Francesco Buzomi and Diogo Carvalho founded the first Catholic community at Hội An in 1615, and between 1627 and 1630 Alexandre de Rhodes and Pero Marques converted more than 6,000 people in Tonkin. Jesuits including Francisco de Pina and de Rhodes also developed a Latin-based alphabet for Vietnamese, the chữ Quốc ngữ script used today, a story told in more detail in our article on the language spoken in Vietnam.
The French priest Pigneau de Behaine backed Nguyễn Ánh during the Tây Sơn wars, and when Nguyễn Ánh took the throne as Emperor Gia Long in 1802, the country had three dioceses, about 320,000 Catholics and more than 120 Vietnamese priests. French colonial rule later brought cathedrals in a European style: Saigon's Notre-Dame Cathedral Basilica was built between 1877 and 1880, with two bell towers 58 metres high. A different approach produced Phát Diệm Cathedral in Ninh Bình Province, built of stone and wood in 1891 by Father Trần Lục in the form of a Vietnamese temple; Graham Greene described it as more Buddhist than Christian.
Today the Catholic Church in Vietnam has 27 dioceses grouped in the three ecclesiastical provinces of Hanoi, Huế and Saigon. Church sources count about 7 million Catholics, roughly 7% of the population, close to the 6.1% the 2019 census recorded and the 6.6% the government reported in 2023.
Protestants Among the Hmong and Ede of the Central Highlands
Protestantism came later. The Canadian missionary Robert A. Jaffray of the Christian and Missionary Alliance introduced it at Đà Nẵng in 1911. Two churches carry its institutional weight: the Evangelical Church of Vietnam North, recognised in 1963, and the Southern Evangelical Church of Vietnam, recognised in 2001. Estimates of the number of Protestants run from the government's 500,000 to church claims of 1 million, with the 2019 census figure at about 1%.
Most of the recent growth has been among ethnic minorities rather than the Kinh majority. Internal church estimates suggest that two-thirds of Vietnam's Protestants belong to minority peoples such as the Hmong of the northern mountains and the Ede, Jarai and Bahnar of the Central Highlands. Some converts worship in unregistered house churches, said to have about 200,000 members, which puts them outside the registration system and in more frequent conflict with local officials.
Cao Đài and Hòa Hảo: Two Faiths Born in the Mekong South
Southern Vietnam produced two religions of its own in the 20th century. Cao Đài was formally founded on 7 October 1926, when Ngô Văn Chiêu signed the declaration of its founding after a series of séances; its name means "highest tower", the place where God reigns. It blends Confucian ethics, Taoist practice, Buddhist ideas of karma and rebirth and a church hierarchy modelled on Catholicism, and its believers practise prayer, ancestor veneration and vegetarianism. Its centre is the Holy See at Tây Ninh, about 100 km north-west of Ho Chi Minh City, where the Great Divine Temple was built between 1936 and 1947. Official statistics put the number of Caodaists across all branches at 4.4 million in 2014, though the 2023 count of registered members was about 1% of the population.
Hòa Hảo was founded in 1939 by Huỳnh Phú Sổ, who was killed by the Việt Minh in 1947, and is named after his home village of Hòa Hảo in today's An Giang Province in the Mekong Delta. It presents itself as a continuation of the 19th-century Bửu Sơn Kỳ Hương movement and stresses lay practice at home over temple building, summed up in the slogan "Practising Buddhism while farming your land". Official estimates put its followers at 1.3 million, while unofficial ones exceed 2 million; in some parts of the Mekong Delta as many as 90% of residents are adherents. Unregistered Hòa Hảo groups continue to report police pressure, including assaults in An Giang in October 2019.
Cham Hindus and Muslims of Ninh Thuận
The oldest Indian-origin faiths in Vietnam belong to the Cham, heirs of the Champa kingdom that ruled the central coast for centuries. Champa's first religion was Shaivite Hinduism, and its kings built the Mỹ Sơn temple complex near Đà Nẵng between the 4th and 13th centuries. The 2009 census counted 56,427 Cham Hindus, most of them in Ninh Thuận, a province merged into Khánh Hòa in June 2025, where 15 of 22 Cham villages are Hindu; another 4,000 or so Hindus in Ho Chi Minh City gather at the Mariamman Temple.
Islam spread among the Cham after the fall of Champa in 1471, through contact with the Sultanate of Malacca, and became widespread from the mid-17th century. A 2005 count found over 66,000 Muslims, with about a third in Ninh Thuận, a quarter in Bình Thuận (now part of Lâm Đồng Province), and most of the rest in An Giang and Ho Chi Minh City. Isolated for centuries from the wider Islamic world, Cham Muslims developed a localised practice: many pray only on Fridays and observe Ramadan for just three days. The country's largest mosque opened at Xuân Lộc in Đồng Nai Province in 2006. Cham communities have long complained of land confiscation and of their temples being turned into tourist sites. For a comparison with Vietnam's northern neighbour, where folk religion, Buddhism and Taoism blend in a similar way, see our guide to religion in China.