Tam Ngo

The Uncle Hồ Religion in Vietnam

Twenty years ago, a poor peasant who lives about 30 km west of Hanoi, survived a strange illness that almost killed her. Since then, she claimed that every night in her dreams she met Uncle Hồ, who taught her “the way of Hồ Chi Minh.” When she woke up, she wrote down these teachings, using a popular Vietnamese traditional poem form. Very soon, a growing crowd began to gather around her, honoring her as the Master (Thay), and seeking healing and moral teaching. Such was the birth of Hồ Chi Minh religion. With tens of thousands of followers in sixteen provinces of Vietnam, Hồ Chi Minh cult is one of the most dynamic religious movements in Vietnam today. This paper follows the development of the cult of Hồ Chi Minh and analyzes the complex relationship between religion, communism, and gender in post-revolutionary Vietnam.

Introduction: Atheist secularism and its discontents

Twenty years ago, a poor peasant who lives about 30 kilometers west of Hanoi survived a strange illness that almost killed her. Since then, she claimed that every night in her dreams she met Uncle Ho, who taught her “the way of Ho Chi Minn”. When she woke up, she wrote down these teachings, using a popular Vietnamese traditional poem form. Very soon, a growing crowd began to gather around her, honoring her as the Master (Thay), and seeking healing and moral teaching. Such was the birth of the Ho Chi Minh religion. Today, the Ho Chi Minh religion has thousands of followers in thirteen provinces in North, Central and South Vietnam. Followers of this religion worship Uncle Ho as the “Jade Buddha of the Nation” (Ngoc Phât Nuoc Nam) and follow the teachings in the “Book of Prophecies”, a compilation of the Master’s poems. A bronze statue of Ho Chi Minh is venerated in the halls of the religion’s main temples, which are adorned with the national flag of Vietnam and the communist hammer-and-sickle flags. Once initiated into the religion, followers are required to replace ancestral and Buddhist altars in their home with a Ho Chi Minh altar, similar to the decorations in the temples. Ritually, the religion has adopted all national and communist holidays, such as Independence Day (September 2), Reunification Day (of north and south Vietnam, April 30), International Labor Day (May 1) and the annual commemoration of war casualties (July 27), as their own celebrations.

Missionary Encounters at the China-Vietnam Border: The case of the Hmong

Abstract This paper examines missionary encounters that faciliate the extraordinary conversion of nearly one third of approximately one million Hmong in Vietnam to Evangelical Protestantism in the last two decades. Since this conversion is not officially approved by the Vietnamese government, these missionary encounters and the networks that facilitate them are highly informal and largely underground. This paper argues that the informality of Hmong evangelical networks as well as the conversion that they facilitate can only be fully understood if one seriously takes into account their ethnic and transnational aspects. Ethnic ties are important factors that motivate overseas Hmong to carry out missionary work in Vietnam, and such ties are also the primary reason why evangelism, carried out by Hmong missionaries, was and is so readily accepted by so many Hmong people in the country. In other words, it is from an ethnic aspiration to change their group’s marginal position and to become modern that many Hmong in Vietnam decide to convert to Christianity. Similarly, the missionary zeal of many American Hmong Christians is connected to their ethnic commitment to the Hmong in Asia while simultaneously shaped by their conversion to Protestantism during and after their migration to America. In this paper, I will show that it is also because of an ethnic commitment that many Hmong missionaries undertake the risk and danger to evangelize in Vietnam.