I went to an elementary school that was about as redneck and backwards as you can get. The vast majority of kids came from conservative families and went to church regularly. However looking back the school did a great job acknowledging that religion did indeed exist while not overly mixing it with school functions. Christmas plays were secular, but it was acknowledged that it was also Jesus’ birthday. Similarly the Jewish and Muslim kids, and there were a few, got Jewish and Muslim holidays off. On the day before Jews fast, the Jewish kids got to eat a big bag of chips during class. If anyone bitched they were told to shove it. This is pretty much how they deal with religion here in Vietnam.
One reason that America gave for the need to abolish communism, was that they did not believe in god and would suppress religion. Because in politics EVERYTHING that your enemy thinks must be wrong, we did stupid things like put “In God we Trust” on our money and add “One nation under God” to the pledge of allegiance to show that we did, in fact, believe in God. Nowadays America has turned this into a battle yet again with the religious right pushing for stupid laws that restrict basic freedoms because their religion says it is a sin to be gay or be “obscene,” overlooking the fact that the constitution, not the bible, is the supreme law of the land. On the other side stupid liberals sue governments for displaying mangers on Christmas or schools for “forcing” kids to say the under god line because that is somehow promoting Christianity, overlooking the fact that Christmas is actually a public holiday that is also a Christian holiday and that saying “One nation under God” doesn’t really equate to prayer by any religions standards
So one would expect that this country of communists would be even more strict about separation of church and state than liberal America, right? Well not really. First off religion is certainly not suppressed here. Every house and hotel has a Buddhist shrine. This is for good luck, the people may not be that religious but good luck is always a great thing to have. The shrines are usually dedicated to an ancestor, and food and drink that the ancestor liked are offered as gifts. Last week the family who owns the hotel I stay in had a celebration for the anniversary of the death of one of their relatives.
There are also plenty of Christians here, and to be honest the Christians here probably follow that religion a lot more closely than the Christians in America. Similarly I would think that Buddhists in America follow that religion more closely than the Buddhists here. On Christmas we encountered a pack of evangelical Christians spreading the good word everywhere, some of them even wore communist stars.
We went to a Buddhist grave yard which was very interesting not only because the graves were all little alters, but because these were people, from the north, who were communist and whose graves were clearly religious. There were even some graves of people who were Christian that also were Buddhist shrines. Really a cross on top of a Buddhist shrine (see picture above). Today George went to visit some of his wife’s family in the countryside and saw a very old Christian church, untouched by the communists.
Possibly the most telling example of how Vietnam feels about religion is found on the grounds of the Ho chi Minh museum. Here is this big museum, decked out with the hammer and sickle and communist propaganda everywhere, and right in front of it is a Buddhist temple, two in fact. Seriously this area is their national mall. Can you imagine the liberals outrage at two Christian churches right on the national mall? And these people are communist. I don’t know what the significance of the first temple is but the second is the famous one pillar pagoda, made to look like a lotus blossom.
The pagoda is actually the second one pillar pagoda, the first was built long ago, then as the French were leaving in 1954, they destroyed it. Ho Chi Minh then came in and rebuilt it. Yes that is right, the godless commie Ho Chi Minh used communist funds to rebuild a religious temple, that was destroyed by our allies, the French. So clearly it was absolutely necessary that we intervened in their little civil war after that because the communists were going to destroy religion… oh wait.
If religion is the opiate of the masses, it is a drug these communists have certainly decriminalized.
