Vietnamese folk religion
traditional religion of the Vietnamese people
Vietnamese folk religion (Vietnamese: tín ngưỡng dân gian Việt Nam) is a group of spiritual beliefs and practices adhered to by the Vietnamese people. About 86% of the population in Vietnam are reported as irreligious, but many among them practice folk religious traditions.
Vietnamese folk religion is not an organized religious system, but a set of local worship traditions devoted to the "thần", a term which can be translated as "spirits", "gods" or with the more exhaustive locution "generative powers". These gods can be nature deities or national, community or kinship tutelary deities or ancestral gods who are often deified heroic persons. Vietnamese mythology preserves narratives telling of the actions of many of the cosmic gods and cultural heroes. Ancestral veneration is practiced by most Vietnamese to varying degrees.
Đạo Mẫu is a distinct form of Vietnamese shamanism, giving prominence to some mother goddesses in its pantheon. The government of Vietnam also categorises Cao Đài as a form of Vietnamese indigenous religion, since it brings together the worship of the thần or local spirits with Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism, as well as elements of Catholicism, Spiritism and Theosophy.
During the Nguyễn dynasty's persecution of Catholics in Vietnam, non-Catholics were called lương dân (良民). The terms bên lương and bên giáo were used to denote non-Catholic and Catholic alignments, respectively.
“Vietnamese folk religion” enters the record as traditional religion of the Vietnamese people. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Vietnamese, folk and religion can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Vietnamese folk religion” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.