Aug 16 Tip: Bringing God along for the Ride

From the NY Times: Bringing God along for the Ride

(The Aug 16 Compassionate Living Tip from Interfaith Paths to Peace)

http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/08/bringing-god-along-for-the-ride/?src=rechp

HO CHI MINH CITY — Get on a bus in Vietnam and you’ll probably see a photo of the Virgin Mary, a bodhisattva or some other deity on the dashboard, if not an altar with fruit offerings. At first I was surprised by such public displays of devotion: Religion is so personal and private, bringing it to work seems like a recipe for offending people.

Not to mention the authorities. Vietnam is usually associated with religious repression. The police have forcefully dispersed protests by religious groups that criticize the government’s land seizures. They block ceremonies andbreak up meetings by churches that aren’t officially recognized. These groups’ ability to organize unnerves the government.

But what often gets lost in this narrative of persecution is the peace that prevails among faiths here. And that is partly the government’s doing. State control over religious activity prevents the sort of sectarian violence that recently broke out in Myanmar and has long plagued Sri Lanka. A Burmese monk like Ashin Wirathu couldn’t roam Vietnam inciting attacks against a rival religion. Here, religions don’t pose much of a threat to each other because they’re not allowed to.

Just 16 million of Vietnam’s 86 million people adhere to a religion, according to the 2009 census. Of them, 43 percent are Buddhist and 36 percent Catholic, while others practice Protestantism, Hoa Hao (a form of Buddhism) and Cao Dai (a local religion that embraces the three major Abrahamic faiths, plus Buddha, Confucius, Laozi and even Victor Hugo.)

Of course this doesn’t mean the remaining 70 million are nonbelievers; according to one poll, no one identified as “a convinced atheist.” Many Vietnamese believe in a mix of folk and popular religions, ancestor worship, animism, karma, the afterlife and other forms of “everyday devotionalism,” to borrow a phrase from Janet Hoskins, an anthropology professor at the University of Southern California. This syncretism reflects near ubiquitous respect for all things sacred.

At one Hindu temple in the center of Ho Chi Minh City, the Vietnamese caretaker regularly performs a Hindu prayer, and then walks over to light incense before a statue of Buddha. “There’s a lot of interreligious cooperation,” Hoskins told me. There are Web sites like Nhip Cau Tam Giao(“The Bridge of Hearts”), which is run by Catholics who also post about Baha’i and other faiths. Some Vietnamese put their hands together in brief supplication whenever they pass a divine idol, even if they don’t follow the religion it represents.

It’s hard to distinguish what behavior stems from religion, as opposed to culture, tradition or superstition. Before national exams, students go to temples to pray for luck. Just about everyone, myself included, burns fake money and clothing for deceased relatives. Vietnamese people are spiritual but seldom devout or tethered to a formal religion.

Yet if otherworldly beliefs permeate most citizens’ lives, they don’t seem to create divisions. It probably helps that no one religion dominates. In the 1960s, under Ngo Dinh Diem, the Catholic president of South Vietnam, monks took to self-immolation to protest his crackdown on Buddhism. That wouldn’t happen now under the Communist (and officially atheist) government.

To the extent that there are frictions to do with faith, these tend to be about the authorities curbing the power of a religious group that dabbles in politics. A Catholic organization that holds vigils for dissidents has faced arrests, violence and “the deployment of armed security forces around churches,” Human Rights Watch reports. Tensions pit the state against religion, in other words, rather than one faith against another. Or, as the Pew Research Centerput it in 2009, Vietnam ranks high in terms of government restrictions on religion but low in terms of social hostilities. Officials may be suspicious of religion, but among the people tolerance is widespread. And so for a bit of security on the mean streets of Vietnam, bus drivers bring their gods along for the ride.

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Lien Hoang is a writer covering Southeast Asia.