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206 Chapter 10 Religion, Power, and Legitimacy in Ngo Dinh Diem’s Republic of Vietnam Jessica M. Chapman That Ngo Dinh Diem’s South Vietnamese administration was bookended by violent conflicts with religious entities—the sect crisis in 1955 and the Buddhist crisis in 1963—suggests that religion was critical to his quest to establish power and legitimacy, and that religion may provide the key to understanding his ultimate failure. Many have claimed that Diem, a devout Catholic from one of the most powerful Catholic families in Vietnam, was out of touch with the more than 80 percent of his countrymen who considered themselves Buddhist , and perhaps even incapable of asserting a legitimate right to lead them.1 To make matters worse, he took advantage of the massive influx of Catholic refugees who fled from the North to the South after the Geneva Agreements in 1954 to establish a base of support for his government, rooting it in a community of outsiders. Plain as these facts may be, historians have yet to tease out fully the relationship between religion and politics in Diem’s Republic of Vietnam (RVN). The government’s conflicts with the politicized Hoa Hao and Cao Dai religious organizations and the nationalistic Binh Xuyen criminal group, commonly referred to as “sects” in the sect crisis and the Buddhists in the Buddhist crisis , were not primarily religious in a doctrinal sense. Yet they stemmed from Diem’s heavy-handed efforts to impose a universal ethical system—perhaps best characterized as a civic religion—on the people of South Vietnam in the form of personalism. Diem’s administration imbued this Catholic-based philosophy with elements of Confucianism as part of an effort to appeal more Religion, Power, and Legitimacy in Diem's Republic of Vietnam | 207 broadly to the people of South Vietnam, but then undercut that appeal by pairing personalist propaganda with a patronage system that benefited Catholics and a violent political clampdown that targeted members of Vietnam’s other religious groups disproportionately.2 Diem had flirted with joining the priesthood as a young man and resided in US seminaries as an adult. He gave political privileges and positions of power to Catholics because of their belief systems and their institutional affiliations. It was not the beliefs of this minority religious group that spurred criticism against the southern government , but the system of patronage benefiting its members. As they pertained to South Vietnam’s political history and that country’s role in the Cold War, religious categories served to denote a system of political inclusion and exclusion based on group identification, rather than on inherently oppositional belief systems.3 Long before Diem came to power, Vietnam had a history of integrating external religions and philosophies with indigenous beliefs to form a unique religious and cultural identity that largely defined Vietnamese patriotism.4 The people of premodern Vietnam assimilated tenets of Buddhism from India and Confucianism from China seamlessly into their existing beliefs in local deities and ancestor worship. As recent scholarship shows, both Confucianism and Buddhism in Vietnam underwent constant redefinition in response to changing historical conditions, in the manner of most enduring religions.5 Confucianism, more a system of political and social organization than a religious framework, allowed for coexistence with other religious beliefs as long as they complemented each other or refrained from imposing on each other’s dominant spheres of influence in society. As one group of Vietnamese scholars wrote, perhaps a bit too simplistically, “Wherever Buddhism went, it accommodated itself easily to the customs and lifestyles as well as historical and political circumstances of the local people and states.”6 Although Vietnam’s adaptation of Buddhism might not have been quite this seamless, the country certainly did have a long history of religious assimilation and tolerance of multiple faith systems living side by side, often overlapping. However, in Vietnam’s particular postcolonial context, several critical factors militated against the hybridization of Catholicism and other dominant religious traditions. Perhaps the foremost reason for Vietnam’s failure to subsume Catholic elements into its national religious culture was the explicit link between the Catholic Church and France’s colonizing mission. Just as France sought to civilize and transform Vietnamese culture, politics, and society, the Catholic Church in Vietnam sought to convert followers rather than to assimilate with local traditions. As a result, the Catholic Church in Vietnam came to represent for many non-Catholic Vietnamese patriots an element of the French colonial regime that needed to be...

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