The Vietnamese eat everything that can be eaten, sell everything that can be sold, and worship everything that can be worshipped.
About one tenth are Catholic. Most of the rest call themselves Buddhists, but practise a combination of Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism (which they have embraced and extended to include roughly 13,000 gods), and ancestor worship. As if mindful of Pascal’s wager, they frequently consult fortune tellers, avoid unlucky numbers, and may even show up in church on Christmas day.
In Hanoi we saw many people kneeling on the sidewalk late at night, burning ghost money for their ancestors to spend in heaven. At the Jade Emperor pagoda in Saigon, a barefoot girl lit a joss stick and said a prayer, believing that the smoke would connect her to the spirit world. At the temple of literature in Hanoi, we saw an old woman praying to Confucius, bowing her head and dipping her hands repeatedly to show respect. On the floor of a candy factory in the Mekong delta, a real cigarette smouldered in the porcelain fist of the happy, chubby, genie of the earth. In a mobile phone store in Saigon, the most important decision a customer had to make was not which carrier or model of phone to choose, but which phone number. A tour guide told us that her best friend got married at 5 a.m. on a Saturday morning - in front of 500 guests - because a fortune teller told her that it was the most auspicious time. And in the poorest place we visited, the godforsaken Chicken Village, a few dozen buildings hugging the edge of Chicken River, the Catholics proudly flew the yellow and white banner of the Vatican. The poorest ones are always Catholic.
Such a variety of piety proved fertile soil for Vietnam’s one true home-grown religion. Cao Dai is a monotheistic faith, which holds that Laotze, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus, Mohammed and others were all messengers of the One True God, Lord of the 3,027 worlds, but that they were misunderstood and that Cao Dai is the one true path. The founders were spiritualists to whom the Lord spoke in a series of seances. It appears that God, frustrated by mankind’s failure to understand Buddha and Jesus, decided to send a clear and unambiguous message via a ouija board. If you haven’t heard about it, blame Victor Hugo, who is the saint responsible for foreign missions.
I don’t think there has ever been a state-sponsored religion in Vietnam - unless you count communist atheism, which never stood a chance - and I suspect that this has encouraged the diversity of beliefs, just as the separation of church and state has indirectly encouraged the growth of religion in America. Established churches, like state-run monopolies, are lazy and uncompetitive, and decline over time. Look at the poor state of the Anglican church in England, where vicars have resorted to conducting services in pubs and the next head of the church is a divorced adulterer, and compare that to America, where churches compete aggressively for worshippers with more songs, fewer sermons, dramatic exorcisms, and folksy politics: 80% of the U.S. population goes to church regularly.