Religion Under and After the Khmer Rouge

The Khmer Rouge regime that ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 pursued one of the twentieth century's most severe attempts to eliminate organized religion outright, banning all religious practice, destroying or repurposing the great majority of the country's Buddhist temples, defrocking or killing most of the ordained sangha, and targeting the Muslim Cham and Christian minorities with especially intense violence as part of a broader genocide that killed an estimated one and a half to two million people. Of an estimated sixty thousand Buddhist monks before 1975, only a small fraction are thought to have survived the regime, and Buddhist ordination and temple life had to be substantially rebuilt from near-total destruction after the regime's fall in 1979, a process that continued through the 1980s under the Vietnamese-backed government and accelerated after the 1991 Paris Peace Accords restored Buddhism as the state religion under Cambodia's new constitution.

Angkor Wat and other Angkorian temple complexes, having survived largely intact despite the surrounding devastation, became central to a rebuilt national and religious identity, and Cambodia's constitution today names Buddhism the state religion while nominally guaranteeing freedom of religious belief for its Muslim, Christian and other minorities.