Laos

Laos is predominantly Theravada Buddhist, with Pew Research estimating roughly two-thirds of the population as Buddhist, alongside animist and ancestor-venerating traditions practiced especially among highland ethnic minorities such as the Hmong and Khmu, who follow indigenous spirit religions often blended with or distinct from lowland Lao Buddhism.

Buddhism reached the Lao kingdom of Lan Xang by the fourteenth century, becoming the state religion under King Fa Ngum and his successors, who built major stupas including That Luang in Vientiane, the country's most important national and religious monument, said to enshrine a relic of the Buddha. French colonial rule from the late nineteenth century introduced a small Catholic minority, concentrated among Vietnamese immigrant communities, while the communist Pathet Lao's 1975 victory ended the monarchy and placed all religious institutions, including the Buddhist sangha, under state oversight through the Lao Front for National Construction. Village-level spirit cults, particularly the propitiation of phi spirits, continue alongside Buddhist practice in a pattern common across mainland Southeast Asia, and Christian minorities face significant restriction, especially in rural highland areas where evangelical growth among ethnic minorities has drawn government suspicion.

Since the Lao People's Revolutionary Party took power in 1975, the state has required all Buddhist monks to register with and operate under the Lao Front for National Construction, which vets sangha leadership and integrates Buddhist ritual into state ceremony, an arrangement that preserved Buddhism's public visibility in exchange for political conformity, unlike the more severe suppression religion faced in neighboring Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge in the same decade. Christian communities, a small single-digit percentage of the population by government estimate, face registration requirements under a 2002 decree on religious practice, and Protestant house churches, especially those growing among Hmong and other highland minorities, have reported forced renunciation pressure, property seizure and detention in various provinces, prompting the US State Department's International Religious Freedom Report to flag Laos for monitoring in multiple years without reaching the highest concern designation.

The Hmong, many of whom sided with the United States during the Vietnam War era Secret War in Laos, experienced further religious and political marginalization after 1975, and Hmong animist and shamanic practice, alongside a growing Hmong Christian minority formed partly through refugee resettlement abroad, remains a distinct thread within the country's religious landscape.