Home›Southeast Asia and Oceania›Modern AreaBrowse ByModern AreaThis page groups sacred regions by the present-day country or countries they actually fall inside. Wikipedia notes that the Holy Land "today ... chiefly overlaps with the combined areas of Israel and parts of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and Palestine." Browsing by modern-area lets a visitor find every sacred region that falls inside the same present-day country.FactsModern AreaSourcesComments (0)Reader Challenges (0)FactsDirectoryCategoryWell-attestedRegions 1Modern AreaFilter Results1 entryApostasy or Blasphemy LawAllVietnam has no law naming apostasy or blasphemy as an offense in those terms. What functions in their place against religious dissent is Article 331 of the Penal Code, which criminalizes abusing democratic freedoms to infringe upon the interests of the state with up to seven years in prison. Human Rights Watch documented at least 124 people sentenced under it between 2018 and February 2025, increasingly against people raising religious freedom grievances alongside land rights and corruption complaints rather than only prominent political dissidents. This is a general political-offense statute turned against religious speech, not a blasphemy law in name, and it is recorded here as exactly that. (1)Ban or Official WatchlistAllThe government maintains no single published list of banned religions, but treats specific groups as illegal by administrative action. Authorities have called the Duong Van Minh group an illegal organization rather than a religious one, and intensive campaigns through 2022 and early 2023 led nearly 8,000 of its followers to formally renounce their faith. In September 2023 the Ministry of Home Affairs ordered local authorities to eliminate the World Mission Society Church of God, citing legal violations, and the unregistered group Ba Co Do (Church of God Loving Us) has had its gatherings disrupted as banned. State media continues to describe Falun Gong as an evil way religion. Decree 95, effective 30 March 2024 and replacing Decree 162, is the first measure to give the central government an explicit mechanism to suspend a registered religious group for serious infractions of the Law on Belief and Religion, alongside new restrictions on the foreign funding such groups may receive. (1)CapitalAllHanoi (Ha Noi) (1)Concordat BasisAllVietnam has no concordat and no full diplomatic relations with the Holy See. Talks have run since 1990, and on 27 July 2023, following President Vo Van Thuong's audience with Pope Francis, the two sides signed the Agreement on the Status of the Resident Papal Representative, letting the Holy See station a resident representative and office in Hanoi for the first time since before 1975. The Vatican itself described the step as short of formal diplomatic ties. Archbishop Marek Zalewski, already serving as nuncio to Singapore, was named the resident representative that December. (1)Established YearAll1945 (1)Establishment StatusAllNo Establishment (1)Government TypeAllcommunist party-led state (1)Legal StatusAllReligious organisations must register with the state under the Law on Belief and Religion in force since 2018; unregistered congregations, particularly Protestant house churches among Hmong and Montagnard highlanders, report continuing restriction. (1)Registration or Recognition RegimeAllReligious organisations must register with the state under the Law on Belief and Religion in force since 2018; unregistered congregations, particularly Protestant house churches among Hmong and Montagnard highlanders, report continuing restriction. (1)Religious CompositionAllOfficial figures record a large majority as following no registered religion, though folk practice and ancestor veneration are near universal; Buddhists are the largest registered group, Catholics about 7 per cent, with Cao Dai, Hoa Hao and Protestant minorities (Pew Research Center, Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020). (1)Sovereignty StatusAllSovereign UN member state (1)State Funding MechanismAllVietnam has no state funding channel to religious bodies comparable to a concordat or an endowment system. What it has instead is control: membership in the Communist Party-run Vietnam Fatherland Front is a de facto requirement for a religious organization's registration under the 2016 Law on Belief and Religion, giving the Front a role in drafting and overseeing religious policy rather than establishing any direct state funding of religious institutions. (1)VietnamModern Area1 entrySources1. Divinity Atlas Directory Taxonomy, First Edition Category TreeComments (0)No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.Sign in to join the discussion.Reader Challenges (0)No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.Sign in to dispute this or suggest a correction.