ABSTRACT
Recent scholarship has increasingly advocated for a thorough examination of communist atheism to comprehensively understand the global career of secularism, particularly in terms of its reception, translation, and adoption in societies beyond the cultural dominance of Euro-American Christianity. For this reason, there has been growing academic interest in exploring how the rise of communism in the 20th century facilitated the dissemination of atheist ideologies and examining the interplay between communist State formation, religion, and modernization in Soviet Russia, Ukraine, China, and other Soviet republics. However, scholarly attention to smaller communist cases remains limited. This paper seeks to address this gap by investigating the state-sanctioned promotion of communist atheism by the Democratic Republic of Vietnam during the Second Indochina War (1955–1975). Drawing on primary sources from the Vietnam National Archives Center III and the National Library in Hanoi, this study seeks to understand how North Vietnam's top leaders employed atheist propaganda as a tool for nation-building and how they navigated the question of religion and the boundaries between religion and superstition in their governance. The study argues that, contrary to the prevailing assumption, the Vietnamese communist State did not pursue a systematic eradication of religion but instead sought to co-opt and compromise it to advance socialist state-building. In so doing, the paper unveils so-called “paradoxes” and “inconsistencies” of political secularism, thereby complicating and rebuffing conventional boundaries of a strict religious/secular demarcation, and contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the entangled histories of the political and the religious.
