Christianity, a new denomination in Laos with only a hundred and fifty thousand followers, is challenging traditional Buddhism with its more than three million adherents. This means that something unusual is happening in the religious space of the country.
Laos is a small country in Indochina. It covers an area of 237,000 square kilometers, with an estimated population of 6 million as of 2008. 200 thousand people approximately
page 39fifty nationalities. The largest of them is Lao (about 50% of the country's population). This is followed by a group of closely related ethnic groups: black, white and red Tai, Ly, Yang, Yuan, Sek, Phu-tai, etc., belonging, like Lao, to the same Thai language family (up to 15%). The remaining third of the population includes several dozen ethnic groups belonging to one of the three families: Mon-Khmer (23%), Hmong-myeon or Miao-yao (7%), and Sino-Tibetan (2.5%). Data on national composition are relevant here, because, as we will see below, they generally reflect the structure of the country's population by religion.
Laos is in principle a secular State, although this is not explicitly stated in any official document. According to the Lao Constitution, all religions and their institutions are equal before the law, and all citizens of the country have freedom of conscience and the right to "profess any religion or not to profess any" (Article 43). However, in practice, Buddhism and its institutions have priority and enjoy the patronage of the authorities. This situation is due to the country's history. Buddhism was declared the official religion of the Lao state in the middle of the 14th century and retained this status until 1975, being under the guardianship of all the ruling monarchs and authorities. Even the French colonial administration of Indochina at the beginning of the 19th century, wishing to create an image of the patroness of Laos and separate it from Thailand, undertook to revive its Buddhist institutions, which had fallen i ...
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