Religion in Cambodia

Based on Wikipedia: Religion in Cambodia

The Land Where Buddhism Reigns Supreme

In a world fractured by religious diversity, Cambodia stands as an outlier. Ninety-seven percent of its population practices Theravada Buddhism. That's not a typo. In a country of seventeen million people, roughly sixteen and a half million follow the same faith.

To put that in perspective: the United States, often called a "Christian nation," is only about sixty-five percent Christian. Even Poland, one of Europe's most Catholic countries, hovers around eighty-seven percent. Cambodia's religious homogeneity is remarkable by any measure.

But this uniformity masks a far more complicated story—one involving Hindu god-kings, Muslim traders, Portuguese missionaries who left in despair, and a genocide that nearly erased religious life entirely.

Two Thousand Years of Buddhist History

Buddhism arrived in Cambodia sometime around the third century of the common era, making it one of the oldest continuously Buddhist societies on Earth. But here's where it gets interesting: the Buddhism that first took root wasn't the same Buddhism practiced today.

The original form was Mahayana Buddhism, sometimes called the "Great Vehicle." This tradition, which spread north through Tibet, China, Korea, and Japan, emphasizes the ideal of the bodhisattva—an enlightened being who postpones their own final liberation to help others achieve enlightenment. Think of the Dalai Lama's tradition, or Zen Buddhism.

Theravada Buddhism, the form practiced in Cambodia today, is fundamentally different. The name means "Teaching of the Elders," and it claims to preserve the original teachings of the Buddha most faithfully. While Mahayana developed elaborate pantheons of celestial buddhas and bodhisattvas, Theravada maintains a more austere focus on individual meditation and monastic discipline. It spread south through Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, and Laos.

For roughly a thousand years, Cambodia's kings shifted between these traditions. The magnificent temple complex of Angkor Wat—the largest religious monument ever built—tells this story in stone. Originally constructed in the twelfth century as a Hindu temple dedicated to the god Vishnu, it was converted to Mahayana Buddhism under King Jayavarman the Seventh later that same century. Then, in the sixteenth century, it transformed again into a Theravada Buddhist temple, which it remains today.

Imagine a cathedral becoming a mosque becoming a synagogue, and you begin to grasp how fluid religious identity was in medieval Cambodia.

The Monastery at the Center of Life

To understand Cambodian Buddhism, you need to understand two institutions: the wat and the sangha.

A wat is a Buddhist monastery, but calling it merely a monastery undersells its importance. In traditional Cambodian villages, the wat serves as school, community center, hospital, town hall, and spiritual anchor all at once. Before modern education arrived, virtually all Cambodian boys learned to read and write at the local wat. Many still do.

The sangha refers to the monkhood—the community of ordained Buddhist monks who live according to strict rules of conduct. In Theravada countries, monks are not priests who intercede between humans and the divine. They are, instead, spiritual athletes pursuing enlightenment through meditation, study, and moral discipline. Laypeople support them with food, robes, and shelter, earning merit in return.

Merit is the key concept here. Cambodian Buddhists believe in rebirth—that consciousness continues after death into new lives. The quality of those future lives depends on karma, the accumulated consequences of one's actions. Good deeds generate merit; bad deeds generate demerit. Supporting monks, building temples, observing Buddhist holidays—all these accumulate merit, improving one's prospects for a favorable rebirth.

This creates a beautiful symbiosis. Monks dedicate their lives to spiritual practice, providing laypeople opportunities to earn merit. Laypeople, in turn, provide monks with the material necessities that allow them to focus entirely on spiritual matters. Neither can function without the other.

The Minority That Survived: Islam in Cambodia

The two percent of Cambodians who practice Islam are mostly Cham people, an ethnic minority with a remarkable history of resilience.

Islam arrived in Cambodia through trade routes connecting Western Asia to Southeast Asia, probably between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries. Muslim merchants from the Middle East and India established communities along the coast and major rivers. The Cham people, who had once ruled a powerful kingdom in what is now central Vietnam, gradually converted to Islam after their kingdom fell to Vietnamese expansion.

By 1962, Cambodia had about one hundred mosques. The oldest surviving mosque, Nur ul-Ihsan in Phnom Penh, dates to 1813. But Islam didn't remain confined to the Cham. In Kwan village in Kampong Speu province, ethnic Khmer people converted to Islam, with most converts coming from Buddhist backgrounds. A Cham farmer named Abdul Amit is credited with spreading the faith there.

This peaceful coexistence between Buddhism and Islam would face its greatest test during the Khmer Rouge period—but that's a story we'll return to shortly.

The Portuguese Priest Who Gave Up

Christianity's first attempt to enter Cambodia ended in complete failure, and the story tells us much about the country's religious landscape.

In 1555, a Portuguese Dominican friar named Gaspar da Cruz arrived in Cambodia determined to spread the Gospel. He stayed for about a year. His own account of the mission drips with frustration. He found the country ruled by what he called a "Bramene" king—probably a reference to Brahmanical Hinduism, which still held influence among the elite—and staffed by "Bramene" officials.

"The Bramenes are the most difficult people to convert," he wrote. He felt that no one would dare convert without the king's permission, and the king showed no interest in granting it.

Da Cruz left Cambodia having baptized exactly one person. That convert died before the priest departed, so da Cruz noted bitterly that he "left him in the grave." Not exactly a triumphant missionary campaign.

Three Centuries of Minimal Impact

Even French colonization, which began in the nineteenth century and lasted nearly a hundred years, failed to make Cambodia significantly Christian. The French, despite being nominally Catholic, didn't push conversion the way Spanish colonizers did in the Philippines or Portuguese colonizers did in parts of India.

By 1972, Cambodia had only about twenty thousand Christians, most of them Catholics. But here's a revealing detail: before 1970, the Catholic population was much larger—perhaps sixty-two thousand. The difference? Most of those Catholics were Vietnamese, and they left during mass repatriations in 1970 and 1971.

According to Vatican statistics from 1953, Catholics in Cambodia numbered one hundred twenty thousand, making it briefly the second-largest religion. But an estimated fifty thousand of those Catholics were Vietnamese. The indigenous Khmer population simply wasn't converting.

Many of the Catholics who remained in Cambodia by 1972 were Europeans, chiefly French. To this day, the Catholic community includes whites and Eurasians of French descent—a reminder of the colonial era rather than successful evangelization.

Protestants and the Hill Tribes

Protestant missionaries arrived later than Catholics but found slightly more success, particularly among groups outside the Buddhist mainstream.

Until the late nineteenth century, no Protestant missions existed in Cambodia. The Christian and Missionary Alliance established the first significant mission in 1923, and by 1962 they had converted about two thousand people. That's forty years of work for two thousand converts—roughly fifty people per year.

American Protestant activity increased after 1970, particularly among two groups: the hill tribes and the Cham Muslims. Both were already somewhat outside mainstream Khmer Buddhist society, making them more receptive to alternative religious identities.

The hill tribes—known collectively as the Khmer Loeu, meaning "Highland Khmer"—number only about one hundred fifty thousand people today. They practice various indigenous animist traditions, believing in spirits called yang that inhabit rice, soil, water, fire, stones, and paths. Shamans and medicine men serve as intermediaries with these spirits. For some in these communities, Christianity offered an alternative framework for understanding the spiritual world.

The Khmer Rouge: Year Zero for Religion

Then came the catastrophe.

In 1975, the Khmer Rouge—a radical communist movement led by Pol Pot—seized power in Cambodia. What followed was one of history's most horrific experiments in social engineering. The Khmer Rouge declared "Year Zero," attempting to restart Cambodian civilization from scratch. Cities were emptied. Intellectuals were murdered. Private property was abolished.

Religion was targeted for elimination.

Monks were forced to disrobe or killed. Temples were desecrated or destroyed. The sangha, that ancient institution at the heart of Cambodian society, was nearly annihilated. Muslims faced particular brutality—the Khmer Rouge viewed them as ethnically and religiously distinct, making them targets for what many scholars classify as genocide within genocide.

By the time the Khmer Rouge fell in 1979, somewhere between 1.5 and 2 million Cambodians had died—roughly a quarter of the entire population. Religious life was devastated.

The recovery has been remarkable but incomplete. Buddhism has rebounded to near-universal practice, but the monasteries lost an entire generation of learned monks. The transmission of traditional knowledge was broken in ways that still affect Cambodian Buddhism today.

A Curious Footnote: The Bahá'í Faith

One of the more unexpected religious stories in Cambodia involves the Bahá'í Faith, a relatively young religion founded in nineteenth-century Persia that emphasizes the unity of all religions and humanity.

The Bahá'í Faith arrived in Cambodia in 1920, when a French-born Bahá'í named Hippolyte Dreyfus-Barney visited Phnom Penh at the direction of 'Abdu'l-Bahá, then the leader of the faith. After sporadic visits from traveling teachers, the first Bahá'í community in Cambodia was established in Phnom Penh in 1956.

Like other religious communities, the Bahá'ís suffered under the Khmer Rouge. Many fled with the waves of refugees who dispersed around the world after 1979, resettling in Canada, the United States, and elsewhere.

But here's the remarkable part: the Bahá'í community has experienced a resurgence, particularly in the city of Battambang. In 2017, Battambang became home to the first Bahá'í House of Worship built to serve a single locality—anywhere in the world. The dedication ceremony attracted 2,500 people.

Today, Cambodia is home to approximately 16,700 Bahá'ís. It's a tiny fraction of the population, but their presence and their temple represent something meaningful: religious diversity finding a foothold even in one of the world's most religiously uniform countries.

The Jewish Community You Didn't Expect

Perhaps the most surprising religious community in Cambodia is also its smallest: a Jewish community of just over one hundred people.

Since 2009, Phnom Penh has had a Chabad house—a Jewish community center operated by the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, which specializes in establishing Jewish outposts in remote and unlikely locations around the world. The Cambodian Chabad house serves resident Jews, visiting businesspeople, and tourists seeking a taste of home.

There's something poignant about this. Judaism, one of the world's oldest religions, maintaining a tiny presence in a country where Buddhism has reigned for nearly two millennia. It's a reminder that religious identity can be remarkably persistent, surviving transplantation across vast distances.

Christianity's Recent Growth

Since the 1990s, Protestant Christianity has grown significantly in Cambodia, with some estimates suggesting Christians now make up two to three percent of the population. This represents a dramatic increase from the two thousand Protestants counted in 1962.

Several factors explain this growth. The devastation of the Khmer Rouge period created spiritual seeking. International aid organizations, many of them Christian, arrived to help rebuild the country. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints began missionary work in 1996 and now has thirty-one congregations. Jehovah's Witnesses arrived in 1990 and have established multiple Kingdom Halls.

But these gains should be kept in perspective. Even if Christians now constitute three percent of Cambodia's population, that still leaves Buddhism with overwhelming dominance. The wat and sangha remain at the center of Cambodian life.

Why Buddhism Held On

Cambodia's religious uniformity raises a question: why did Buddhism succeed where other religions failed?

Part of the answer is historical. Buddhism has been present in Cambodia for nearly two thousand years. It has shaped the language, the art, the architecture, the very rhythms of daily life. Converting to another religion means separating yourself from almost everything that defines Cambodian identity.

Part of the answer is institutional. The wat system embedded Buddhism into every village. Monks were (and are) everywhere, visible reminders of the faith. The merit-making system created constant participation—Buddhism wasn't just something you believed; it was something you did, regularly and publicly.

Part of the answer is theological. Theravada Buddhism is remarkably adaptable. It doesn't demand exclusive loyalty in quite the way Abrahamic religions do. Many Cambodians participate in Buddhist rituals while also honoring local spirits, ancestors, and Hindu-derived practices. This flexibility allowed Buddhism to absorb rather than compete with other spiritual traditions.

And part of the answer, paradoxically, may be the Khmer Rouge. By trying to destroy Buddhism, they made it a symbol of resistance, of cultural continuity, of everything the regime was trying to erase. When the nightmare ended, rebuilding the sangha became an act of national recovery.

The View from Preah Vihear

The relationship between religion and national identity becomes particularly clear at disputed sites like the temple of Preah Vihear, which sits on a cliff on the Thai-Cambodian border.

The temple, built in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, is dedicated to the Hindu god Shiva. It was claimed by both Cambodia and Thailand, with the International Court of Justice ruling for Cambodia in 1962. Tensions over the temple flared into armed conflict in 2008 and 2011, with soldiers dying on both sides.

Neither Cambodia nor Thailand is associated with Catholicism, yet Catholic communities in both countries have found themselves caught in these nationalistic tensions. Religious identity, ethnic identity, and national identity intertwine in complex ways, and borders—whether physical or spiritual—are rarely as clear as maps suggest.

A Country Still Defining Itself

Modern Cambodia guarantees freedom of religion in its constitution. The small communities of Muslims, Christians, Bahá'ís, and others practice their faiths openly. But Buddhism remains the state religion, and its cultural dominance is overwhelming.

For visitors from more religiously diverse societies, Cambodia offers a window into what relative religious consensus looks like. There are no culture wars over religious symbols in public spaces—the symbols are Buddhist, and virtually everyone accepts this. There are no debates about which holidays to recognize—Buddhist holidays structure the calendar.

But this consensus came at a cost. The religious minorities who survived the Khmer Rouge remember what happens when the state decides some identities are acceptable and others are not. The hill tribes remember that their animist traditions were dismissed as primitive even before the genocide. The Cham remember that their Islamic identity made them targets.

Cambodia's religious story is not simply one of Buddhist triumph. It's a story of survival, adaptation, and the complex ways that faith intersects with power, identity, and belonging. The wat may stand at the center of village life, but at the edges, other temples, mosques, churches, and houses of worship quietly persist—reminders that no society is ever quite as uniform as it appears.