The New Way

A must-read for anyone interested in Christianity in developing countries, religion in Asia, and studies of Southeast Asia and Vietnam. -- Yoko Hayami, author of Between Hills and Plains: Power and Practice in Socio-Religious Dynamics among Karen Contributes to the study of religion-not just Protestantism-and ethnic minorities in Southeast Asia. Will be of interest to scholars who want to pursue ongoing studies of Hmong practices and their transformation in the future. -- Patricia Symonds, author of Calling in the Soul: Gender and the Cycle of Life in a Hmong Village Conversion to evangelical Protestantism by members of the Hmong community in Vietnam raises a host of questions: the impact of conversion on individual converts and non-converts; the relationship between Protestant eschatology and Hmong millenarianism; relations between the Hmong and the state; the transformation of this marginal community into the center of the Hmong diasporic imagination through radio broadcasts and US-based missionaries. This ethnographically rich and theoretically sophisticated study is a major contribution to a wide range of disciplines. -- Hue-Tam Ho-Tai, Harvard University

In the mid-1980s, a radio program with a compelling spiritual message was accidentally received by listeners in Vietnam’s remote northern highlands. The Protestant evangelical communication had been created in the Hmong language by the Far East Broadcasting Company specifically for war refugees in Laos. The Vietnamese Hmong related the content to their traditional expectation of salvation by a Hmong messiah-king who would lead them out of subjugation, and they appropriated the evangelical message for themselves.

Today, the New Way (Kev Cai Tshiab) has some three hundred thousand followers in Vietnam. Tam T. T. Ngo reveals the complex politics of religion and ethnic relations in contemporary Vietnam and illuminates the dynamic interplay between local and global forces, socialist and postsocialist state building, cold war and post–cold war antagonisms, Hmong transnationalism, and U.S.-led evangelical expansionism.