Violence against Religious Minorities

Even as these two states battled one another over the course of the seven­teenth century, each also began to address the perceived threat of a steadily growing population of Vietnamese Catholics and their European missionary priests.

The introduction of this new religious doctrine and the emergence of communities of believers sustained by foreign priests gradually contributed to social and political tensions. Particularly significant were questions about whether Vietnamese Catholics could continue to participate in local rituals, including veneration of the ancestors and of village deities. These rites, and particular those venerating the ancestors, were considered pillars of the Confucian social structure that was central to state authority and its ruling ideology. Villagers who refused to abide by these cultural and social norms were thus seen as subversive of state interests, and as a threat to social and political stability. Consequently, Catholics increasingly found themselves the targets of periodic campaigns of harassment by the state and sometimes by local entities. These crackdowns, sometimes accompanied by violence, were driven by political considerations and justified by reference to Confucian ideals. At times, the state would destroy churches, and occasionally officials would hold church leaders for ransom reasoning that ostensibly wealthy Christian followers would pay to free their religious leaders.^[686] At their most extreme, these crackdowns led to the capture and execution of Vietnamese Catholics who refused to give up their faith, and their deaths inevitably rendered them martyrs for the devout.

State suppression of Christians, their communities and the European missionaries who supported them was highly unpredictable. At times rulers, both in Tonkin and Cochinchina, aggressively attempted to root out Catholics. But such crackdowns alternated with eras of de facto tolerance when political leaders grappled with other more pressing concerns. The result was a substantial degree of uncertainty amongst Vietnamese Christians that left them constantly vulnerable to violence from the state. The Trinh state in particular issued regular anti-Christian edicts - in 1664, 1689, 1712, 1721, 1750, 1754, 1761, 1765, 1773, 1776 - an indication both that the faith continued to flourish and of the state's determination to exterminate it. While the degree of repression was not as high in the Nguyen south, with its much smaller Catholic populations, Christian communities did come under pressure at times, particularly with a forceful 1698 edict followed by a violent repression beginning two years later.^[687]