I went to Vietnam a couple times. If you hang out downtown in the city, you might get a random Jehovah’s Witness or Seventh Day Adventist* try to chat you up. “Oh, we can’t do missionary work out in the open, so we just do one-on-one conversations like this”. Despite the lack of “Jesus saves, die sinner” signs in Hanoi, you can definitely find Catholic and Protestant churches in Vietnam.
The Western press likes to piss and moan about settler nation missionaries that go, without proper visas mind you, to spread their Western versions of Christianity to the DPRK, only to get deported. So am I allowed to enter a white people country without a visa to stir up trouble and expect no consequences???
I’m the furthest thing from an expert on Myanmar. I get everything I know from Burmese friends. But if you look into the minority people situation, many of them are being heavily proselytised by the worst of the Amerikan type. I don’t want the Pat Robertson’s the world anywhere near struggling people.
*I’m definitely not saying that JWs and SDAs are anywhere near the worst as Christian sects go.
Fair enough
For me it’s a bit different, being in an Orthodox country,the small churches are really old and culturally significant, and the bigass cathedral in the capital city built in the last decade is the place that the next Ceausescu should build a House of the People on
In Norway as well there are some churches in the middle of nowhere that aren’t very big but are literally 1,000 years old or nearing on it. I’d see no problem with keeping these buildings but using them in practice as secular communal institutions. I’d see for that matter no issue with letting people read religious texts, provided that people know their proper context and historicity.
My views on religion otherwise still lack much form, however…