Religion in Vietnam came under intense scrutiny in 2005. That year, the U.S. State Department included Vietnam for the second successive year on a list of countries allegedly in grave violation of the right to freely observe religion. Human rights organizations, dissident clergy, exiled groups and international media outlets reported a serious deterioration in the freedom to worship and the harassment and imprisonment of religious believers — reports strenuously rejected in Vietnam's state-controlled media. In the same year, the famed peace activist and Buddhist meditation master Thích Nhẩt Hạnh also made headlines as he returned home from a period of exile that had lasted nearly four decades for an extended pilgrimage and programme of Dharma talks and meditation sessions. Making the news too were the ordinations of fifty-seven new Catholic priests overseen by the Vatican's envoy. Yet away from the media spotlight, although well known to the millions of Vietnamese people who were making it happen, a nationwide upsurge in religious activities of great intensity and variety was also taking place. For several years, indeed, this phenomenon had been documented by foreign and domestic scholars interested in why it was happening, its political ramifications and, more generally, its implications for understanding the place of religion in the modern world.

In August 2005 two international workshops on religion in Vietnam were held at the Australian National University. The first was “Religion in Contemporary Vietnam”, on 10 August, which was followed on 11–12 August by the 2005 Vietnam Update, “Not by Rice Alone: Making Sense of Spirituality in Reform-era Vietnam”. These workshops brought together seventeen researchers from eleven countries to present the results of their ethnographic, historical and cultural research on religion in Vietnam. Testament to the high level of international interest in their topic, the workshops were attended by representatives from the U.S. diplomatic mission and European Union in Vietnam as well as development agency and NGO workers, academics, religious practitioners, Australian and Vietnamese government officials, journalists and members of the overseas Vietnamese community.