Hòa Hảo is a Vietnamese new religious movement. It is described either as a syncretistic folk religion or as a sect of Buddhism. It was founded in 1939 by Huỳnh Phú Sổ (1920–1947), who is regarded as a saint by its devotees. It is one of the major religions of Vietnam with between one million and eight million adherents, mostly in the Mekong Delta.
Huỳnh Phú Sổ
Imperial Japanese forces entering Saigon, 1940
August Revolution in Hanoi, 1945
French marines landing in Annam, July 1950
A new religious movement (NRM), also known as alternative spirituality or a new religion, is a religious or spiritual group that has modern origins and is peripheral to its society's dominant religious culture. NRMs can be novel in origin or they can be part of a wider religion, in which case they are distinct from pre-existing denominations. Some NRMs deal with the challenges that the modernizing world poses to them by embracing individualism, while other NRMs deal with them by embracing tightly knit collective means. Scholars have estimated that NRMs number in the tens of thousands worldwide. Most NRMs only have a few members, some of them have thousands of members, and a few of them have more than a million members.
A member of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness proselytising on the streets of Moscow, Russia
1893 Parliament of the World's Religions
Practitioners of Falun Gong perform spiritual exercises in Guangzhou, China.
A Rasta man wearing symbols of his religious identity in Barbados