A Critical Analysis in Quest of the Relationship Between Caodaism and New Religious Movements: Comparison and Appraisal

Dao Cao Dai or Caodaism appears as a distinct tradition although it proceeds from the blending of the Great Traditions of the East and the West. These long-established traditions are mostly found to have made a significant and lasting contribution to Vietnamese cultural spaces. In such a social and cultural milieu Caodaism, together with different new religious movements, emerged primarily as a secret socio-religious movement in French Cochinchina in the early 20th century. The primary objective of this paper is to provide a partial summary of diverse circumstances in which new religious movements emerge even due to the presence of a bias against them. Thus, this paper proceeds by presenting some of the different socio-historical contexts on the basis of which new religious movements emerged. In addition, this is an attempt of the current paper that can help us explain and evaluate the socio-historical facts of the origin of new religious movements in order to understand their common features and the manners by which new religious movements come into agreement with Caodaism. Methodologically, we used the approach of critical discourse analysis to understand the socio-historical relationship between Caodaism and New Religious Movements (NRMs). The findings show a strong eschatological character based on which Caodaism comes into agreement with most of the New Religions. At the same time, these findings show some meaningful differences between Caodaism and NRMs. This paper concludes with a brief discussion about how Caodaism tends to be quite simple regarding its doctrines and ceremonies like New Religions.