As part of their horrific year zero policies the Khmer Rouge regime banned all religious practice in Cambodia and persecuted the local Christian Church almost to extinction. Buddhist institutions were allowed to reform soon after the regime was driven from power but Christianity remained illegal throughout the 1980s and the few Cambodian Christian believers who survived met in secret house churches.

On Easter Sunday 1990, Christianity was officially legalized in Cambodia and over the next decade experienced a period of vibrant growth. The Cambodian government has been broadly accepting of Christianity and has imposed far fewer restrictions than in neighboring contexts like Việt Nam, Laos, or even Thailand.

Today, there are an abundance of Christian missionaries and churches active in Cambodia but how many Cambodian Christians are there? Well…

• The US State Department claims that less than 2% of Cambodians are Protestant and 0.4% of Cambodians are Catholic.
• The Joshua Project claims that 3.48% of Cambodians are Christian and that the church is growing by 8.8% annually.
• Around 0.4% of Cambodians self-identify as Christian on Cambodian government surveys. This matches findings by the Pew Research Institute.

So how many Cambodian Christians are there really? It depends on how you define Christian.

• Is a Christian someone who has prayed that Jesus will forgive their sins?
• Is a Christian someone who regularly attends a Christian Church?
• Is a Christian someone who self-identifies as Christian?
• Is a Christian someone who self-identifies as exclusively Christian?

Something that certain Christian missionaries in Cambodia seem to have to failed to account for is that Cambodia is polytheistic. What these Christian missions have actually accomplished is to add Jesus to the pantheon.

Buddhism is the state religion of Cambodia but it has long co-existed fluidly with Hindu, Vedic, Animist, Taoist, and other beliefs. Ancestor worship, which pre-dates even Vedic belief in the region, is perhaps the most fundamental underlying religious practice. In this context religious practice is about function, not exclusive truth. Buddhist practices are believed to earn karma and generally improve one’s condition, but Cambodians fluidly turn to other religious practices to solve their daily problems by appeasing capricious local spirits and divinities, engaging the services of warlocks, and making offerings to their ancestor’s ghosts so that they will be blessed by them rather than cursed.

I think that I’ve told the story before of how we noticed a Bible while visiting a house we were considering renting and asked if the landlord was Christian. With a smile, the landlord showed us their Ancestor shrine, Taoist shrine, Yon protective spells placed over the entryways, and their copy of the Quran. The landlord then explained that they also make regular offerings at the neighborhood Buddhist pagoda and to the local divinities. So, the landlord concluded, we could rest assure that the house was safe because they had covered all of the major spiritual powers. (We decided against renting this house.)

I’m not criticizing all Christian mission in Cambodia, there are people here – particularly long term people who have stayed since the early years of the 1990s – who are doing fantastic outreach. But too much of Christian mission in Cambodia today is shallow, focused on rapid numeric growth, driven by foreign support that demands ever higher numbers, and with scant attention to strengthening the local church.

 “A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants. Still other seed fell on good soil, where it produced a crop—a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown.”

Mark 4:3-20

Long term Eastern Mennonite Mission workers shared a story with me of one Cambodian who, after years of discipleship, reported “I think I’m 60% Christian now.” I’m sure that this felt discouraging but here’s the positive side. The EMM workers were around to hear this. They were listening. They were asking. They had the relationship with this person. The EMM workers didn’t hurry on to the next person, assuming that the faith journey was on auto-pilot after hitting those first reportable metrics of asking Jesus for forgiveness and attending church regularly.

So how many Cambodian Christians are there? Only God knows for sure.