Christianity in Cambodia

Cambodia is a land-locked country in south east Asia which borders Vietnam to the East and Thailand to the West. The traditional form of religion is the Theravada branch of Buddhism.

The first recorded Christian missionary contact with Cambodia was in 1555/6 by a Portuguese Roman Catholic missionary and member of the Dominican Order called Gas par Da Cruz. He is said to have only baptised one convert who died shortly afterwards.

Later, Cambodia was under French colonial rule (1863 to 1953), but the Christian church made little impact. Those who were Catholic believers were mainly of Vietnamese heritage.

The first Protestant missionary contact came in 1923 with missionaries from the Christian and Missionary Alliance. The New Testament and later the whole Bible were translated by 1954. (The Cambodian language belongs to the Austro-Asiatic language family, the same language family as Vietnamese.)

The evangelical church saw some growth in the period 1965-1970 and then in the early 1970s before the advent of the Khmer Rouge regime (Pol Pot), which decimated the church until the demise of the regime in 1979. This is known as the time of the "Killing fields".

Since 1979, the evangelical church has recovered and grown, and may number as many as 250 thousand, which would represent just under 1.5% of a general population of just under 18 million. Roman Catholics may represent somewhere in the region of 75 thousand.

Sources

Evangelicals Now, August 2025
https://catholiccambodia.org/?page_id=22496&lang=en

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