Indian police in Pune charged a church leader based in Great Britain under Maharashtra’s anti-conversion law eleven days before it came into force — and the interim bail order that followed contains a rare judicial proposition: an open door is not an invitation to convert. Elsewhere, the RSS held its coordination meeting without mentioning conversion, preferring the language of demographic imbalance; Shanghai reportedly extended curbs on Catholic practice to funeral rites; a Russian court fined three Baptists for missionary activity without saying what made it missionary.
Proselytism and Religious Outreach Worldwide: Conflicts, Policies, and Trends – 22-29 May 2026
This week’s briefing tracks two converging dynamics. In India, the “ghar wapsi” reconversion campaign pushed eastward into Uttar Pradesh and Odisha, where a single conversion can be narrated at once as a crime (when toward Islam) and a celebrated homecoming (when toward Hinduism) — while Nepal’s Christians petitioned to repeal anti-proselytism law. Meanwhile, a debate among China’s persecuted house churches over whether Western advocacy protects or endangers them, and Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas, which calls the digital world “a new continent to be evangelised.”
Proselytism and Religious Outreach Worldwide: Conflicts, Policies, and Trends – 18-22 May 2026
The expanding legal toolkit against religious life. – Non-state violence against conversion. – The ghar wapsi asymmetry. – The framing contest over Nigeria. – Draft bill to ban religious activities in private homes scheduled for Russian Duma consideration.
Proselytism and Religious Outreach Worldwide: Conflicts, Policies, and Trends – 8-18 May 2026
China’s southward expansion and legal recharacterisation. – The American accountability gap. – Anti-missionary law as administrative routine. – Toward a papal ethics of digital-age mission. – The South–South missionary frontier.
Proselytism and Religious Outreach Worldwide: Conflicts, Policies, and Trends – 1-8 May 2026
India’s elections as a conversion-policy referendum. – The USCIRF-RSS moment: internationalised accountability meets nationalist backlash. – Pope Leo XIV: toward an encyclical theology of mission. – China’s two-track religious repression. – The Turkey precedent: proselytism as national security threat.