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 – 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.
Proselytism and Religious Outreach Worldwide: Conflicts, Policies, and Trends – 24 April – 1 May 2026
India: from law to lived coercion. – The internationalisation of the forced conversion debate. – Pope Leo XIV: doctrine as missionary strategy. – Iran: persecution as geopolitical byproduct. – China: the architecture of legal isolation. – A note on the “genocide” framing in Nigeria. – Islamic Da’wa Campaign Planned for FIFA World Cup 2026.
Proselytism and Religious Outreach Worldwide: Conflicts, Policies, and Trends – 17-24 April 2026
The papal tour as a test of missionary theology. – Forced conversion: from bilateral complaint to multilateral norm-setting. – India’s anti-conversion architecture: systemic completion. – China’s legal innovation: economic statutes as religious control. – The Middle East’s symbolic and physical geography of persecution. – A global regulatory toolkit, refined.