This week, the state’s sharpest tool against missionaries was the visa, not religion law. Nepal fined, deported and banned 24 South Koreans found at a Bible college for activities outside their tourist visas. In Khabarovsk, a Korean missionary got 5 years 8 months for “organising illegal migration”, and a Krishna festival in Russia drew 535,000 roubles in fines. In West Bengal, Christian families allege a forced ghar wapsi, with “purification” by water and worship at a Durga Puja pandal. In Tanzania, an Orthodox metropolitan publicly baptised 270 former Muslims, while converts were sentenced in Iran and tried in Egypt. In Rome, the “Church of the Sheaves” spoke of “honest memory” of mission’s colonial past.
Proselytism and Religious Outreach Worldwide: Conflicts, Policies, and Trends – 3-9 October 2026
France’s Catholic bishops become partners of the state’s anti-cult agency. A Chhattisgarh village invokes tribal self-government law to bar pastors. The Madras High Court rules that conversion by inducement, and ghar wapsi alike, disqualifies a body from foreign funding. Russian courts heard 716 “illegal missionary activity” cases in 2025, up 66%, while the Orthodox Church trains activists in “counter-sectarian mission”. In Israel, Yad L’Achim pushes door-to-door Witnesses out of Petah Tikva; in Iran, a pastor’s wife must serve 13 years for “deviant proselytising”. The common thread: majority institutions joining the regulation of outreach, and money replacing belief as its legal object.
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.
Proselytism and Religious Outreach Worldwide: Conflicts, Policies, and Trends – 3-10 April 2026
News from Nigeria, India, Pakistan, Turkey. – Iranian Christian converts detained by US Immigration. – Catholic Church: more detailed data revealing the scale and geographic breadth of the 2026 Easter baptism surge. – Provincial council will address the pastoral challenge of welcoming, forming, and integrating the unprecedented number of neophytes entering the French Church. – The “missionary-as-provocateur” frame.