This week’s briefing finds the same story playing out in three countries: a religious majority casting the missionary as the intruder. In India’s Uttarakhand, arrests over alleged Christian conversion of the Tharu tribe escalate into an SIT probe and a “foreign funding” charge; in Nepal, a conversion accusation on Parliament’s floor draws Christian protest; in Indonesia’s Bantul, an Islamist group halts a permitted church service.
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 – 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.