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 – 17–24 July 2026
This week, the initiative lay with the missionaries rather than their opponents. The Latter-day Saints crossed 87,000 missionaries and 506 missions as President Oaks defended exclusive truth as the guarantor of religious freedom; Seventh-day Adventists opened a “Creator Summit” to enlist a million member-influencers online under the banner “faithfulness over virality”; and Sri Lankan Buddhist diplomacy advanced dhammadūta through Thailand’s Dhammakaya network. Three traditions, three rival theologies of why outreach is legitimate.
Proselytism and Religious Outreach Worldwide: Conflicts, Policies, and Trends – 10–17 July 2026
The European Parliament condemned forced conversion in Pakistan (9 July) — the coercive extreme of the conversion spectrum. Against it, the RSS-affiliated Organiser and Sinhala-Buddhist LankaWeb turn the same vocabulary of coercion on schools, clinics and cricket academies: the missionary as foreign agent. In Auckland, Adventists unveiled AKAI, a faith-bounded AI, shifting digital mission from entering shared spaces to owning the machine.
Proselytism and Religious Outreach Worldwide: Conflicts, Policies, and Trends – 3–10 July 2026
This week’s briefing surfaces a striking cross-tradition convergence: the migration of missionary outreach into engineered “third spaces.” Christian evangelism in VRChat reached national attention (NPR), while Yad L’Achim exposed a Christian café network in Israel using the very same “third-space” logic — both drawing the identical charge of infiltrating a “neutral” space. India supplies the hard-law counterpoint, as the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India asks that “proselytization” be struck from the proposed amendments to the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act.
Proselytism and Religious Outreach Worldwide: Conflicts, Policies, and Trends – 19–26 June 2026
This week’s briefing centres on India’s regulatory escalation: new FCRA Rules 2026 (22 June) explicitly bar foreign funds for religious conversion, reinforced by the Timothy Initiative UAPA case and seven pastors sentenced in Madhya Pradesh. The Vatican consistory (26–27 June) saw Pope Leo XIV restate the witness-vs-proselytism line. Adventists publicly questioned their own evangelism’s cultural sensitivity.