India’s anti-conversion laws moved from arrest to adjudication this week: a Muzaffarnagar court refused bail to twelve people seized at a prayer meeting after a Bajrang Dal tip-off. Strasbourg, meanwhile, struck down a Bulgarian ban on door-to-door preaching. Elsewhere: the Ahmadiyya Caliph announced 267,596 new adherents at Jalsa Salana UK; Texas Baptists counted 500 decisions from a World Cup campaign; Sinhala-Buddhist critics shifted from anti-conversion bills to colonial restitution; and AI is quietly ending missionary “creative access.”
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.
Debate continues on Sri Lanka anti-conversion law – Buddhist monks lobby for international support of controversial bill
Dublin, September 13 (Compass) — Buddhist monks from the Jathika Hela Urumaya (JHU) party have launched an international campaign to win support for a proposed anti-conversion bill in Sri Lanka. The monks have met with representatives at the United States, United Kingdom, Canadian, Indian, Australian, French and German embassies in Sri Lanka, according to local […]