Popular, Folk, Grassroots and Pop Culture
in World Christianity and the History of Mission
10–12 June 2026 ‧ New College, University of Edinburgh ‧ #YaleEdin2026
Yale-Edinburgh Conference on World Christianity and the History of Mission
Deadline: 1 February 2026
Christian communities, individuals, and institutions have always grappled with grassroots cultural expressions that surround them in different historical and social settings. This relationship has been riven with ambiguities. Songs, plays, and literature, print, radio, television, and the internet are deemed to edify or to scandalise, to propagate the Gospel or to profane it, to promote Christian virtues or to reject them, to encourage devotion or to deaden Christian sentiments. Missionaries have drawn upon familiar forms for hymns or folk traditions for liturgy. They have also eschewed popular songs and myths as antithetical to the Gospel. Majority World Christians simultaneously cultivate a ‘world-breaking’ attitude towards popular culture, casting off local traditions and customs as demonic, and a ‘world-making’ posture that positively engages local ontologies and folk cultures, like the Orthodox Anastenaria in which icons are displayed at festivals.
Christians have circulated catchy and appealing songs, images, and cults for mass consumption into various languages that create a shared sense of belonging and cultivate religious enthusiasm across borders. The sacred songs of Charles Wesley, Dwight Moody, and Ira Sankey, Afua Kuma and Ruth Lu, or the Marian devotions and the cult of the Sacred Heart of Jesus are examples of Protestant and Catholic grassroots piety, often with transnational reach. More recently, charismatic Catholics and Evangelicals have expressed their faith through skilful use of social media. African Catholic bishops have encouraged their young to be digital faith influencers, while Brazilian Catholic priests are commonly livestreamed singing, clapping, and dancing to pop songs wearing their priestly robes. West African Neo-Pentecostal leaders call their followers to take dominion of the internet so that God’s presence may diffuse the influence of Satan, while Gen-Z Asian netizens use social media to coordinate and promote protests. Sport is in our purview too: whether it be the public profile of contemporary athletes or the muscular Christianity of missionaries that encouraged team games. Catholic documents such as Maximum Illud and Rerum Ecclesiae promoted the inculturation of sacred art and architecture, while more recent theologians like Stephen Bevans, Pete Ward, C. S. Song, and Orlando Espín provide frameworks for analysing and developing such engagements.
For our 2026 conference we invite papers that attend to the ways in which Christian communities and individuals around the world engage or have engaged with popular genres of song, folklore, myth, literature, wisdom, and proverb in their everyday lives as well as devising explicit strategies to either purify their faith through cultural cleansing or to positively interact with culture. The conference topic also encompasses media and the ways Christians produce, circulate, and interact with mass culture and mass media, including music, television, cinema, sport, photography, and the digital. We welcome historical case studies examining worldwide religious and cultural interactions; theological interrogations of culture, embodiment, media, and art; qualitative studies that analyse the lived realities of cultural engagement and production of the everyday faithful; comparative studies of media, popular culture, and religion; or any other pertinent topics.
Please submit title and abstract (150-250 words) to cswc-events@ed.ac.uk by 1st February 2026.