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.