By Hugh Beattie

In November, New York for the first time ever elected a Muslim Mayor – Zohran Mamdani, who since 2020 has been a member of the New York state legislature. His background is a cosmopolitan one. His mother, Mira Nair, was brought up as a Hindu. She is an internationally-acclaimed Bollywood film director (her best-known film is probably Monsoon Wedding, released  in 2001). His father, Mahmood Mamdani, is an academic who specializes in colonial, anti-colonial and decolonisation studies. His publications include Good Muslim, Bad Muslim (2005) which explores American attitudes to Islam. Mahmood Mamdani comes from a Khoja background. Khojas are members of a trading caste living mainly in western India, Pakistan, Uganda, Europe and the USA. Their ancestors became Muslims in the 14^th century CE; today the largest Khoja community is found in Bombay. Most Khojas identify with the minority Nizari Ismaili Muslim tradition, led by Aga Khan V, Shah Rahim al-Husayni. There are also Sunni and Twelver Shi’ite Khojas. Zohran Mamdani (who was born in Uganda and has lived in New York since he was seven) identifies with the Twelver Shi’a Khoja tradition.

Khoja Islam has been characterised as flexible, diverse and tolerant. In many respects Zohran Mamdani’s approach seems to be a liberal one; for example he is a supporter of the LGBTQ+ Community, and  is a hip-hop fan who has composed, performed, and produced rap music. His views on Palestine and Israel, however, have attracted ‘criticism from across the political spectrum’ (Mays, 2025). While a student at Bowdoin College, he helped to found the campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine. He is also a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, which uses non-violent means to try and pressure the Israeli government into recognising Palestinian rights. This has helped to make him a controversial figure who has been condemned by some as an anti-Semite, and accused of calling for the destruction of Israel. It is true that he has described Israel as an apartheid state, criticised American military support for it, and called for New York-based organisations funding Jewish settlements on the West Bank to lose their charitable status. Nevertheless he argues that ‘Israel has a right to exist as a state with equal rights’ for all its citizens, and he has challenged anti-Semitic views and said that, whatever their identity, the killing of civilians is always wrong. He criticised a rally held in New York on October 8 2023 which celebrated Hamas’s actions on October 7, and on the second anniversary of the attack said that on that day Hamas committed a ‘horrific war crime’ (Friedman and Bartov, 2025). During his mayoral campaign Mamdani reached out to New York’s million or so Jews, for example visiting synagogues and engaging with Jewish organisations. Some 30% of the Jewish electorate in the city voted for him (Demir, 2025).

Mamdani has also been accused of being anti-Hindu, mainly because he has been a critic of the Hindu nationalist Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, for what some have called Modi’s anti-Muslim rhetoric and policies. However, during his mayoral campaign Mamdani also tried to win the support of the substantial Hindu community in New York, for example visiting two Hindu temples during his campaign, and proclaiming that he was ‘proud of [his] … Hindu heritage’ (Dutt 2025). Many Hindus voted for him too.

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By Marion Bowman

Last week, during the Open University Graduation Ceremony at the Birmingham Symphony Hall on October 30, I had the enormous pleasure of delivering the Oration in honour of Steve Roud, after which our Chancellor, Baroness Martha Lane-Fox of Soho, presented him with the honorary degree of Doctor of the University.

The Open University has a noble tradition of awarding honorary degrees to individuals recognised for outstanding achievements aligned to the University’s values.  I have often been part of the platform party when we have presented an honorary degree, for instance to Martha Lane Fox in 2011 and to Terry Pratchett in 2013, so it was fascinating to actually participate in this process. Working with Steve’s daughter Kate Faulkner and his longterm academic collaborator Dr Julia Bishop (University of Sheffield), OU ethnomusicologist Professor Byron Dueck and I proposed Steve for the honorary degree; we were delighted that the nomination was successful.

Figure 1. Marion orating while Steve had to stand and listen! Photo by Leslie Currie (2025)

Figure 2. Steve responding to Oration and award. From the smiles, this was the moment he said ‘Indexers don’t get out much!’ Photo by Leslie Currie (2025)

So, what had Steve done to deserve this? Steve spent many years as local studies librarian in Croydon and also served as the honorary librarian of the Folklore Society. However, Steve Roud is best known as the creator of the Roud Indexes: an extraordinarily comprehensive record of traditional English-language folk songs from around the world. His passion for documenting and cataloguing the genre has transformed both scholarly research and popular understanding.

The Folk Song Index records key details of traditional songs in English, and features a comprehensive numbering system, called ‘Roud numbers’, to identify and bring together variants of songs across time and place. This is essential in a field where there are many different renditions of songs and no single, definitive version of them. For instance, clicking on Roud 12 in the Folk Song Index, Scarborough Fair, will take you to 355 entries detailing the song’s different titles and versions, and citing evidence of the song, and its performance, in myriad sources. In relation to Vernacular Religion, you can explore the index for references to ghosts, Wassailing, May Day and other calendar customs.

Because of its size and reach, the Index allows researchers to undertake comparative studies, chart song histories, investigate the role of women as performers, and many other aspects of vernacular culture. The Folk Song Index sits alongside Steve’s Broadside Index, which documents songs in cheap printed formats and early recordings, which are essential to understanding the sources and histories of vernacular song.

The Roud Indexes began life around 1970 on a series of index cards kept in a shoebox and were eventually transferred to Steve’s personal computer. More than 50 years later, there are over three quarters of a million entries, linking thousands of songs, from Australia to the Americas, as well as the British Isles. Today, the Roud Indexes are hosted online by the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library at the English Folk Dance and Song Society and are available free of charge. They are an indispensable resource for researchers of all kinds around the world, utilised by academics, practitioners and enthusiasts alike.

Based on his extensive research, Steve has published widely on folk music, including Folk Song In England, a comprehensive history of the subject, highlighting the social context of the songs. With Julia Bishop, Steve created the award-winning New Penguin Book of English Folk Songs. In recognition of his outstanding scholarship, Steve has received the Folklore Society’s Coote Lake Medal and has been elected an International Fellow of the American Folklore Society.

As I said in my Oration, the Roud Indexes are ground-breaking resources, democratic and scholarly, comprehensive and co-operative. This ethos resonates powerfully with our own belief at The Open University in the importance of making knowledge inclusive and accessible. It seemed entirely appropriate that the OU should honour Steve’s extraordinary contribution to the history of vernacular song and folk traditions.

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by Maria Nita 

Religion and culture – two overlapping categories and concepts – determine how people see the climate crisis. For the 20th-century anthropologist Clifford Geertz, cultures are made up of ‘structures of meanings or meaningful structures that allow participants in the same culture to correctly interpret the words, gestures, activities, or symbols that were part of their own cultural context’ (Geertz, 1973: 7). Therefore, they are important concepts that can help us understand both climate activism as well as its public and media reception.  It has not been too important in my ethnographic work to make a distinction between the terms ‘religion’ and ‘culture’ on the ground, but I aim to use and apply both these concepts, as far as possible, in connection with how the people I interview and observe (often during marches and protest actions) understand them. I suggest that religion could be understood as a culture of resistance in the context of a growing global, transnational climate movement, which can in turn be understood as a meeting place for many different cultures of political resistance. 

Religion and culture are encoded into the many different networks that make up the climate movement, particularly through ritualised and performative actions which can include singing, dancing, drumming, acting or chanting. But to what extent are these forms active elements or just inert relics inside the protest repertoire of the climate movement? In other words, to what extent can they be understood to actively shape the movement or do they simply provide a cultural resource to activists? My research (Nita, 2024) suggests that religious traditions have a lot of influence and impact, and that they represent key cultures of resistance inside the British climate movement.  

The British climate movement has been strongly influenced by Contemporary Paganism and has become increasingly open to support from and collaboration with other religious traditions, such as Rebel Christians and XR (Extinction rebellion) Buddhists. Despite its initial  opposition to institutionalised and organised  religion, during the 21st century there has been increased acceptance and support for Christian churches and Christian movements and grassroots networks, like the influential Christian Climate Action (CCA) founded in London in 2014 or the Laudato Si Movement, which was launched as a response to the late Pope Francis’ letter with the same name, issued in 2015. Christianity and Contemporary Paganism are not as different as they might appear. Contemporary Paganism – and particularly the Eco-Pagan faction of the movement that developed post 1960s – can be seen in various guises, as a countercultural movement, or even on the edge of the spectrum of new Christian reformulations, that simply benefited from increased cultural visibility  given the decline of institutionalized Christianity in the second half of the 20th century.    

In addition, the British climate movement developed new and influential forms of direct-action like the climate camps in the mid-2000s – which have roots in transatlantic models of civil disobedience. Post 1960s, in Britain and the US, new forms of direct action emerged through the commitment of religious and spiritual countercultural movements. In the US, Black churches contributed to the traditions of civil disobedience within the civil rights movement. In the UK, Pagans shaped British green activism, especially in the 1990s and early 2000s (Letcher, 2001; 2002).  Contemporary Paganism is itself a transatlantic movement with roots in the 18th and 19th century Romantic Movement, as well as the British Druid and Celtic revival that took place around this period. During the 1990s Pagans in the UK played an important role in the development of key activist methodologies – such as non-violent direct action (NVDA).  Today NVDA represents the bedrock of British climate activism – contemporary protest actions generally start with some form of NVDA training. The Contemporary Pagan ‘witch camp’ which began as a form of protest in Britain’s forests during the 1990s British anti-road movement became the model of the climate protest camp.  

Scholars have argued that religious traditions have a key part to play in supporting wider environmental values and attitudes, both inside religious communities and the wider public sphere. Whilst religious leaders like the late Pope Francis played an important role in raising awareness of the ecological crisis, it is the Laudato Si green movement that had a tangible impact. Moreover, research shows that top-down efforts from religious leaders and eco-theologians have not had an impact on ‘the streets’, for ordinary people, ‘rank and file Christians’ and local churches (Clements, McCright, & Xiao, 2013). In contrast, greening coming from grassroots networks in the UK has been more successful in influencing the churches (Nita, 2016). This is particularly the case with green Christians in largely Protestant/ Anglican contexts, like the UK and the United States, who have been able to develop new religious practices and protest methodologies – such as climate vigils for example.  

Green Christians have been using climate vigils to combine political protest with ritualized and performative actions in their varied ‘bottom up’ efforts to reach out to Christian communities and churches, as well as the wider unengaged public. Members of Christian Climate Action led many campaigns of support to the wider climate movement and demanded that the Church disinvested from the fossil fuels industry. We can see an example of such a protest in the image below, where members of Christian Climate Action and other green Christians are protesting outside of the building where the Church of England General Synod was being held in February 2020. As it becomes clear in this image, Green Christians who protest in public spaces ‘face’ both their own Christian communities and the larger public sphere. The protest methodologies activists use in these settings often combine artistic and religious symbolism. In the image below the artistic display that can be seen in the foreground of the picture, represents children’s coffins – the future victims of the climate crisis. During the event participants knelt to make flower offerings as one would do in front of a real memorial. The site became a ritual representation of an uncertain future. Importantly, such actions can be said to have been successful, given that only a few years later, in 2023, the Church Commissioners and the Church of England Pensions Board announced that they would independently disinvest from fossil fuels.  

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In the face of the recent upsurge of anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and other forms of prejudice, how can we support young people in building their resilience against hostile voices?

The Open University’s RETOPEA (‘Religious Toleration and Peace’) project team is collaborating with colleagues from the ‘Understanding the Interplay: Worldviews, Education & Lived Citizenship’ project (Universities of London South Bank University and UCL) and  HFL Education to offer a free joint workshop on the 24^th of June 2025 at Walton Hall in Milton Keynes. This  will explore ‘Creative pedagogies for promoting religious tolerance and diversity in schools’, including the use of filmmaking and Lego.

This workshop is aimed at head teachers and educational leaders in secondary education, further education and sixth forms as well as at teachers in history, film and media studies, or religious, worldviews and civic education. The workshop is offered free of charge, with financial support from the Culham St Gabriels Trust.

The RETOPEA project aims to support young people’s active learning about religious diversity in the past and present through the creative process of making short documentary-style films (‘docutubes’).​ RETOPEA ​is an international project originally funded by the EU’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (2018-22; Grant Agreement no. 770309). Its educational methods and resources have been piloted across Europe with young people (aged 12-18). From 2023 onwards, further funding from the Culham St. Gabriel’s Trust and The Open University’s Open Societal Challenges programme has allowed the team to test and evaluate RETOPEA resources and methods more extensively in Jordan, Albania and the UK, and the team are currently also exploring their use in primary and home education.

The RETOPEA team have developed a free online course on Young people and religion: creative learning with history, which is available on OpenLearn. This explains how teachers and youth workers can use the ‘docutube method’ in their own teaching. Participants will receive a free statement of participation upon completion.

The team would like to hear from teachers, educational leaders and schools interested in using the docutube method and RETOPEA resources.

To get in touch, find out more about RETOPEA or book your place at the workshop in Milton Keynes on the 24^th of June, ​​contact: [email protected], including details of your school, job title and roles held.

By Suzanne Newcombe and Stephen Christopher

The Religious Studies Department at the Open University is excited to be the lead partner on a new grant from the John Templeton Foundation entitled ‘New Religiosity and the Digital Study of Eudaimonia’ (No. 63357), which runs from 2025-2027.

This project will establish an infrastructure that will allow researchers to explore how contemporary religion might promote or hinder well-being. Eudaimonia is a Greek word commonly translated as happiness or welfare. The concept is closely associated with questions of how to live a ‘good’, meaningful, and satisfying life. This was a major consideration of Aristotle’s practical philosophy. Traditionally, religious frameworks aim to provide the beliefs and social structures of providing just such a ‘good life’.

Using the infrastructure of the Database of Religious History at the University of British Columbia in Canada, the project will design a new data entry framework (a ‘poll’) to capture group-level descriptive variables that is fit-for-purpose to capture beliefs and practices in contemporary religious movements.

The ‘New Religiosity Poll’ will incorporate both narrative (qualitative) as well as closed questions which lend themselves to statistical analysis (quantitative). By establishing this data entry structure, we will be able to bring the study of contemporary religious movements into dialogue with the rapidly expanding field of the digital humanities and expanding computing power.

The project will have a particular focus on variables which are associated with human flourishing and well-being.  These questions are likely to relate to things like gratitude, dietary restrictions restricting alcohol or tobacco use, nature of social support networks or encouragement to volunteer for causes within and beyond the structure of the religious movement itself.

Cambridge Central Mosque’s atrium (Cmglee, CC BY-SA 4.0)

We will also look at variables relating to how and to what extent a religious group is accepted by mainstream society in a particular national context or by the greater mainstream tradition to which it claims to be associated. We will also include information on beliefs and practices that might have a negative effect on wellbeing of some people, such as questions about the treatment of former members and the corporal punishment of children.

Svetoary community celebrating Mokosh (Union of Slavic Rodnover Communities, CC BY-SA 4.0)

After we establish this framework, we will enter 400 movements into the new database structure. Half of these entries will be organised by the partner organisation Inform, based in Theology and Religious Studies at King’s College London and half will be commissioned by Dr. Christopher with a focus on engaging scholars and trained expert-insiders from Asia and Africa. Our selection criteria for these groups will capture five broad traditions which have a significant presence from the 1970s onwards and have engaged with rapidly changing media technologies and the increasingly global flows of information and people.

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The BASR is pleased to be supporting the quinquennial IAHR conference in Krakow this year and we hope to see many of you there. As is our usual custom in an IAHR year, we will be running our annual conference for 2025 over a single day. This year, with thanks to the Open University for hosting, we have also chosen to run the conference online, in the hope that this will be as accessible to as many participants as possible.

We are therefore pleased to announce that the theme for this year’s conference will be, ‘Religion Space and Place’. Our keynote speaker will be Professor Lily Kong, a geographer who has written extensively on religion, with a focus on religion and urban change in Asian cities.

15-minute papers are welcome from all scholars, at any level of experience, on any dimension of

Religion Space and Place, including (but not limited to):

• Religion and pilgrimage;

• Religion and nationalism;

• Religion and populism;

• Religion and urban transformation;

• Religion and rural change;

• Religion, borders and stratification;

• Religion and tourism;

• Religion and architecture;

• Religion and virtual space;

• Religion, landscape and memory.

Papers are also welcome on any dimension of inter-disciplinary, theoretical or methodological reflection, including (but not limited to)

• Religious Studies and Geography;

• Theorising religious space and the places of religion;

• Feminist, post-colonial or post-humanist approaches to religion, space and place.

Submissions should be sent to [email protected] by June 9 2025.

By David Robertson 

Every year, on April 1^st (today!), your news feed is filled with fake stories, designed to test your credulity. No, I’m not talking about post-truth disinformation – I’m talking about April Fools’ Day. Today’s media pranks are a very modern version of a much older tradition.

But just how much older? Like many of today’s traditions (Christmas or Mother’s Day, for example), most of what we now associate with April Fool’s Day dates back only to the Victorian period, when rapid industrialisation and urbanisation led to both an interest in preserving rural traditions that were in danger of being lost, as well as a process of standardisation, as people from different villages came together in the cities.

As well as pranks, today you will likely also come across articles explaining what these supposedly original, deeper religious roots of the day were—usually something like this:

In 1584, King Henry VIII passed the Act of Supremacy, which made the king to be the only head of the Church of England, declaring England independent from Papal authority. Although his daughter, Mary Tudor, reversed this, her successor Elizabeth I reinstated it and went even further, making it illegal not to be an Anglican. Roman Catholics, as well as puritan Protestants were prosecuted as recusants with fines, imprisonment and even capital punishment. One of the techniques used to identify recusants was to trick them into admitting they had broken their Lent fast on Maundy Thursday, rather than Holy Saturday as Anglicans did, and Anglicans were granted special leave to lie on the Friday in between. As Maundy Thursday often fell close to April 1^st, which was already a holiday, and so the date quickly became associated with these April Fools.

Although you will hear this story every April, it is not true! Rather, it’s an example of later anti-Catholic prejudice. As is often the case with traditions, the REAL story is far stranger and more interesting.

In the sixteenth century, a community grew up around Louis-Joseph Pseudos, Bishop of Abrille, in the Languedoc region of southern France. Psuedos was infamous for his heretical preaching that the Man Jesus and the God Christ were two different beings. Modern historians, notably Astley (1987), have argued that his anticlerical rhetoric was probably the actual reason he was excommunicated by Rome, in 1535. Pseudos continued to lead his community of followers as an independent Bishop, and eventually came to believe that the God Christ had incarnated in him, as well as the Man Jesus. The community began to call themselves the Poissons d’Abrille, but everyone else called them the Abrille Fools. Several records from across France and into modern Belgium over the following fifty years mention a game called “Abril’s Fools” being played during the Easter celebrations, in which children would go around the revellers telling lies in an attempt to winkle out the gullible, heretical Fools, who would then become the focus of boisterous mockery. This game soon spread to Britain, but with its name mispronounced to show that it was now stripped of its religious and political context.

So, this April Fools’ Day, remember Louis-Joseph Pseudos, and try not to believe every “true” story you read – even if it comes from a seemingly reputable source!

By Niall Oddy 

‘We’ve kind of forgotten that what underpins everything is our Judeo-Christian culture, and that’s where we need to start.’ These words emphasising the significance of faith in British society were uttered last month by Nigel Farage, the leader of the political party Reform UK.[i] But is religion really important in Britain? After all, the 2021 census indicated that less the half of the population of England and Wales considered themselves to be Christian and over half of Scottish people declared themselves to have no religion.[ii]

The relationship between religious identity and national identity is contentious. In contrast to Farage’s claim that British identity has ‘Judeo-Christian’ underpinnings, the National Secular Society campaigns to lessen the influence of religion in British society.[iii] Debates about the role of religion in society have a long history, and in this blog post I want to travel back to the sixteenth century, when the Protestant Reformation had unsettled the religious uniformity that had long prevailed in most of western Europe.

The spread of Protestantism forced governments to grapple with how to respond. In England, Henry VIII broke from Rome to establish an independent Church of England. In France, the monarchy remained steadfastly Catholic. Yet, around 10% of France’s population of 15 million converted to the Calvinist branch of Protestantism. Hardline Catholics opposed religious freedoms for this large minority. The monarchy’s attempts to broker compromise failed, leading to over three decades of warfare known as the French Wars of Religion (1562 – 98).

France was not the only country to experience bloodshed as a result of the Reformation. In fact, refugees fleeing religious persecution were so common that the historian Heiko Oberman coined the phrase the ‘Reformation of the Refugees’.[iv] John Calvin was one of over 5,000 French people who fled to the safety of Geneva as the city doubled in size. Basel, Strasbourg and Zurich were also safe places for exiles. As many as 100,000 Protestants from the Low Countries (Netherlands and Belgium) fled to cities in England and the Holy Roman Empire, including London, Cologne, Hamburg, and Frankfurt. Not every Protestant was a refugee, but enough were that exile was a significant and well-known part of Protestant experience, identity and culture. Religious reformers were conscious of belonging to a pan-European community that had suffered persecution and exile from their homeland.

The refugee experience can help us to think about the relationship between religious identity and national identity. What does it mean to have to leave your country of birth because of your religious identity? How does that feel? A travel account by one French Calvinist, Jean de Léry (1536 – 1613), offers some insights.

Born in France, Léry studied in Geneva, became a Calvinist minister and got embroiled in the French Wars of Religion. He was in Sancerre with many fellow Protestants in 1572 when Catholic forces began an eight-month siege that resulted in starvation and acts of cannibalism. Léry survived and eventually settled in Switzerland.

In 1578 Léry published an account of the time he spent in Brazil in 1557 – 58. His History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil recounted how he went with a group of Calvinists to assist with the establishment of a French colony. After some months, disagreements with the Catholics there about religious practices led to Léry and his co-religionists being expelled from the French fort. They spent time living with the indigenous Tupinamba people before returning to France.

In his published account Léry explores his split loyalties to his country and his faith.  He calls France ‘my homeland’ and of himself writes, ‘native Frenchman that I am, desirous of the honour of my prince’.[v] Monarchy, though, was problematic from the point of a Calvinist subject to a Catholic king. Writing twenty years after his return from Brazil, and having witnessed the horrors of the Wars of Religion, Léry is nostalgic about his time across the Atlantic and expresses his ‘regret’ that he is not there. For him, Brazil represented a potential safe haven from Catholic France and an opportunity to resolve the contradictions between religion and nationhood:

‘if we had stayed longer in that country, we would have drawn and won some of them to Jesus Christ [and…] there would be at present more than ten thousand Frenchmen who, besides staunchly protecting our island and our fort against the Portuguese […] would now possess under allegiance to our King a great country in the land of Brazil’.

Léry here blames the Catholics for the failure of the colony, expressing a belief that if the Calvinists had not been forced out, he would have been able to perform a service for both his faith and his country.

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