(RNS) — Figures from the realms of politics to sports, from presiding over the Vatican to Temple Square, are among those who died in 2025 and will be remembered for shaping the world of faith.
They include a millennial influencer who reached vast audiences on social media and college campuses, while others wrote dozens of books or reached millions via radio and TV stations. Others used their pulpits to preach the gospel or advocated for the environment, election fairness or justice within and beyond their denominations.
Here, we recall some of the religious leaders who died this year.
Pope Francis
The former archbishop of Buenos Aires who became the worldwide leader of the Roman Catholic Church in 2013 died on April 21 at age 88. The day before, he surprised faithful gathered in St. Peter’s Square for Easter Sunday. Francis, a charismatic reformer, was a leader of many firsts, including becoming the first Latin American pope and the first Jesuit pontiff.
Known for his humility — he chose to wear simple clothing and jewelry — Francis was an advocate for peace in war-torn countries and for interfaith engagement that fostered aid for the environment and for the poor. He made significant structural and economic reforms in the Vatican and selected new cardinals that led to the most diverse College of Cardinals in the church’s history. He sought to restore the church’s credibility after The Boston Globe’s 2002 “Spotlight” investigation showed numerous cases of sexual abuse by U.S. clergy, but the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors he created at the Vatican was impeded by political wrangling.
Francis also worked to reduce the often-preferential treatment of priests over lay people in the church. The Synod on Synodality, a three-year process that ended in 2024, aimed to include the views of Catholics across the globe in hopes of adding their perspectives to the church’s decision-making.
He retained church teaching on abortion, euthanasia, homosexuality and female priesthood. Among the few changes he made, one opened the door for divorced and remarried Catholics to receive the Eucharist, and another added the church’s opposition to the death penalty to its catechism.
Yet, pastorally, he stood out for including women in leadership in Vatican departments, welcoming encounters with gay couples and inviting trans sex workers to Vatican events. “Who am I to judge?” he famously said early in his pontificate, in reference to gay people.
Russell M. Nelson
The oldest president in the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints died on Sept. 27 at age 101.
In his first year as president in 2018, the former heart surgeon sought to transform the way his religious group was addressed, The Associated Press reported, using its full name rather than the shorter “Mormon” or “LDS” substitutes that had been used for decades.
The following year, he rescinded 2015 rules that regarded same-sex couples as sinners who could be expelled and that forbade baptisms of children whose parents were gay. Yet his administration maintained the church’s opposition to same-sex marriage and tightened policies that restricted participation of members who changed their names, dress or pronouns or sought gender-affirming surgeries, the AP said.
During his seven-year presidency, he announced 200 temples across the globe and permitted women and girls to officially witness church ordinances such as temple sealings and baptisms. He also fostered diversity and improved race relations: He named a Brazilian and a Chinese-American to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, the church’s second-highest leadership body, becoming the first two men in the body who were not white Americans. And he also led the church as it began an initiative with the NAACP in 2018, where leaders of the church and the civil rights organization called for “greater civility, racial and ethnic harmony and mutual respect.”
Nelson also led the church to part ways with the Boy Scouts of America, which had started accepting LGBTQ+ young people and adult volunteer leaders. The Mormon church developed its own program for youth in North America and beyond.
A 2022 investigation by AP found that the LDS’ hotline for reporting sexual abuse could cause victims to remain in danger because leaders could share accusations with church attorneys instead of law enforcement. Nelson and other leaders responded that the hotline “has everything to do with protecting children and has nothing to do with cover-up.”
Charlie Kirk
The evangelical Christian activist who urged young Americans to support President Donald Trump and his MAGA cause died Sept. 10 at age 31.
Kirk, who was shot to death while speaking on the campus of Utah Valley University in Orem, was the host of the streaming “Charlie Kirk Show” and a founder of two conservative organizations, Turning Point USA, which seeks to “educate young people about the importance of fiscal responsibility, free markets and freedom,” and Turning Point Faith, where he more recently spoke openly about his faith and rallied Christian leaders to back Trump’s causes.
Turning Point USA, which he cofounded with Tea Party conservative William Montgomery in 2012, grew quickly, forming 800 chapters on high school and college campuses within three years.
In 2019, Kirk joined Jerry Falwell Jr., then-president of Liberty University, to launch the Falkirk Center, a Liberty-based think tank to protect Judeo-Christian beliefs. In 2021, Kirk departed after Falwell was the subject of scandal; the center has since been renamed the Standing for Freedom Center.
Kirk became a social media personality, advocating for conservative positions and regularly attracting millions of viewers to videos depicting him debating the validity of spiritual or political beliefs. His supporters praised him for engaging people who disagreed with his stances, but his critics included some Black pastors who objected to his statements that denigrated Black people, immigrants, Muslims, women and LGBTQ+ people.
In an early 2025 video, Kirk talked about taking a “Jewish Sabbath” every week, turning off his phone from Friday night to Saturday night. “I’m not saying that that’s something you have to do,” he said. “I’m saying it will make your life better. It was important enough that God put it as one of the Ten Commandments.”
Jennifer Lyell
The editor and author, who reached high ranks of Christian publishing before her career was sidelined after she accused a former Southern Baptist leader of abuse, died on June 7 at age 47.
She worked on New York Times bestseller books while serving as vice president at Lifeway, the publishing arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, the country’s largest Protestant denomination.
While studying at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in 2004, where she earned a Master of Divinity degree, Lyell, then 26, met David Sills, a professor in his late 40s who became a surrogate father figure and mentor. In 2018, Lyell told her supervisors that Sills allegedly used force and his spiritual influence to coerce her into nonconsensual sexual acts over a period of a dozen years. Sills admitted to misconduct and resigned from his leadership of a nonprofit as well as his seminary position with no details made public.
But when Lyell made her allegations public the next year after Sills took a job at another Christian ministry, a Baptist Press article said Lyell had “a morally inappropriate relationship” rather than depicting her claims as abuse. Though the publication later apologized and retracted the statement, Lyell was hit with hate messages, and churches and pastors called for her firing. Amid the turmoil, Lyell quit her job. She found another career after attending law school.
Although she was sued by Sills, Lyell never backed down from her account. Earlier in 2025, she detailed the abuse allegations in a deposition, noting how the Bible had been used for years to keep her quiet.
“I do not need to be under oath to tell the truth — and there are no lies that will shake my certainty of what is true,” she said in a social media post when the suit was filed.
The Aga Khan IV
The prominent philanthropist and global spiritual leader of millions of Ismaili Muslims died Feb. 4 at age 88.
The Aga Khan IV became the leader of the religious community at age 20, the Associated Press reported. He was selected by his grandfather as the successor to direct the Ismaili Muslim sect, favoring him over his playboy father and choosing the younger man “who has been brought up in the midst of the new age.” He was considered a direct descendant of the Prophet Muhammad and led the Shiite sect that initially had India as its center but spread to East Africa, the Middle East and South and Central Asia.
The Aga Khan was given his title in a 1957 ceremony in Tanzania. A year-and-a-half later, he returned to Harvard University to complete his undergraduate degree after spending time at the side of his then-ailing grandfather.
Focusing on philanthropy instead of politics, the Aga Khan led the Aga Khan Development Network that addressed housing, education, health care and rural economic development, the AP said. Though he considered it inaccurate to be described as a philanthropist, he is thought to have put billions of dollars into nonprofit development projects in dozens of countries.
“What is not understood is that this work is for us a part of our institutional responsibility — it flows from the mandate of the office of Imam to improve the quality of worldly life for the concerned communities,” he said in a 2006 award acceptance speech for Germany’s Tutzing Evangelical Academy.
The Aga Khan also was known for owning and breeding horses and represented Iran in the 1964 Winter Olympics as a skier.
Rabbi Arthur Waskow
The social justice activist regarded as the forefather of postwar U.S. Jewish progressivism died Oct. 20 at age 92.
Waskow was the leader of Philadelphia’s Shalom Center since 1983 and a progressive voice on late 20th-century causes, including nuclear disarmament, environmental justice and civil rights.
Never working as a pulpit rabbi, he gained a reputation as a radical in the forefront of justice and equality movements.
He was a founding member of Jews for Urban Justice, which became a partner in the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign. One of the Jewish group’s most visible social actions was to protest, on the eve of Yom Kippur, a Washington synagogue that included congregants who would not rent real estate to Black people.
Waskow was perhaps best known for writing “The Freedom Seder: A New Haggadah for Passover,” which reinterpreted the Exodus story of the Israelites’ liberation from Egyptian slavery, using traditional liturgy alongside texts by King, Mahatma Gandhi, Henry David Thoreau and others.
Ordained at age 62 by Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, the founder of the Jewish Renewal movement, and three other rabbis, Waskow was not tied to a single denomination. He taught at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College near Philadelphia and at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, a Reform movement seminary, where he taught what is considered the first eco-Judaism course.
Bill McCartney
The football coach who went on to found the Promise Keepers, an evangelical Christian men’s movement that brought tens of thousands of men to the National Mall in the 1990s, died on Jan. 10 at age 84.
The organization grew from a relatively small group of participants in the early 1990s to a crowd of 4,000 at a University of Colorado arena, where McCartney coached football. Within a few years, tens of thousands worshipped together in stadiums and arenas. And in 1997, the movement held its Stand in the Gap rally on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
McCartney and his movement, driven by a concern that American men had lost faith in God and caused their families to suffer, sparked tensions about gender roles, particularly in religious circles, and the place of faith in civic life.
“A real man, a man’s man, is a Godly man,” McCartney said in a 1995 press conference before a packed-out event in Washington, D.C., The Washington Post reported. “A real man is a man of substance, a man that’s vulnerable, a man who loves his wife, a man that has a passion for God, and is willing to lay down his life for him.”
Promise Keepers promoted racial reconciliation, which it connected to religious revival, but that focus proved to be less popular than the emphasis on being good husbands and fathers. As the movement shifted to smaller events, it had financial challenges and laid off staffers. It has sought to reinvent itself several times, including with a turn toward partisanship, but never regained its earlier level of influence.
Known as “Coach Mac,” McCartney remains the coach with the most wins in Colorado history — a record of 93-55-5 — and was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame.
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Martin E. Marty
The renowned church historian and prolific author who long interpreted religion and public life died Feb. 25 at age 97.
His book “Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience in America” earned Marty, who taught at the University of Chicago Divinity School for 35 years, 1972 National Book Awards in Philosophy and Religion. In the next decade, he published the first of three volumes about American religion in the 20th century. In it, he cast fundamentalism as a reaction to modernity and secularism and not to liberal religion.
With religion scholar R. Scott Appleby, Marty examined fundamentalism in seven global faiths for the “Modern American Religion and the Fundamentalism Project.” The work resulted in books, radio episodes and documentary films featured on National Public Radio and PBS.
He served more than five decades as an editor and columnist of The Christian Century magazine. For almost as long, he produced “Context,” a biweekly newsletter.
Prior to joining the faculty at the Chicago Divinity School, Marty was ordained in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod and served in Chicago-area churches, including the Lutheran Church of the Holy Spirit in Elk Grove Village, a congregation he founded.
Although known for his academic contributions, Marty also participated in interreligious and civil rights activities, serving in 1964 as a Protestant observer during the Second Vatican Council and marching with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, Alabama, the next year.
The Rev. Joan Brown Campbell
The first ordained woman to lead the National Council of Churches and the U.S. office of the World Council of Churches died March 29 at age 93.
She also was the director of religion at the Chautauqua Institution, an intellectual and arts-focused summer retreat center in southwestern New York, where she fostered ecumenism and interfaith relations.
Campbell worked with an array of prominent leaders, often across religious lines, to address social, political and faith issues. She invited the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to her predominantly white church in the Cleveland suburbs in 1965, after King observed that he’d only spoken to Black congregations in the area. She recalled in a Religion News Service interview how the civil rights leader spoke to some 3,000 outside, after influential members of the Shaker Heights church opposed his presence inside their building.
She was the only woman among more than 200 clergy to process into Cape Town’s St. George’s Cathedral at the 1986 enthronement service of Desmond Tutu as the archbishop of the Anglican Church of South Africa. Campbell led a delegation that presented Pope John Paul II with a copy of the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, first published by the NCC in 1989. She traveled to Belgrade with the Rev. Jesse Jackson to negotiate, along with clergy from the Serbian Orthodox Church, the release of American soldiers imprisoned there during the Balkan Wars of the 1990s. Late in her time leading the NCC, she helped negotiate the return of a young boy named Elián González to his family in Cuba after he was found floating on an inner tube off the coast of Florida.
She also held a closed-door meeting with evangelist Billy Graham, who rarely met alone with a woman, and sometimes created seating issues in contexts where women and men traditionally sit separately.
Ordained by three different denominations — the Progressive National Baptist Convention, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and the American Baptist Churches USA — Campbell encouraged other women to be involved in ordained ministry and ecumenism.
“I think that my own style, which some people took issue with, is not one of trying to make the other side the enemy as much as it is to see what the barriers are and see if you can climb across those barriers, and then that will be a major victory, and it opens doors for other people,” she told RNS.
Kay Arthur
The popular Christian speaker and host of the “Precepts for Life” Bible teaching program died on May 20 at age 91.
A former nurse, Arthur began leading Bible studies for teens after she and her husband, Jack, returned to the U.S. from serving as missionaries in Mexico.
She was famous for her Bible studies that involved teaching people to “observe, interpret and apply the truth of Scripture.” The Precept Bible Study Method has been translated into 110 languages and is used in 190 countries.
“When you know what God says, what He means, and how to put His truths into practice, you will be equipped for every circumstance of life,” Arthur was known to have said, according to Precept’s announcement of her death.
The “Precepts for Life” program that Arthur hosted from 1999 to 2019 reached more than 75 million households in more than 30 countries, the ministry said. It was named to the National Religious Broadcasters Hall of Fame in 2011. The program was also twice named Best Bible Teaching Program by the NRB.
The author of more than 100 Bible studies and books, Arthur won four Evangelical Christian Publishers Association Gold Medallion awards.
Jimmy Swaggart
The televangelist and gospel singer known for controversy in the 1990s died July 1 at age 90.
At one time, he was one of the most well-known preachers in the U.S. — a Pentecostal with crusades filling stadiums in the 1980s. He came from a musical family that included rock ‘n’ roll pioneer Jerry Lee Lewis and country star Mickey Gilley. A prolific author, including the book “The Expositor’s Study Bible,” he published The Evangelist magazine for five decades.
As Swaggart’s fame grew, so did his ministry, gaining a large following on radio and television as it raised $100 million a year. But he also engaged in feuds with rival televangelists Oral Roberts and Jim Bakker.
Swaggart was accused of trying to take over Bakker’s ministry but ended up following Bakker in falls from grace. Swaggart and Marvin Gorman, a Louisiana evangelist, were involved in dueling suits after Swaggart accused Gorman of sexual misconduct. Gorman hired a private detective to follow Swaggart, who was eventually photographed visiting a New Orleans prostitute. An investigation by the Assemblies of God, which ordained Swaggart, led to a 1988 confession by the minister in front of his congregation at a worship service that was broadcast live.
“I have sinned against you,” he told those watching and a capacity crowd at Family Worship Center, his Baton Rouge, Louisiana, church. “I beg you, forgive me.” He was caught again in 1991, with a woman identified as a prostitute, during a California traffic stop.
Swaggart, whose ministry lost millions due to the scandals, was defrocked by the Assemblies of God. However, he remained active in ministry, preaching in his late 80s and singing as recently as early this year with his church’s gospel band. He was among the five inductees in this year’s Southern Gospel Hall of Fame.
James Dobson
The psychologist who advocated a “family values” brand of conservative Christian morality in his bestselling books and popular radio shows died Aug. 21 at age 89.
Trained as a child psychologist, Dobson founded Focus on the Family in 1977 to promote conservative views on parenting, defending spanking of children as a means of discipline. The nonprofit, eventually based in Colorado Springs, Colorado, became hugely influential among evangelical Christians and later gained a broader public audience due to his internationally syndicated radio programs.
He further outlined his parenting precepts in the 1992 book “Dare to Discipline,” followed by many sequels. His more than 70 books included “Bringing Up Boys”; “Bringing Up Girls”; “The New Strong-Willed Child”; and “When God Doesn’t Make Sense.”
Political leaders sought out Dobson as his popularity grew among cultural conservatives. He was regularly invited to the White House to consult with President Ronald Reagan and his staffers in the 1980s. Dobson was appointed to Attorney General Edwin Meese’s Commission on Pornography in 1985.
Dobson’s influence on policy and law extended as he started, along with evangelical leader and activist Gary Bauer, the Family Research Council in Washington to advocate for pro-family policies in 1983. In 1994, he cofounded, along with evangelical luminaries D. James Kennedy and Bill Bright, the Alliance Defense Fund, a conservative legal organization now known as Alliance Defending Freedom.
Dobson left Focus on the Family in 2009 — some reports at the time said he was pushed out — and launched the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute and “Family Talk,” a nationally syndicated radio broadcast. He last recorded a broadcast in March, according to the public relations firm representing the institute and his family. It aired in April.
Sister Jean Dolores Schmidt
The chaplain of Loyola University Chicago men’s basketball team who became an international celebrity died Oct. 9 at age 106.
She had retained her post until her August retirement due to health complications but remained an adviser at the university in her final months.
Schmidt gained fame along with the Loyola Ramblers when the team was considered an underdog in the school’s 2018 March Madness run. Videos clips from that time showed her applauding from her wheelchair, cheering on her team from the sidelines. The team eventually lost to the University of Michigan.
A member of a devout Catholic family, she wrote in her memoir “Wake Up with Purpose! What I’ve Learned in My First Hundred Years” of playing intramural basketball when it was becoming popular for girls and women. She also said she knew by age 10 that she wanted to be a religious sister.
She joined the religious order Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary after graduating from high school. She taught for many years at Mundelein College for Women, which was founded by her order in 1930 on Chicago’s north side and became part of Loyola Chicago in 1991.
Schmidt was inducted into the Loyola Ramblers Athletic Hall of Fame in 2017. On her 103rd birthday, the Chicago train station plaza at Loyola was named after her, The Associated Press reported, with a sign that reads “Home of the World Famous Sister Jean.”
Theodore McCarrick
The former cardinal, who was defrocked after facing sexual abuse allegations, died April 3 at age 94.
McCarrick, who led the Diocese of Metuchen and the Archdiocese of Newark in New Jersey before becoming archbishop of Washington in 2001, was the highest-ranking U.S. prelate to face criminal charges for the sexual abuse of a minor. He was stripped of his cardinal rights and resigned from the College of Cardinals.
As early as 1994, reports emerged of McCarrick being involved in inappropriate behavior, including sharing his bed with seminarians, but in 2018 at least two minors and former seminarians accused him of engaging in sexual misconduct. The New York Times reported allegations that McCarrick sexually abused an 11-year-old boy, whom he had baptized in 1969, for 20 years.
In 2019, McCarrick was laicized after a canonical trial found him guilty of “solicitation in the sacrament of confession and sins against the Sixth Commandment with minors and with adults, with the aggravating factor of the abuse of power.” In 2024, the criminal case against him was suspended after he was found incompetent to stand trial because of his dementia.
Once widely influential in the church, including for his fundraising skills, McCarrick was one of the American prelates who drafted the “Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People.” The shadow of his alleged abuse continued to hang over the Washington and Newark archdioceses, as their leaders, Cardinal Robert McElroy and Cardinal Joseph Tobin, respectively, have been the subject of accusations that they mishandled matters relating to McCarrick.
The former prelate spent his last years in the Vianney Renewal Center in Missouri.
Bishop Reginald T. Jackson
The African Methodist Episcopal Church leader known for his commitment to voting rights and other social justice causes died Nov. 25 at age 71.
Jackson was serving a second four-year term as the chair of the predominantly Black denomination’s Social Action Commission at the time of his death. He also was leading the AME Church’s Second Episcopal District, which includes Maryland, North Carolina, Virginia and the District of Columbia.
While heading the AME Church’s district of hundreds of churches in Georgia, he was among faith leaders critical of that state’s passage of a 2021 elections bill that banned offering food and water to people waiting in line to vote and said the measure targeted people of color. He also was chair of Atlanta’s Morris Brown College, which regained its accreditation in 2022.
Before he became a bishop, Jackson led several New Jersey congregations, including St. Matthew AME Church in Orange where he served for 31 years. He also was an educational leader, including president of a county college board and a public school board, according to his biography on the Second Episcopal District website. He was influential in passing legislation that made racial profiling a crime and that halted the state’s death penalty.
Earlier this year, Jackson joined in efforts to boycott Target over its work to scale back diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. He was also vocal in his opposition to recent legislation and Trump administration policies that Jackson said were having a detrimental effect on African Americans.
“Our churches must rise now,” he wrote in July in The Contrarian, a Substack account described as “Unflinching journalism in defense of democracy.” “Our people must organize now. We need voter registration drives, policy teach-ins, and loud, public pressure on every member of Congress — Democrats and Republicans alike. We need our young people, our elders, our workers, and our warriors. We need a mass moral movement that makes clear: If you target our survival, we will target your seat.”
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