(RNS) — The news of Pope Francis’ death dominated headlines for days in 2025, as the media feasted on the pomp and mystery of the Vatican succession rituals and the world bade farewell to a charismatic leader who spoke frankly and acted on his own teaching. But as in every year, faith was present in so many of the headlines, and side by side with politics, faith produced some of the most compelling and inspiring events of 2025, as well as some of the most distressing and divisive. Here are the stories that were last year’s most read, most shared and most likely, in the eyes of RNS’ editors, to shape the year ahead.
Pope Leo XIV is elected the first U.S.-born leader of the Catholic Church
Heading into the conclave at the Vatican the first week of May, the man whose resumé made him the obvious successor to Francis was little considered: Cardinal Robert Prevost, who had traveled widely as head of the global Augustinian order, acquainting himself with the world’s cardinals, then headed the committee charged with nominating the world’s bishops. But Prevost was an American, and therefore disqualified — until he wasn’t. After only two days, the cardinal electors sent up the white smoke and presented the first pope from the most powerful country on Earth.
Charlie Kirk’s assassination elevates him to martyr status
The co-founder of Turning Point USA was at the height of his influence the day he was shot at Utah Valley University on a stop on his “American Comeback” tour. He was a favorite of the Trump White House for helping deliver evangelical Christian votes in the 2024 election — directly, through his Turning Point USA campus political organization, and indirectly through Turning Point Faith, which recruited pastors to the MAGA cause. But with his death, it became clear that Kirk had helped keep the MAGA movement together as an enforcer of loyalty to the president and as a star debater who dispensed Bible-backed arguments against abortion rights, feminism and transgender acceptance. Without him, the religious and political right has offered him as a martyr who can bind up the divisions over Israel, antisemitism and roiling conspiracy theories.
Faith leaders mobilize against immigrant sweeps
When a protester took a nonlethal pepper bullet to the head outside the Broadview Detention Center outside Chicago, the incident distilled a growing sense that immigration agents were going beyond acceptable tactics in their all-out rounding up of noncitizens. That the targeted protester was the Rev. David Black, pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Chicago, displayed the activism of many clergy in defending the undocumented. From the Bay Area to New York, clergy have gone to the front lines at protests, demanded access to incarcerated migrants and, when federal government has threatened to arrest people at their houses of worship, filed lawsuits alleging violations of their religious freedom. The Episcopal Church, faced with the prospect of resettling a group of white Afrikaners favored by the Trump administration, refused.
Other clergy focused on the material and spiritual deprivation of families of those who have been deported, rallying their congregations to supply food or going themselves to administer Communion to those too afraid to leave their homes.
Armed attacks made a battleground of religious belief
Shootings at houses of worship are scarcely new, especially hate-fueled attacks at synagogues or gatherings of Jews such as the Bondi Beach massacre, which killed 15 in Sydney, Australia, in December. But in the sad cycles of these crimes, authorities have increasingly cited hatred for religious belief itself in recent years. In August, a 23-year-old whose personal writings included anti-Catholic and antisemitic fulminations fired through the windows of Minneapolis’ Catholic Church of the Annunciation, where students and teachers at the church’s school were attending Mass, killing two children and wounding 30. The next month, a man motivated by hatred for Latter-day Saints, according to authorities, rammed an LDS chapel in Grand Blanc Township with his truck and opened fire before he set the building ablaze, killing two.
Meanwhile, the shooting death of Minnesota legislator Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, in June was apparently motivated by the shooter’s faith-based opposition to abortion, which led him to target Hortman, the Democratic leader of the Minnesota House, as well as another lawmaker, who, with her husband, survived.
First woman appointed to lead worldwide Anglican Communion
In October, the Rt. Rev. Sarah Mullally was nominated the 106th archbishop of Canterbury, making her the first woman to fill the role traditionally regarded as “first among equals” of the bishops of the 85 million-strong Anglican Communion. The news dismayed African Anglican bishops who have historically been slow to accept women leaders and are opposed to same-sex marriage, though Mullally has not taken any definitive stand on the latter.
Moving on or moving right, women were the United States’ most-watched religious demographic
In 2024, it was young men returning to church that caught the eye of religion sociologists. In the past year, however, new data has made women’s exodus from Christianity the story. While the percentage of men who are unaffiliated with any religious tradition has stayed the same since 2013, according to the PRRI Census of American Religion, Generation Z women (ages 18 to 29) have increasingly shed any sort of religious label over that time. Anecdotally, evangelical women in particular continue to abandon a church they view as patriarchal and too political.
But if their numbers are fewer overall, in some sectors of the faith their voices are growing stronger. Christian “momfluencers” and liberal-baiting conservative commentators such as Allie Beth Stuckey have drawn huge audiences to videos, to conferences and to books such as Stuckey’s “Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion.” The message is one of defiance. “The pattern that we see of Christianity for the past 2,000 years, much to the disappointment of the tyrants that have tried to stop us, is that Christians tell the truth, Christians are persecuted, Christians multiply,” Stuckey said at a recent stop on her “Share the Arrows” tour.
New York City elects its first Muslim mayor
In a campaign that stunned political observers, Zohran Mamdani, a Democratic Socialist back-bencher representing Queens in New York’s State Assembly, defeated the establishment favorite, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, in both the Democratic primary and the general election to become the first Muslim to take the city’s top office. Mamdani, who was born in Uganda to diaspora Indian parents, won despite his steadfast defense of Palestinian liberation and his anti-Zionist convictions. He owed his victory to relentlessly vowing to make New York more affordable to its middle-class voters, but, working from a playbook likely to be copied by other progressive Muslim candidates, unabashedly proclaiming his faith while building a multifaith network of supporters around the city.
The rise of political Islamophobia
Mamdani’s success in the June mayoral primary stirred politicians on the right to warn of a Muslim takeover, with U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia posting a picture of the Statue of Liberty covered in a black burqa, and her colleague Andy Ogles, a Republican representative from Tennessee, dubbing Mamdani “little muhammad” in an X post and calling for his deportation. Anti-Muslim propaganda was already on the rise after the East Plano Islamic Center, a mosque in North Texas, sought to build a Muslim-centric community, causing local officials to accuse EPIC of establishing Shariah. In March, the state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, launched an investigation into the development, and in December he sued the mosque to stop the plan. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott also declared the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim voter-turnout organization, a foreign terrorist organization.
While Mamdani defeated this kind of rhetoric by sticking to his economic message, Muslims worry that Islamophobia will gain a foothold in next year’s midterm elections.
Jen Lyell, a Southern Baptist and a survivor of sexual misconduct, dies at 47
Once one of the highest-ranking women leaders in the Southern Baptist Convention, Jen Lyell was showered with hate from pastors and church leaders in 2019 after she named a former seminary professor as her abuser and demanded he resign from a high-profile ministry. The scandal came as the largest Protestant denomination in the United States was reckoning with the #ChurchToo movement, with grassroots demands to quell sexual misconduct in the denomination’s churches. By the time she died, in June, promised reforms to SBC protocols on abuse had stalled. Though she inspired women in the church for her perseverance, news of her death struck some as the final blow to sexual abuse reform efforts.
Faith leaders argue for a humane artificial intelligence
“Do not let the algorithm write your story! Be the authors yourselves; use technology wisely, but do not let technology use you,” Pope Leo XIV told students at the Jubilee of the World of Education earlier this year. The pope’s warning was prompted by the advent of artificial intelligence amid predictions that it will transform the world, and possibly impair the quality of human souls.
The pope is not the only religious thinker who is concerned with how the technology will be used, and whether it will ultimately help or harm humankind. Christians of all stripes are having conversations about how to ensure that AI will include human values and godly ones, and what it means to say prayers generated by large language models. A new venture, the Buddhism and AI Initiative, launched publicly in August. It aims to bring together Buddhist practitioners, technologists and researchers to shape the future of AI. Theologians and pastors have long grappled with technology’s promise — and threat — to free humans from work. As one theologian wrote in an essay for RNS this year, the results are mixed at best. Instead of leisure, he cautioned, “we get acceleration. Instead of freedom, we get precarity.”
