ReligionIntel is an AI-assisted analytical platform built for professionals who work at the intersection of religion and public life — foreign policy practitioners, journalists, scholars, advocates, and policymakers who already know that faith shapes how nations behave, and who need better tools to act on that knowledge.

The platform combines the analytical capabilities of Anthropic’s large language model with curated databases of religious actors, live news feeds from authoritative sources, and prompts designed by a senior religion journalist and scholar with more than two decades of experience covering religion’s role in international affairs and American public life. It is a starting point for serious analysis — not a substitute for it.

When you ask ReligionIntel to assess religious risk in Pakistan, analyze the bilateral religious dimensions of a US-Saudi relationship, or brief you on how evangelical communities are positioned on immigration policy, you are drawing on Anthropic’s synthesis of an enormous corpus of training data: academic scholarship, government reports, journalism, policy documents, and reference materials in religion, international affairs, law, and politics.

ReligionIntel does not query external databases in real time when generating analytical responses. It is not accessing USCIRF’s servers, pulling live State Department cables, or reading this morning’s newspaper. It is drawing on patterns in its training — which is both its strength and its limit. For structural, slowly-changing factors like religious demographics, constitutional frameworks, longstanding government postures toward minority communities, and the history and ideology of a transnational religious actor, that training is deep and generally reliable. For fast-moving developments, ReligionIntel’s analysis should be treated as context, not current intelligence.

The one exception is the News Digest, which pulls headlines directly and in real time from the RSS feeds of a wide range of authoritative sources. Those headlines are genuinely live.

The analytical foundation of ReligionIntel rests on a set of primary sources that serious religion-and-policy professionals will recognize.

The US Commission on International Religious Freedom publishes annual country assessments and maintains the most authoritative public database of government-level religious freedom violations. The State Department’s annual International Religious Freedom Reports provide country-by-country documentation from US diplomatic posts. The Pew Research Center’s Global Restrictions on Religion index tracks both government restrictions and social hostilities across nearly 200 countries. The Association of Religion Data Archives provides the most comprehensive repository of religious demographic and survey data available to researchers.

In the US domestic context, the Public Religion Research Institute’s American Values Survey and related research provides the most rigorous tracking of how religious identity maps onto political behavior, policy preferences, and cultural attitudes.

Academic scholarship in religion and international affairs — from Georgetown’s Berkley Center, the US Institute of Peace, and the broader community of scholars in religious studies, political science, and international law — forms the intellectual scaffolding of the platform’s analytical frameworks.

The News Digest draws from outlets such as Religion News Service, NPR Religion, USCIRF, Crux, National Catholic Reporter, Christianity Today, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Catholic News Agency, RealClearReligion, and the Berkley Center for the Global section, and from a parallel set of domestic-focused sources for the USA section.

Claude’s training data has a knowledge cutoff of early 2025. This matters differently depending on what you are asking.

For questions about religious demography, constitutional doctrine, the history and structure of transnational religious organizations, or the theological bases of a faith community’s policy positions — areas where change is slow and the scholarly record is deep — the 2025 cutoff is unlikely to be a material limitation.

For questions about recent events — a government designation issued last month, a Supreme Court decision handed down this term, a religious leader who rose to prominence in 2025 — the platform may not have current information, and users should verify against live sources. When in doubt, the Deeper Dive research packages point toward the primary sources where current information lives.

Each analytical tool includes a Deeper Dive option that generates a curated research resource package: government sources, academic literature, think tank reports, key scholars, and monitoring databases relevant to your query. These packages are designed as roadmaps — pointing you toward the categories and types of sources that matter, and in many cases toward specific works and institutions that are genuinely relevant.

A note of caution: AI-generated bibliographic details should always be verified before use in formal professional or academic work. The scholars named are real, the organizations are real, and the source types are accurate — but specific titles, publication years, and URLs should be confirmed against the original sources. Treat the Deeper Dive as an expert colleague pointing you in the right direction, not as a verified bibliography.

The Transnational Religious Actor Database and the US Religious Actor Profiles are not AI-generated — they are hand-curated by the platform’s editor based on professional judgment about which actors matter most to the foreign policy and domestic policy communities this platform serves. The seed profiles reflect two decades of reporting on and scholarship about religious actors and their policy implications. The AI analysis generated when you click on a profile draws on those curated foundations and supplements them with broader synthesis.

The platform is well-suited to: synthesizing complex multi-source analysis quickly; identifying the relevant frameworks, actors, and historical context for a religion-policy question; generating research resource packages that would take hours to compile manually; briefing on the theological bases of a community’s policy positions; and mapping the domestic and international religious landscape around a policy issue.

Users should apply additional scrutiny to: highly specific factual claims, particularly exact statistics, dates, and percentages; analysis of very recent events or developments from late 2024 onward; situations in countries or regions that are underrepresented in English-language scholarship; and any AI-generated citation of a specific publication, URL, or document.

ReligionIntel is not a neutral algorithm. The choice of which transnational actors to profile, which domestic organizations to include, which sources feed the News Digest, which quick-launch prompts appear on each tool, and how each analytical prompt is framed — all of these reflect editorial judgment built on professional experience.

That experience includes nearly two decades as Religion Beat Editor and Correspondent for The Associated Press, advanced degrees in Islam and Muslim-Christian Relations and Religion and Social Movements from Georgetown University, field research in Turkey, Egypt, Uzbekistan, and Nigeria, and scholarly engagement with the religion-and-foreign-policy community at venues including the R20 International Summit of Religious Authorities and the Council on Foreign Relations.

The platform is designed to be useful to professionals across the political and theological spectrum. It does not advocate for particular policy positions. Where communities are divided, it attempts to represent those divisions accurately. Where the scholarly record is contested, it says so.

AI tools are only as good as the judgment behind them. ReligionIntel is built on the conviction that religion deserves serious analytical attention in both foreign and domestic affairs — and that the professionals who share that conviction deserve tools equal to the seriousness of the work. We hope this platform earns your trust over time, and we welcome feedback at walterratliff@gmail.com.