The Corporate Sovereignty Accords of 2141 included a nominal protection for religious practice, framed as a 'cultural expression right' rather than the older constitutional language of religious freedom. This framing has had significant practical consequences: religious institutions must register as Cultural Expression Organizations and are subject to the same licensing requirements as other cultural producers. Large, established congregations — the St. Casimir Cathedral in the Polish heritage district of the Northwest Stack, the Meridian Islamic Center in the Dearborn Quarter, and the half-dozen major Buddhist temple complexes in the Lakefront cultural corridor — have navigated the licensing system successfully, often by cultivating relationships with corporate sponsors who value the community goodwill that visible faith patronage generates.

Smaller, less institutionalized faith communities face considerably more difficulty. Storefront churches, home prayer groups, and new religious movements that lack the institutional capital to maintain Cultural Expression Organization status operate in a legal grey area that enforcement bodies choose to address selectively. In practice, religious gatherings in lower-tier districts are rarely disrupted unless they intersect with other concerns — organizing activity, unlicensed assembly, or association with political movements. The Meridian Interfaith Legal Defense Network, a coalition of religious liberty lawyers operating out of a shared office in the Wacker Stack district, handles approximately 300 cases per year involving religious practice disputes, the majority of which are resolved through negotiated compliance rather than litigation.

Neural interface technology has generated profound theological debate across faith communities. The question of whether neural implants constitute a modification of the God-given or naturally-given body has divided communities along lines that do not map neatly onto older denominational differences. Within Meridian's Catholic communities, a significant conservative faction called the Embodiment Coalition argues that cortical implants violate the integrity of the human person and constitute a form of self-harm; a larger progressive faction argues that augmentation is consistent with a theology of human creativity and stewardship. The Islamic scholarly community in the Dearborn Quarter has produced extensive jurisprudence on neural interfaces, much of it permissive regarding implants used for communication and navigation but divided on implants that alter mood, memory, or cognitive function.

New spiritual movements have emerged specifically in response to the megacity's conditions. The most widely discussed is called the Mesh, a non-hierarchical spiritual practice that understands the city's neural network infrastructure as a form of collective consciousness worthy of contemplative engagement. Mesh practitioners hold that moments of deep neural connectivity — particularly in high-density overlay spaces where thousands of minds are simultaneously processing shared data — constitute genuine spiritual experience. The Mesh has no central organization, no clergy, and no canonical texts; its practices are shared through neural overlay networks and vary considerably by community. Corporate communications researchers have studied the Mesh with a combination of anthropological interest and strategic concern, uncertain whether it represents a genuine cultural phenomenon, a marketing vulnerability, or something more difficult to categorize.