Coptic Orthodox Christians comprise the largest Christian community in the Middle East and are among the oldest Christian communities in the world. While once the objects of American missionary efforts, in recent years Copts have been in the spotlight for their Christianity. A spate of ISIS-related bombings and attacks have garnered worldwide attention, leading to a series of efforts from US politicians, think tanks, and NGOs to re-channel their efforts into “saving” these Middle Eastern Christians from Muslims. The increased targeting of Copts has also contributed to the moral imaginary of the “Persecuted Church,” particularly among American evangelicals, which embraces the idea that Christians around the globe are currently being persecuted more than any other time in history.

Drawing on years of extensive fieldwork among Coptic migrants between Egypt and the United States, Martyrs and Migrants examines how American religious imaginaries of global Christian persecution have remapped Coptic collective memory of martyrdom. Transnational Copts have navigated the sociopolitical conditions in Egypt and the global consequences of the US “war on terror” by translating their suffering into the ambiguous forms of religious and political visibility. Candace Lukasik argues that the commingling of American conservatives and Copts has shaped a new kind of Christian kinship in blood, operating through a double movement between glorification and racialization. Occupying a position between threat and victim, Copts from the Middle East have been subject to anti-terror surveillance in the US even as they have leveraged their roles as “persecuted Christians.” Through Lukasik’s careful examination of the everyday processes shaping Coptic communal formation, Martyrs and Migrants broadly reveals how ideologies of spiritual kinship are forged through theological histories of martyrdom and of blood, demonstrating the global dynamics and imperial politics of contemporary Christianity.

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Reviews

“Demonstrates how utterly transnational the Coptic community has become, and how this transnational condition has created both new possibilities and new binds…Whether or not they endorse her framing of Copts’ predicament through the notion of an ‘economy of blood,’ scholars of the community will find her approach deeply thoughtful and bracing, sparking debate in a field that has remained staid and demure for far too long.”

—Paul Sedra, author of From Mission to Modernity: Evangelicals, Reformers and Education in Nineteenth-Century Egypt

“A historically informed, ethnographically astute, and theoretically subtle book that examines the shifting political landscapes Egyptian Copts in the United States and Egypt navigate and promote.…This multi-sited ethnography provides a poignant intervention in the studies of minorities by exploring the fraught entanglements of imperial discourses, diasporic and minority politics, and the construction of the self.”

—Zainab Saleh, author of Return to Ruin: Iraqi Narratives of Exile and Nostalgia

“Aptly interrogates a paradox of our time: the tension between transnational, collective and co-opting, Christian theopolitics of kin-blood persecution, and the legal, everyday racialized, painful singularities of diasporic class divisions—through and beyond a Coptic prism.”

—Valentina Napolitano, University of Toronto