Research
“Power Circuits: Asymmetries of Global Christianity”
Journal of the American Academy of Religion
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This article examines the idea of global Christianity in scholarship and the postcolonial and present imperial conditions that underlie it. Through an analysis of the fields of World Christianity and the anthropology of Christianity, it considers how Western Christian histories and power dynamics have impacted Christian traditions of the Global South and seriously considers the pervasive logics of geopolitical power that transform local contexts–not only altering how such communities and traditions are written about, but also impacting the traditions, practices, and people themselves. Thinking with Coptic Orthodox Christians between Egypt and the United States and Born-Again Christians in Uganda, this article examines how global power inequalities in the circuits of ideas, forms of life, and theopolitics are integral to thinking about the idea of global Christianity and its variations in scholarship.
“Economy of Blood: The Persecuted Church and the Racialization of American Copts”
American Anthropologist
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Since the 1990s, attacks on Egyptian Copts have been made legible to American (particularly evangelical) audiences through the moral imaginary of the “Persecuted Church,” which argues that Christians around the globe are persecuted more than any other time in history. Images of bloodied Egyptian Coptic bodies have circulated among Western Christian religio-political networks in an “economy of blood,” an imperial economy of Christian kinship that performs the double movement of glory and racialization. This double movement has placed American Copts in a bind, whereby indigenous Coptic collective memory of blood and persecution has intersected with the political, theological, and affective kinship formations of this economy of blood. This article analyzes how the contemporary remapping of Eastern Christian traditions, like that of the Copts, produces effects on a geopolitical scale, and examines how this reconfiguration unfolds whiteness and Western Christianity.
“Migrating Minority: Persecution Politics in Transnational Perspective”
International Journal of Middle East Studies
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In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, debates about minority rights in Egypt were increasingly shaped by Coptic migration to the United States. This migration de-territorialized Coptic life beyond Egypt’s borders, reframing it through contemporary narratives of global Christian persecution. Yet most scholarship has either treated Coptic minoritization strictly as a political process or examined social forms of pluralism within Egypt, largely overlooking how migration to centers of global power such as the United States has transformed Coptic communal life. This article traces how everyday practices across sites of migration shape transnational Coptic belonging, caught between their minority status in Egypt and their racial-religious positioning within American Christian conservatism. Transnational Copts are bound together not only by their religious tradition but also by their politicized minority condition Their navigation of this condition—mediated between Egypt and the United States—raises critical questions about political praxis and about their interpellation into contested geopolitical frameworks of international religious freedom and counterterrorism.