This project concerns the devotional song genre of tarat?l, the most prevalent non-liturgical folk music performed by Coptic Orthodox Christians in Egypt. Specifically, it examines their integral role during the Sunday School movement at the beginning of the twentieth century and their importance to contemporary Coptic identity. Historically, this movement was initiated to resist American Protestant missionary efforts, and drawing on the rising nationalism for Egypt's independence from Britain in the early 1920s, organized classes that celebrated Coptic culture, heritage, and national identity. Tarat?l's contemporary folk and popular music idioms, embedded oral histories, and indigenous metaphors made them especially emblematic as sites of resistance and Coptic pride against British imperialism and missionary encroachment. Thanks to the Sunday School movement, the Coptic community continues to experience a vibrant cultural renaissance and a religious revival in Egypt and in diasporic communities all over the world. With a growing pan-Arab movement and the Islamicized rhetoric of a newly declared Arab Republic of Egypt beginning the 1950s, this renaissance has increasingly depended on an autochthonic perspective of Coptic Christian identity. Drawing from western and indigenous scholarship, this post-revival privileges a traditionalist, "authentic," and "pure" representation of Coptic culture. Early Church history, the antiquated Coptic language, and the Coptic liturgical hymnody known as alh?n, have become especially coveted as a direct link to an Ancient Egyptian heritage. Folk genres such as tarat?l, however, have been slowly devalued for incorporating 'outside' influences, including the Arabic language, folk and popular music idioms, and borrowed elements from a missionary legacy. In many cases, tarat?l and their accompanying oral narratives are not only left out of the Coptic discourse about identity, but also further neglected in contemporary scholarship by both Western and indigenous scholars. By investigating the changing values surrounding the genres of alh?n and tarat?l, I address the influence of Egyptian nationalism on an emerging sense of Copticity, and the Sunday School reform movement on the dissemination of tarat?l and the forging of contemporary Coptic identity through music. Through the analysis of the changing discourse surrounding Coptic music culture, I examine the emerging nativistic movement that continues to shape today's Coptic renaissance and religious revival. Specifically, I consider how this movement utilizes Western scholarship, to fuel the present predilection with a 'pure' ancient Egyptian heritage and the desire for its revival. This study is based on ethnographic research conducted in Toronto, Canada as well as Cairo, Egypt.