In Shady Lewis’s novel, Ways of the Lord (2018), Sherif, a Coptic narrator, is a non-practicing Christian of the Orthodox faith, who finds himself forced to engage in weekly confessional visits with an Orthodox Coptic priest in order to prove that he has no restrictions that should prevent him from marrying his German girlfriend, Esther, in the Orthodox Church. The novel’s opening biblical quote, “The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge” (Jeremiah 31:29), reflects Sherif’s malaise and crisis of belonging, a result of multi-generational decisions in light of their interactions with and perceptions of the 19th and 20th centuries Western missionaries, the Jews of Egypt and their departure, post-independence secular pan-Arabism, wars with Israel, modernity, and the January of 2011 uprising in Egypt. In this paper, I study the narrator’s implicit criticism of church rituals, rules, and treatment of other Christian denominations, as well as his navigation of belonging and search of identity in a series of blames and justifications of his current relationship with the Coptic Orthodox church. Despite Sherif’s constant struggle during his confessional meetings, there is an “absence of victimhood,” a trait that Lewis admires in his favorite novelists. This absence aims to shed light on the effects of external factors - social history, historical events, and the church-state rapport - on modern Coptic identity and self-perception, as I shall demonstrate. In my analysis, I study Sherif’s struggle with the issues of trust, control, fear, coercion, fate, and repression, and the extent to which Sherif’s crisis echoes the author’s self-identification with Mary Youssef’s “new consciousness wave.” I shall argue that, while Christians are often studied as a persecuted minority in a majority Moslem country, Lewis draws on a more intricate situation where many Copts find themselves at the intersection of control by multi-dominants: the Orthodox church, the populace, the state, and his ancestors’ decisions. Fear of these dominants puts limitations on self-identification with and belonging to a particular group.