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Renditions of Christian Citizenship and National Belonging Among Protestant Egyptians
Abstract
This paper analyzes practices of social engagement that Evangelical Egyptians have been producing in the wake of the popular protests of 2011, called in Egypt “The January 25th Revolution.” There is a growing sensibility among Protestant Christians that these years have afforded emergent opportunities for a more expansive space for Christian Egyptian national belonging expressed in church workshops on citizenship and the church and state, election organizing and mobilization, public media appearances as revolutionaries, participation in political parties, and increased involvement in civil society initiatives. In their attempts to situate themselves as distinctively and authentically national citizens, Protestant Christians must negotiate complex subject positions, in relation to their historical connections to Anglo-American colonial-era missionaries and as descendants of the Coptic Orthodox population, as well their membership in Egypt’s politically charged and symbolically powerful Christian minority. These complex negotiations entail a bricolage of evangelical Protestant theological sensibilities, Egyptian nationalist discourse, and abiding connection to the mythology of ancient Egypt and its pre-Islamic Christian roots. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork undertaken in 2015, this paper seeks to illuminate the way that this distinctively Euro-American form of Christianity - evangelicalism - has become invested in affectively charged and nationally-oriented that is, a religiously inflected sense of national belonging and responsibility. These complex negotiations of Egypt’s “minority within a minority” serves to underscore the deep historic roots of Egyptian Christianity, as well as the way that the category is produced and contested in the wake of colonial missions, and shows the way that this Euro-American religious form is subsumed, or made sense of, in the more salient framework of Middle Eastern Christianity.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Egypt
Sub Area
None