Too often, studies of Coptic Christians are confined by geographic boundaries of the modern nation and the question that local minority identities pose for the construction of bounded national mythologies. Such limitations obscure the impact of migration, cultural exchange, and how immigrants reconstruct and invent new ways of understanding the nation, its minorities, and transnational communal identities. This paper interrogates the continentally-circulated publications of academics, political activists, and religious leaders of Coptic populations in Toronto and New York after the ascendancy of President Anwar al-Sadat and concludes with the release of Pope Shenouda III from the St. Bishoy monastery in Wadi al-Natroun Valley. I focus particularly on how Canadian multiculturalism offered an alternative for thinking otherwise about communal identities to challenge what it meant to be a Coptic Christian, outside the confines of the Egyptian nation. Employing textual material from Canadian and Egyptian archives, the textual and photographic collections of Coptic families in Toronto and New York, and oral testimony collected in those cities, I address the crucial role that immigrants have played in transgressing artificial boundaries to highlight the importance of borderless narratives in developing a more nuanced understanding of ethnic identity and belonging that have shaped, and continue to shape, the history of Egypt and of Copts in Canada. Concerned with several questions, this paper examines the ways in which relations between the Egyptian state and this religious minority have changed in the latter twentieth century, and how Coptic émigrés - through their academic literature, church newsletters, newspapers, and political activism - have challenged and extended local political and religious conversations beyond the confines of the nation. These, and other questions, will offer fertile ground to further interrogate the affect of long-distance nationalism on relations between minorities and the state in Egypt and its diasporas.