Tisa Wenger: Candace, thank you for such a generative set of questions in the first half of our exchange! Your book, Martyrs and Migrants: Coptic Christians and the Persecution Politics of US Empire, shows how Egyptian Copts came to epitomize the figure of the “persecuted Christian” for conservative Christians in the United States–and how Copts themselves live with and leverage the contradictions of that role. I found your term “the economy of blood” especially powerful for theorizing the fraught relational ties forged by theologies of martyrdom. Layered alongside the contradictions Copts have faced as immigrants who find themselves racially profiled as “Arabs” in the United States, this book offers new ways to think about the transnational politics of persecution under the sway of US empire and around the world. Could you say a bit more about your key arguments and interventions, and also how and why you decided to write this book?
Candace Lukasik: Thank you, Tisa—I should say that engaging with Spirits of Empire in the first half of this exchange has really sharpened my thinking about this project and my current work on Middle Eastern Christianity and the politics of indigeneity in ways I hadn’t anticipated. Your previous work on the long entanglement of religious freedom and US empire also offers such a generative frame for thinking about what I’m tracking in Martyrs and Migrants in a more contemporary register.
As you note, the book is fundamentally about the making of a particular religious-racial figure: the “persecuted Christian” explored here through Coptic Orthodox Christians, whose experiences of minority life in Egypt finds new expression in the United States. The largest Christian community remaining in the Middle East, Copts constitute roughly ten percent of Egypt’s population and trace their Christian roots to the first century—a community whose numbers abroad grew significantly in the wake of the 2011 Egyptian revolution.
Martyrs and Migrants’s central claim is that the discursive deployment of “persecution” is not simply instrumental or cynical, even when it is clearly being mobilized for political ends. Persecution is a theopolitical concept—animated by theological commitments to blood, martyrdom, and sacrifice that carry their own long histories and their own spiritual weight, and cannot just be reduced to the politics of this world. And that is what I most want to push on, and where I think the concept of the “economy of blood” does its most important work.
Similarly, the economy I describe is not simply rhetorical or political but also theological—through which Christian communion is constituted and kin relations are managed, evaluated, and contested. To understand why blood operates in this way, I found it necessary to think seriously about the long arc of Christian theology in which martyrdom has never been merely symbolic—drawing inspiration from Tertullian’s declaration that “the blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church,” through to Caroline Walker Bynum’s work on medieval blood piety, where blood signified outflow and access, pulling a broader Christian community together while simultaneously requiring the non-Christian as its constitutive other.
The Coptic tradition sits in a complex relationship to this Western genealogy. The Coptic Orthodox Church marks time itself by its martyrs: its calendar begins in 284 AD, the year Diocletian ascended to the throne. New martyrs are not simply commemorated but incorporated into the Synaxarium—divinely threaded from Christ’s sacrifice at the Crucifixion forward into the present. Martyrdom is not a frame imposed on suffering after the fact; it is a red genealogy of life moving between this world and everlasting life in Christ. So, when Pope Francis declared, after the beheading of twenty Copts and one Ghanaian man by ISIS in Libya in 2015, that—regardless of Copts’ Orthodox difference from Catholics— “their blood is one and the same,” he illustrated exactly what is at stake in the blood. And as Gil Anidjar has noted, Francis’s affirmation of identity responds to difference but also abolishes and remakes it—leaving the blood of others open to what he calls “benevolent speculations,” which I take to name the cost of that sublation. Once absorbed into a universal Christian “we,” the Coptic tradition becomes transvalued as raw material for others to narrate and interpret on their own terms, however sympathetically intended.
Persecution is a theopolitical concept—animated by theological commitments to blood, martyrdom, and sacrifice that carry their own long histories and their own spiritual weight, and cannot just be reduced to the politics of this world.
It is precisely that double movement—of unification and difference, of inclusion and exclusion—that the “economy of blood” holds in analytical tension. And it is that same double movement that makes the racialization you name so structurally significant. As migrants, Coptic Christians in the U.S. are simultaneously racialized as Arab/Middle Eastern/Muslim through governing practices shaped by the War on Terror, even as they are also hailed as Christian kin by White conservative America. Their racialization oscillates between kinship and suspicion—and those contradictions are not incidental to the economy of blood but constitutive of it. Blood makes this oscillation possible in the first place: its polysemy—slipping between Christ’s salvific Blood, material blood in the body, and Blood as spiritual kinship—lets the same substance be read as sacred kinship in one register and racial threat in another, within a single circulation. The book traces the contemporary U.S. history of this circulation since the 1980s, showing how the figure of the “persecuted Christian” was assembled by American evangelical and conservative Christian networks, by US foreign policy and asylum law, and crucially by American Copts themselves—and what it costs and enables for the Coptic community, in migration between Egypt and U.S., to inhabit it today.
As for why I wrote this book—the personal origins matter for understanding how I approached these arguments. I grew up in a Polish Catholic family in Buffalo, New York, and was deeply shaped by that tradition. But, by high school I had grown distant from it, searching for a way back to a kind of spiritual home, and not quite finding it in the Catholic Church. In 2007, at 17, I first traveled to Egypt for an Arabic-language program, and during that trip I became close with a Coptic Orthodox Christian family in Cairo. Prior to that trip, I had not encountered Orthodox Christianity, let alone known that there were Christians in Egypt. This perception really shows how American Christians imagine the Middle East, which Melani McAlister has written and spoken about extensively. During that trip and many subsequent ones throughout my late teens and twenties, I was introduced to the Coptic Orthodox tradition that I found both intellectually arresting and, over time, personally transformative. In 2012, I was baptized into the Coptic Orthodox Church. So, I came to this project (over many years of contemplation) with both intellectual interest and spiritual stakes.
Tisa: Your comments here on the “double movement” of sameness and difference leads directly into my next question. This book covers very different historical ground than mine, and yet, I keep seeing more threads of connection between them. One of these threads lies in what (using your terminology) we might call the theopolitics of Christian benevolence. In my book, this benevolence is directed towards the figure of the Indigenous suffering heathen; in yours it targets the Copts as persecuted Christians. In both cases, impulses deeply rooted in Christian theology and biblical tradition are mobilized in ways that authorize the expansion of US imperial power. And in both, White Christians in the US simultaneously romanticize, pity, and fear the targets of their benevolence. But there are also important differences. In the case of the Copts especially, do you see the ambivalent “double movement” you describe as inherent to Christian theologies of martyrdom? Or, does it reflect a less-than-seamless blending or even a clash between these older Christian martyrdom traditions and contemporary US racial formations that frame Copts as Arabs and therefore potential terrorists? More broadly, are “theopolitics” ever as seamlessly integrated as the word suggests, and what do we make of the fissures and contradictions that develop along the way?
Candace: Perhaps what the fissures and contradictions teach us is the difficulty of separating the two—because the very idea that we can distinguish what is “deeply rooted in Christian theology” from what “authorizes imperial expansion” assumes that theology and politics occupy distinct domains that can be compared, blended, or misaligned. But the economy of blood I’m thinking through in the book doesn’t work that way, and neither, I think, does “theopolitics” as a concept. And this is especially true when it comes to race.
As scholars like Junaid Rana have shown, for example, the figure of the Muslim was racialized through theological difference long before the emergence of biological racism—from the Reconquista’s limpieza de sangre to the superimposition of the Muslim “infidel” onto Indigenous peoples of the “New World.” And as Tomaž Mastnak and others have argued, Christian kinship was constituted by directing holy war outward against a contaminating enemy. So, the theological and the racial were co-constitutive from the start—if not flowing from a shift in focus on the soul to fleshy difference. In the case of Martyrs and Migrants, the racialization of Copts as an Arab enemy and therefore potential terrorists is not something that happens to a prior theological formation from the outside. It is itself a theopolitical operation with a very long genealogy.
This is where Talal Asad’s work, and Valentina Napolitano and Carlota McAllister’s thinking on theopolitics help us explain why the fissures you’re naming are not incidental to the economy of blood but generative of it. For Asad, a tradition—including a specific conversation on martyrology within it—is never a stable structure; it is an ongoing, embodied argument about what is essential and what is contingent, one that accommodates rupture and reorientation without ever achieving resolution. The aspiration to coherence is precisely that: an aspiration, not an accomplishment. This means the ambivalence you’re describing isn’t a product of an otherwise coherent theology being distorted by racial or imperial formations. The double movement of inclusion and exclusion is internal to Christian theologies of martyrdom—the blood that flows toward kinship has always required a constitutive outside, a non-Christian or heretical other against whom that kinship becomes legible. US racial formations do not introduce contradiction into something previously seamless but rather activate and racialize a tension that was already structural, producing a situation in which Copts are pulled simultaneously into Christian kinship and held at racial distance, and in which those two forces require each other to function.
The most clarifying examples from my book that highlight this come from the American evangelical and conservative Christian networks that began embracing Coptic martyrdom as shared Christian kinship, which I document in Chapter 1 (“Persecution and Power”). These are not straightforwardly instrumental deployments of Coptic suffering for US imperial ends—there is genuine theological investment in the idea that the blood of martyrs constitutes a global body of Christ. And yet the contradictions this produces are sharp. The passage of the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA) in 1998 crystallizes them precisely. IRFA was shaped by Coptic diasporic activism and the broader persecuted Christians movement—and yet Egyptian Copts saw it as a new form of imperial interference that would damage Christian-Muslim relations on the ground. A Coptic member of the Egyptian People’s Assembly put it directly: those advocating for foreign intervention were “stabbing Copts in the heart.” What followed only deepened the bind. Coptic diasporic activism became increasingly legible in the United States through its alignment with the Christian Right and its anti-Muslim civilizational framework—a dynamic one Arab American critic described as Copts “pushing their message of Christian persecution” in ways that “antagonized Muslims and sowed the seeds of division” across Arab and Egyptian American communities alike. At the same time, dismissing those claims of persecution simply erased the real violence Copts experienced in Egypt. The book traces how the focus on Islam and Muslim monstrosity became a necessary feature of making Coptic discrimination legible in diaspora—not because Copts cynically adopted that frame, but because it was the available grammar of suffering within American imperial politics, one in which the figure of the Muslim had long been constructed as a racial-religious threat crossing the categories of nation, ethnicity, and religion simultaneously. Christian difference became imbued with what I call a “geopolitical aesthetic of suffering,” in which the theological claim to kinship and the racial logic of civilizational threat were/are inseparable from one another.
US racial formations . . . produce a situation in which Copts are pulled simultaneously into Christian kinship and held at racial distance.
What makes this theopolitical rather than merely political is precisely that inseparability. Neither the theological investment nor the imperial instrumentalization can be disentangled—and the Copts caught between them are not passive objects of that dynamic but active participants in an ongoing argument about what their suffering means and what obligations it generates.
Tisa: Thank you, Candace, this is such a helpful way to think about entanglements that truly do not involve blending two separate things but rather reveal how everything we conceptualize as “political” and “religious” have been woven together all along. This brings me to my next question. I have found it helpful to think with critical secularism studies about how these political-religious distinctions are constructed and how the secular/imperial state employs them to manage religion. “Good religion” is privileged over and against whatever is deemed bad–excessive, fanatical, or too “political”—despite the fact that the “good religion” is itself invariably interwoven with governing systems and logics. Your book doesn’t foreground the question of secularism, although it’s clear (e.g., in your mention of Asad) that your work too is informed by scholars working in this vein. To what extent do you find the lens of secularism helpful in thinking about the questions you tackle in your book?
Candace: Let me begin with how I think of Talal Asad’s project and its connections and divergences from Martyrs and Migrants. Asad has, across his many works, pursued a critical inquiry into the core concepts of secular modernity—and primary among them, the twin concepts of religion and secularity. What makes his project distinctive, and what makes the critical study of secularism so generative for my book, is that Asad never took religion to designate an object of analysis. Rather than circumscribe a thing to be studied, he has always thought about religion so as to become able to think through and with it—treating it less as a bounded domain than as a point of view from which to illuminate questions about ethics, embodiment, power, and the limits of what language can hold. That orientation runs through Martyrs and Migrants, even where it isn’t named. It also marks the limit of how far the critical study of secularism, in its more structuralist registers, can take me.
What I carry most directly from this tradition is a set of arguments about the paradoxes of minority recognition. Saba Mahmood, in Religious Difference in a Secular Age, demonstrates that the modern liberal state does not simply protect religious minorities but actively produces their precarity—that the same apparatus which claims to guarantee equality between majority and minority populations is structurally organized around majoritarian norms, such that formal legal equality coexists with substantive social inequality. Hussein Agrama’s work on Egypt extends this: he shows how the state’s attempts to regulate and adjudicate religious difference actually expand rather than limit sovereign power over religious life. Kabir Tambar, writing about the Alevi minority in Turkey, captures what he calls an “extraordinary bind”—in that, the terms of pluralist inclusion require marginalized communities to commit to statist narratives of national modernity as the price of visibility. All three of these arguments (among many others) run beneath the surface of Martyrs and Migrants: Coptic appeals to religious freedom law, asylum protections, and foreign policy advocacy produce forms of legibility that simultaneously constrain them, reformatting their politics in ways they did not choose and cannot fully control.
But where I diverge from this tradition is in analytic emphasis. Critical secularism studies tends to locate the primary action at the level of the state and its genealogy, asking how sovereign power classifies, manages, and disciplines religion. What that framework is less equipped to track is the internal life of a community; in my case, the intergenerational arguments about what migration means, the contested authority of the Coptic Orthodox Church hierarchy over diaspora parishes, and the everyday negotiations in American congregations over identity, practice, and belonging that are not reducible to what the state can see or authorize. These are not simply effects of secular governance. They are arguments happening within a tradition that has its own logic, its own temporality, and its own forms of authority. The asylum court captures this tension precisely. As I argue in the book, specifically in Chapter 3 (“Religious Difference and Asylum Law”), the US immigration system treats Copts as an ethnos, reasoning that their Christian bodies are distinguishable from their Egyptian Muslim counterparts without ever asking about their beliefs—the state positions itself as secular, indifferent to faith, yet in doing so racializes religious difference. But what that U.S. imperial/legal machinery cannot comprehend are the ambiguities of Coptic intercommunal and intracommunal life (in Egypt and now in diaspora)— and that gap between the structures of the state and the messiness of everyday life turns out to be, ethnographically, some of the most generative terrain in the book.
That tension is something I find myself pressing on even more directly in my current research—which, as you know, examines how Assyrians in Iraq and in the diaspora navigate the tension between their international legibility as a persecuted religious minority and their own claims to indigeneity and ancestral belonging to land. There, the stakes of the critical study of secularism become even sharper: the secular separation of religious from ethnic identity turns out to function not only as a mode of minority management but as an instrument of territorial dispossession. Thinking about what secularity does to communities whose forms of attachment to land, language, and ancestry exceed the category of “religion” is, I think, where the conversation you’re opening has the most to teach us—and where Martyrs and Migrants was, in retrospect, already pointing.
Tisa: Through this conversation, I’ve come to see the paradoxes of minority status and its relationship to indigeneity as another shared theme between us, especially in your current research. In your work, far more than mine, reaching across transnational contexts helps illuminate these contradictions. But in truth, my work also has a transnational dimension. It’s just that Indigenous lands and sovereignty have been so attenuated by the imperial nation-state that most non-Native people fail (or refuse) to recognize them as nations. And as you note, the secular state’s management of minority populations perpetuates this erasure. Could you reflect some more on the complexities of working across such varied transnational contexts, with attention to the attenuated status of Indigenous nations and how different secular states manage minority difference? More broadly, what do you see as the advantages of transnational research for religious studies, and what advice would you give to other scholars working in this vein?
Candace: What working transnationally opened up for me was not so much a kind of geographic comprehensiveness, but the ability to operate across different scales of intelligibility and translation at once. It let me hold broader structures of power—from foreign policy and border infrastructure to forms of legality and advocacy—alongside the intimacies and ambiguities of everyday life in the same frame, because each scale on its own obscures as much as it reveals. In the context of Martyrs and Migrants, my sites between Egypt and the United States were not separate fields connected by migration; they were constituted by their asymmetrical relation to each other. So, the book’s transnational method is an attempt to grasp what I think of as the tentacles of US empire.
Part of what this method resists is the tendency to treat American power as something that radiates outward from a fixed center into discrete, separable “elsewheres.” I wanted instead to hold in view both the excess of US imperialism beyond territorial control and the other imperial histories braided into it, without letting that complexity collapse back into a simple here/there. “America” in this sense becomes less a location than an assemblage—something that generates the problems it then claims to solve, that governs the movement of bodies as much as the circulation of ideas and sensibilities, producing a tangle of connections that look different depending on where you’re standing inside them. In the book, the methodological question I kept returning to was not how to bring “America” into view in the Egyptian context—“America” was already there, whether in migration routes or kinship networks—but rather, asking, “where is America not?”
‘America’ in this sense becomes less a location than an assemblage—something that generates the problems it then claims to solve.
The question of empire and territory takes on a different shape in the Assyrian case, precisely because of what you’re naming about the attenuated status of Indigenous nations. Coptic transnationalism, for all its complexity, still moves between two internationally recognized states—Egypt and the United States—even as Copts are racialized and rendered precarious within both. Assyrians navigate a different problem: their claims to a homeland in modern-day Iraq are not claims on a recognized nation-state, and Assyrians’ contemporary dispersal across Iraq, Syria, Iran, US diasporas from Detroit to San Diego, and historically the Ottoman empire means that the very category of “homeland” is itself contested in ways that complicate even the comparative move I’m describing. Working “transnationally” here has meant attending not just to two poles of a migratory circuit but to the dispersals of a people that contest modern categories of nation and territory and in so doing show us alternative forms of belonging that have exceeded imperial claims on them and their national exclusions. But erasure in the form of illegibility or misrecognition by the state does occur. And I would argue that this erasure is itself a secular technology, performed differently by Ba’athist Iraq, by the post-2003 Iraqi state, and by the international humanitarian and religious-freedom apparatus that absorbs Assyrian claims of injury and presence into the more familiar grammar of persecuted Christian minorities.
This is also where the “transnational” forces a scalar reckoning in the Assyrian context. For example, the catastrophic decline of Assyrian Christians in Iraq is not a story that can be told on its own terms, separate from US foreign policy. The 2003 invasion, and the intercommunal violence and state collapse that followed it, is the primary driver of the displacement that produced the contemporary Assyrian diaspora. American Christians (and other Western Christians) anxious about the fate of persecuted Christians in the Middle East are often responding to a crisis their own governments’ wars helped create. Nadine Naber’s work on what she calls “diasporas of empire” names this dynamic precisely, that many Middle Eastern diasporic communities in the United States are here, in significant part, because of the very imperial movements the United States projects abroad. In this context, a diaspora is not simply a population that migrated and then, separately, encountered American power; it is partially produced by that power, now living inside it—which is exactly why treating “foreign policy” and “diasporic religious life” as separate domains misses their interconnection.
My advice to scholars considering this method of inquiry would be to resist the temptation to treat the transnational as simply “more fieldsites.” This method isn’t an exercise in accumulation. Rather, multi-sitedness is a method for producing friction between scales of seeing—in the gap between how a claim is made in one register and how it is received in another, what gets lost or transformed in that translation, and what that loss reveals about the structures of power doing the translating.
