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Winner, 2025 Alixa Naff Best Book Award in Migration Studies, given by the Moise Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies
How Coptic Christian migrants reshape religious identity through the imagination of US empire
Coptic Orthodox Christians comprise the largest Christian community in the Middle East and are among the oldest Christian communities in the world. While once the objects of American missionary efforts, in recent years Copts have been in the spotlight for their Christianity. A spate of ISIS-related bombings and attacks have garnered worldwide attention, leading to a series of efforts from US politicians, think tanks, and NGOs to re-channel their efforts into “saving” these Middle Eastern Christians from Muslims. The increased targeting of Copts has also contributed to the moral imaginary of the “Persecuted Church,” particularly among American evangelicals, which embraces the idea that Christians around the globe are currently being persecuted more than any other time in history.
Drawing on years of extensive fieldwork among Coptic migrants between Egypt and the United States, Martyrs and Migrants examines how American religious imaginaries of global Christian persecution have remapped Coptic collective memory of martyrdom. Transnational Copts have navigated the sociopolitical conditions in Egypt and the global consequences of the US “war on terror” by translating their suffering into the ambiguous forms of religious and political visibility. Candace Lukasik argues that the commingling of American conservatives and Copts has shaped a new kind of Christian kinship in blood, operating through a double movement between glorification and racialization. Occupying a position between threat and victim, Copts from the Middle East have been subject to anti-terror surveillance in the US even as they have leveraged their roles as “persecuted Christians.” Through Lukasik’s careful examination of the everyday processes shaping Coptic communal formation, Martyrs and Migrants broadly reveals how ideologies of spiritual kinship are forged through theological histories of martyrdom and of blood, demonstrating the global dynamics and imperial politics of contemporary Christianity.
— Zainab Saleh, author of Return to Ruin: Iraqi Narratives of Exile and Nostalgia
"Demonstrates how utterly transnational the Coptic community has become, and how this transnational condition has created both new possibilities and new binds. . . . Whether or not they endorse her framing of Copts’ predicament through the notion of an 'economy of blood,' scholars of the community will find her approach deeply thoughtful and bracing, sparking debate in a field that has remained staid and demure for far too long."
— Paul Sedra, author of From Mission to Modernity: Evangelicals, Reformers and Education in Nineteenth-Century Egypt
"Lukasik aptly interrogates a paradox of our time: the tension between transnational, collective and co-opting, Christian theopolitics of kin-blood persecution, and the legal, everyday racialized, painful singularities of diasporic class divisions—through and beyond a Coptic prism."
— Valentina Napolitano, Professor of Anthropology, University of Toronto
"Overall, Martyrs and Migrants is a seminal ethnographic contribution that lays a vital foundation for future scholarship on identity formation among migrant minorities, especially among descendants of diasporic Copts, and the shifting hierarchies of belonging in transnational contexts... The book opens an essential line of inquiry into how immigrant religious minorities contend with US racial hierarchies while seeking visibility and legitimacy."
"Martyrs and Migrants is a powerful work that richly details Coptic lifeworlds and communal formation, as well as the internal and external forces that mediate them from the inside out. This book will draw interest among sociocultural anthropologists, historians, scholars of religion and the Middle East, as well as scholars in Coptic studies, and will find a home in upper-division undergraduate and graduate courses across anthropology and related fields."
"Through its use of scripture, ethnographic fieldwork, and political critique, Martyrs and Migrants offers an interdisciplinary approach that bridges Christian theology, anthropology, and migration studies … [the book] challenges academic trends that tend to separate divine revelation from secular knowledge production."
"Martyrs and Migrants offers a fascinating account of the interconnectedness between empire, migration, religion and race. It is an outstanding addition to the growing field of Coptic studies. The book will be of interest to scholars of migration, diaspora, religion and Middle East Studies."
"Lukasik has given us the tools to think more critically about a set of disturbing and complex issues—a gift to the scholars who will follow in her footsteps."