Why are Coptic Christian youth leaving their Church?
By: Andrew Paul
When the 19th century Dutch writer Hans Christian Andersen penned his short story on the Emperor’s New Clothes, he probably could not have imagined its versatility. Historians note that Andersen may have drawn on 14th century Spanish sources that were in turn influenced by Aesop’s Fables, among others. In it, an Emperor employs two weavers to clothe him, yet the swindling weavers trick him into thinking that their linen is so fine that only those unfit for their service could not recognize it. His royal consort shower the Emperor with praise, fearing speaking the truth may put them out of a job. As the Emperor marches through his empire nude, none of the townsfolk point out the obvious until an innocent child shouts it from the ramparts. The Emperor shivered, for he suspected they were right. Yet he thought to himself “This procession has to go on.”
With a few notable differences, the story has much to teach today’s churches steeped in ancient traditions.
Only a handful of denominations today claim traditional heritage and I come from one, a relatively obscure denomination called the Coptic Orthodox Church. I’m an active member of two Coptic church communities in the Coptic diaspora, considered a leader in our young adult ministry. A decade ago, I started noticing a troubling trend with my friends and acquaintances: many were growing increasingly dissatisfied with a church community that had for centuries been the source of meaning for our community.
Why had that ancient tradition failed us?
I’ve come to contemplate our Church’s predicament. If you only had to know one thing about the Coptic Church, it’s that its identity is invariably tied to an ostensibly fixed, ancient Christian Egyptian tradition. Our story is not unlike that of the Emperor, and while the Church does truly don fine garb, certain factions of the Church are convinced the Church is fully clothed in a uniformly traditional, ancient, and historically fixed attire. But as the world inches toward a post-Christian future, the Coptic church has pinned itself between the mythic past and an uncertain future. The ramparts are filling with disillusioned children, so how does the procession go on?
Linens: Apparent and Actual
We grew up boasting of our proud ancestry, descendants of the Pharaohs and one of the first peoples who accepted the Gospel preached by St. Mark no less. As the Copts of Egypt, we had endured centuries of persecution under Roman, Byzantine, Islamic, Mameluke, and Ottoman rule. Now was our time, in these ‘lands of immigration’, to establish ourselves academically and financially. That could only become reality if we had complete faith in Priests and Bishops, who represented the last of a long unbroken line of leaders established by Jesus Himself. They were to be obeyed and respected at all times, and consulted on every aspect of existence from school, career, finances, and relationships. Most of our Church’s rituals were of course passed down from Christ Himself, and if it wasn’t Christ it was certainly one of His faithful vicars. The Bible was infallible, evolution was a lie, homosexuality was ‘somewhere between sin and disease’, and if you were too bored during the liturgy then there was something very wrong with your spiritual life. Everything the Church taught or did had directly Apostolic or Scriptural origins. We were the traditional Ancient Church, and change was the enemy of perfection. It was good to ask questions, but not accepting the simplistic, one-dimensional answers was insubordination.
Yet reality can sometimes be a bit messier than what we’d like, and if the Coptic Church is shrouded in anything, it would be mystery. Historically, theologically, and liturgically.
Throughout late high school and University, many of us started to question established narratives. The earliest mention of the Coptic Church is found in the writings of Eusebius, who noted that that the church was founded by St. Mark according to some oral accounts. Some scholars speculate that the Church may in fact have origins in Jewish or Jerusalem churches. The Council at Chalcedon, which had carved out the Coptic Church as a fully distinct entity in the 5th century, had far more political undertones than most would like to appreciate, not unlike the recent rupture of the Ukrainian Church from Moscow. While the church faced persecution, recent scholars have downplayed its scale in the first two centuries of Christianity, noting only a few decades of persecution interspersed by years of relative peace. In another ironic twist, the Eastern Roman Empire were in fact more cruel to the Copts, owing to that fifth century split referenced earlier, and Copts welcomed Arab conquest in the 7th century as reprieve from Byzantine brutality. It was only in the 10th century that Islamic rule intensified marginalization of the Coptic people.
Theologically today’s modern church might be unrecognizable to the first century Church. With a fair degree of autonomy, the Coptic Church used allegorical and other non-literal methods to understand the Bible first pioneered by Hellenized Jewish Rabbis like Philo. The openness to syncretism as a tool by which God used pagan religions to convey deep perennial truth, helped turn many pagans to Christianity, and with the aide of a widely agreed yet not quite definitive canon (at least until the 4th century), writings poured out of the pens of the early Church Fathers. The Church placed a deep emphasis on the social gospel, serving the most disenfranchised members of Roman society, pagan or otherwise.
But then our church hardened into amber, and with a few notable exceptions went into theological stasis for a thousand years.
With the industrial revolution and the rise of the West, new waves of colonialism and evangelism hit Alexandria’s shores. Spurred on by Protestant missionaries in the 19th century, the Church created and adopted a Sunday school curriculum. It was then that the modern day Arabic Bible took form. Many modern-day Arabic bibles are of the Van Dyke translation, named after the 19th century New York physician-turned missionary Rudolph Van Dyke, a Dutch Reformed Calvinist. It presented a departure from the Scriptural translations of the first few centuries of Christianity which were based on the Septuagint. His translation gradually became the de jure translation for all scriptural exegesis that forms the basis of modern Coptic teaching. The translation is notable for its heavy protestant influence, and particular reliance on TULIP theology. Much Coptic teaching draws not from an ancient past but the writings of Bishops and Popes over the last 50 years, very little of referencing source documents of the Patristic tradition. Many modern teachings on salvation, heaven and hell, Biblical infallibility, and creation show protestant influence and a vast departure from truly traditional Patristic writings. Literalism supplanted allegory as the go-to method of biblical interpretation in the Coptic Church, despite it being a more recent innovation that developed as a response to German Biblical scholarship of the 19th century.
The result is perhaps the single biggest dichotomy the Church has had to address in the last two decades: faith and science. In more hardliner circles, we were told evolution was a mythology, that the Bible was intended to be a perfectly historical narrative as well as a Spiritual text, and that any other idea likely had Satanic influence. Gone was Alexandrian allegory, the contextualizing of the text; the letter of the word had all but killed its Spirit, and many young adults in higher education had to make difficult decisions on whose side they’d be in the eternal Manichean struggle between reason and faith.
Liturgical traditions are hardly static, and were over developed over 350 years and show strong evidence of influence from both Jewish and Gnostic texts. Catechism texts are texts read in liturgy that are not based on the Bible, and many show parallels with some non-canonical books, such as The Acts of Mark. Most notably the Synaxarium — the book on the lives of the Saints read each liturgy — dates to the 15th century, hardly ancient by Egyptian standards. The liturgical tradition shows strong influence from Jewish morning prayers and owes much of its tradition as borrowed from the Hellenized Jews of Alexandria. Liturgical praxis itself has only recently allowed deacons of any rank to serve outside the altar, a previously non-existent role. These non-altar-serving deacons were now the voice of the congregation, which now listlessly stands listening to the voice of zealous deacon lucky enough to grab microphone first. While non-believing men are allowed in the altar, provided they take off their shoes, a saintly Coptic woman is forbidden. This despite the fact that the early church actually allowed women to enter the altar; St. Gregory’s own mother passed away holding onto an altar.
And so the story was not unlike discovering that the clothes the Emperor thought he had on were quite different. Yet unlike the Emperor, there were no swindling weavers except those those that lived in our collective imagination. History had become legend. Legend became myth. The myth of a perfectly insular, stable and static tradition.
It was time to figure out what people thought of all this.
Subjects of the Empire
The year was 2001, and I sitting in my eighth grade classroom pondering whether I’d be worthy of anyone’s friendship, as most angsty teenagers were apt to do. The daydreaming was sharply interrupted by the static of the PA system. A plane had hit the World Trade Center in New York, and for now classes would go on as planned. But 2001 also sounded the alarm on dangerous religious extremism, and some took it as a warning on the perils of religion itself. With a heap of new books touting so-called New Atheism, the number of people in the United States that identify as atheist continues to shatter records while the Church pews empty. It became a global trend that has not gone unnoticed by Coptic Church leadership. Dubbed as a ‘silent exodus’, in 2015, a Coptic global association ran a survey on why Copts were leaving the church, and while capturing several hundred to thousand responses, results were never made publicly available.
The Emperor had clothes after all.
Frustrated with the opaqueness, a group of equally curious and concerned friends decided to run our own survey on why Coptic Christian youth were leaving the Church, if at all. Six questions, all long answer-form. Our core question asked those surveyed — most of whom were youth themselves — asked why they thought youth were leaving the church. Based on 176 free-text responses, only 2 answers dismissed the proposition. Of the 174 remaining, we categorized answers based on five categories: personal gripes, secularization and stance on contemporary issues, overall theological issues, cultural differences, and lack of leadership. With the caveat that the results are hardly scientific, here’s what we found:
Unsurprisingly, over a third of all reasons pointed to personal gripes. Respondents felt judged, had not been able to identify role models, had seen their friends leave and decided to leave themselves, or had sensed a lack of belonging. Narrow-mindedness, clericalism, and concerning educational gaps among teachers were slotted in with these reasons.
This came as no surprise.
But it was the second and third reason that we found telling: youth were leaving because of perceived core theological gaps in teaching and an incapability to deal with contemporary secular issues. These included the Church’s stance on homosexuality, evolution, and women’s issues (though abortion was not mentioned once). They were similar issues I had trouble squaring a decade before, but now there was quantifiable evidence demonstrating these issues as quite common. In short, as the West caters to every material and immaterial human need, churches are pushed into irrelevancy. Even the personal gripes people have with the church would often boil down to ideological dissimilarities.
So how did youth come to feel this way? The Emperor now had a chance to reflect on his fine linens.
Re-examining the Linen
Beginning in the 1960's, the Coptic church faced a fresh round of political and religious marginalization. In post-revolutionary Egypt, a new wave of nationalism aligned Egyptian identity with an increasingly intolerant version of Islam, and in the face of adversity and vulnerability, the Church went into self-preservation mode. That typically means a shift to more conservatism, politically and socially. Indeed after 9/11, the average US citizen shifted politically right, it is a well-documented phenomenon that can even be induced in laboratory settings. Yet what was conserved were not things like allegorical methods of understanding Scripture, but an ossification of evangelically-influenced teachings between 1960–1980's. In a brutal twist, what has been conserved as ‘traditionalism’ was anything but.
Culture does not appear and change randomly, it is inexorably tied to its social, political, economic, and sometimes biological environment. The latter has given me a sense of morbid curiosity and dread. Reading Robert Sapolsky’s Behave gave me long pause on how so very little we actually control our own emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. The book traces a behavior backward in time, gradually moving from the biological ‘how’ of a behavior to a why, and makes a startling conclusion on free will — or rather the lack thereof — near the end of the book. A frighteningly interesting study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal that examined over 30 cultures and 11,000 people showed traditionalist values (defined as adherence to group norms) in countries correlated strongly with parasite stress (r=0.7,). That is to say, countries where there was more infectious disease burden were associated with that country’s adherence to certain group behaviors:
“traditionalism relates strongly to religiosity…to prejudice toward the types of individuals who violate traditional social norms, including prostitutes, atheists, homosexuals, and drug users”
There are hypotheses linking these not only as correlative, but causative. The point is that so much of why we are the way we are cannot be simply explained away. But also that traditionalism — however it comes about — makes people more likely to see the stranger as ‘Other’, even parasitic, making us weary and overprotective. And that made sense, for the centuries of insularity and protectionism within a church made us ‘Other’ others, it imbued us with a need for epistemic stability. Because when the world around you seems to cave in, you’re more likely to cling to whatever it is that gives you a sense of certitude and closure.
These cognitive patterns had served persecuted churches well, it may have even preserved it. But in diaspora, where the same physical threats do not exist, there was a gradual shift away from conservatism among younger generations. It was a trend that might have perplexed and frustrated our parents’ generation.
So what next?
Putting on New Clothes
Revolution isn’t the answer, neither is reformation. We might want to look at the most successful yet vilified processes that lead to success in the animal life for answers: evolution. Evolution requires genetic variation, and that is precisely happening today. But if that genetic variation were to be guided in any way, it may come by examining three things:
- Re-think the teaching: Theology doesn’t need reinvention, but a rethinking and re-framing. Putting off the garb of perceived tradition and re-examining the actual ancient texts for what they are would be a good place to start, examining them with the ancient eyes that first told the stories. Incorporating the theological creativity and ingenuity of the third century Coptic tradition might go a long way. We need to appreciate the role syncretism has played in shaping our own church as a way to see commonalities among different cultures and denominations. Epistemic certitude has to give leeway for comfort in ambiguity, unanswered questions, and rethinking theology as not an equation that needs balancing or a text that has to be searched, but a mystery who’s answers lie deep all that is true, beautiful, and good.
- Re-invent the liturgy: A liturgy that fails to reflect the changing needs of the congregants fails to tap into the original spirit of prayer. Reforming aspects of the liturgy to better reflect modern morays and concerns could go a considerable way in retaining the attention of congregants (ex. modify the seven short prayers, remove or refresh the Synaxarium). Involving congregation members in church responses. Accessibility in language and relevance might go some way in helping reignite the passion that had kept the early Church vigorous and engaged.
- Re-envision the Community, as a place for various identities for healing and friendship. The old world of the Other must give way to something deeper. For churches in diaspora, this might come in the form of better integration into their local communities, a sharp contrast to the Survival Mode that had kept the Church afloat back home. This could mean service to the indigent, jails, retirement homes, finding and servicing societal gaps. One such community regularly services indigent populations in my home nation of Canada.
I love my Church. It’s time to reclaim the Empire.
