I’ve been to many Greek Orthodox churches across the country, and one of the most salient features of Greek churches in the United States is emptiness.

It’s odd because, still, in most cities, there are Greek festivals–whether in Chicago, Boston, or Nashville. And there are tours of Greek churches by mostly-white people, and there are snacks like chips and drinks like soda and commodities like baklava and gyros and Greek handbags.

This is when you’ll find the church most alive, its emptiness hallowed out for other people.

If you attend a Greek Orthodox liturgy, most of the parishioners are older–third or fourth generation–or families with young children, but their high school and college students are elsewhere. Fascinatingly, like every religious tradition, the Greek Orthodox church in the United States suffered a “youth decline” and has yet to fully recover.

The question is: how did this happen? How does a church–across the country–atrophy like this? Yet still have a booming business every year (i.e. the Greek Festival)? How does a church empty of its religiosity and gain merely commodity?

It’s a slow process: you covert the liturgy into a single language, so that in time, parishioners in the United States don’t know how to communicate or pray with people in the homeland; you create disconnection in hopes of connecting to whiteness. You claim that you converted the words of the liturgy (but you’re actually also converting meaning of the liturgy) because you want to keep youth. You’re still hemorrhaging. Instead of helping the new immigrants of your congregation–because, God forbid, you claim poverty as an feature of being Greek in the United States–you reach out and missionize. Not to the poor. Not to the broken. Who are your own. But rather to the rich, the powerful, the privileged. You do this in hopes of gaining a presence in this country.

A lot of this slow process that the Greek Orthodox church went through and that, now, the Coptic Church–a century later–is going through is instructed by US racism and immigration policy:

Most immigrant communities–because this is a capitalist society that, through the US immigration policies, mimics its own white culture–are highly stratified. That is, there are a few at the top who offer this country skilled labor; they’re professors, doctors, engineers. And then you have the majority of the population who are janitors, secretaries, housekeeping, factory workers–the rejected of society and of the church.

This high-stratification creates numerous issues of difference in a church. Whereas in Egypt and Greece–who are both, before, not truly capitalist countries–have churches based on neighborhoods, and therefore, people not only know each other but work and live and interact with one another outside of church, the United States changes that radically, so that church isn’t based on neighborhood, but rather imagined identitifications: Copts from a thirty mile radius who don’t know each other, have different dialects and histories and livelihoods and values, gather together in one space every Sunday.

Instead of combatting this situation with intra-community help–that is, the rich help the poor–the community breaks from each other. It’s at this moment where the majority of church-goers are in need of desperate help–in school, in unions, in work, in home–that the church servants cannot handle these desperations. You often hear, “The people are lazy,” or “the children are ignorant and the parents are arrogant.” All of this in discussing the poor. Sound familiar?

Once a religion vilifies the poor–the majority of its population–and glorifies the rich as community examples and pillars, the problem has gone beyond itself. What started as mere dialectic/linguistic, historical and cultural differences has emerged as a class issue, which has finalized and crystallized as Another issue.

You hear this often in new immigrant communities in the US–and elsewhere. It’s difficult to pinpoint the Self when you’re a migrant. Land and location are critical to human existence, but what differs in the United States is the vocabulary used to describe the Self. This vocabulary is limited because it is racist. It’s limited to race. It’s limited to color. It’s limited to the connotation of differences that cannot be breached.

To save themselves, the rich and privileged participate in this: they manufacture difference between themselves and the poor whom they label “Egyptian” and name themselves “Americans” as imagined–same as what occurred a century before among the Greeks.

Citizenship and race, as always in the United States, formulated existences and belongings.

It is then natural for the rich and privileged to manufacture not only their own identities, but also the church’s, since they’re the ones on church boards and are the theoretical servants of the church. They then commodify the church; in other words, they make the church a marketing strategy. They print flyers to bring people to tour the church–but not to pray together; they sell snacks that white people will buy (as opposed to Black or Latinx neighbors); they commodify their culture back home with trinkets and clothes and sell them for exorbitant prices; and, now, they create hashtags to imagine experience and connection through technologies.

Religion is seen as fun. Religion is seen as community when, in actuality, the bonds of community are severing in the background. While the festival sings, others groan, paying off rent and bills, staring at the healthcare bill they can’t pay, hoping Monday comes sooner so that they can ask about the Immigration Office’s new mail.

While the party lives and roars, the people suffer.

While others take pride and say, “See what our culture offered the world” with art and dance, the people are left behind.

While the festival marches forward, the people fester, unable to find acceptance even among their own.

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it has a rhyme to it, and #GlobalCopticDay matches that rhyme’s pitch. The United States forces that pitch upon the weak-hearted who prefer social acceptance with whiteness–as a means of gaining true citizenship since paperwork doesn’t matter greatly in the United States–than social acceptance with their own, with the downtrodden, with the oppressed. #GlobalCopticDay isn’t about being Coptic—it’s about how to be Coptic. It’s about English, and not Arabic; it’s about fun and games, and not religion; it’s about fitting into Western civilization through ancient Egypt, and not finding solidarity with the oppressed; it’s about citizenship in the United States, and not transnationally being proud to be Coptic without states or borders or languages.

#GlobalCopticDay ain’t that deep: it’s a day to uplift the privileged of our communities to whiteness, while letting the unprivileged of our societies wallow in the background, and ironically, while the privileged try to bring people closer to God with fun and games (think: bread and circus), God lies somewhere in the background with the oppressed, never to come to the foreground because the day isn’t about Him/Them at all.

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