From Populism with Coptic Characters to the Christian Origins of Socialism: Transformations of Revolutionary Orthodoxy in Egypt’s Republican Church

This paper traces the development of discourses on revolutionary politics in the Coptic Orthodox Church during the early years of the Egyptian Republic (est. 1953). I argue that Egypt’s 1952 coup struck a nerve in a Coptic community grappling with material corruption and spiritual decay, prompting a transformation of communal politics and religious thought in line with the period’s revolutionary ethos. This first manifested in a populist wave in elections for the Coptic Communal Council and papacy in the 1950s that called for new blood in these institutions, with a preference for younger candidates whose credentials were piety, spirituality, and ascetism rather than administrative experience. This populist turn was accompanied by an emerging communal discourse that emphasized the affinities between socialism and Christianity, with clergy in particular arguing that Christianity constituted the origins of socialism or even socialism at its purest form. While both currents were apparently inspired by the anti-elitist trajectory of the revolutionary period, I argue that their ultimate result was the incorporation of the Coptic Church as part of the emerging authoritarian state.

On the eve of the 1952 coup, Egypt’s Coptic community was beset by institutional factionalism and corruption. The Communal Council, the community’s elected lay administrative body, had just survived an electoral legitimacy crisis only to have its ranks divided between antagonistic factions. In the papacy, Pope Yusab II, elected in 1946 on a campaign of reform, was by the early 1950s associated with corruption and simony. In this environment, the 1952 coup ignited a populist fire within the community, sparking calls for the purging of Coptic institutions of corrupt elements as well as a growing tolerance for unelected positions to act as the practical agents of purging. Most famously, this populist zeal resulted in the 1954 kidnapping of Pope Yusab by a Coptic youth organization. However, as I show in this paper, revolutionary fervor went beyond the high-profile kidnapping and spread into electoral politics and political theology. For the next decade, communal discourse would revolve around a desire to punish enemies of the “the people” whether they be the communal elite or foreign manipulators.

I trace the trajectory of populism in Coptic electoral politics from the 1952 Free Officer’s coup until the aborted Communal Council elections of 1961. A defining element of the populist turn in Coptic discourse was a desire for “new blood” in communal institutions. This manifested in both the punishment of incumbents in elections as well as an emerging preference for the election of youth candidates. By the 1950s, a generation of youth educated in both Coptic Sunday schools and Egyptian public universities had reached political maturity and were viewed by the Coptic public as having the necessary spirituality, knowledge, and energy to open a new page in communal history by ridding it of corruption. During this period, communal elections were particularly antagonistic. The 1956 Communal Council elections, which were effectively a referendum on the Yusab papacy, were characterized by language of plots at the hands of domestic capitalists and Ethiopian manipulators. In the 1961 Council elections, populist voting blocs presented youth candidates as a revolutionary wave coming to cleanse the community of corruption.

Coptic populism also found new expression in ideal candidate qualities. Papal elections in the early twentieth century revolved around the administrative capacities and governing experience of candidates, leading to a preference for electing bishops rather than the Coptic tradition of electing monks. With the populist shift of the 1950s, communal discourse began to emphasize qualities such as spirituality and piety rather than administrative experience as the key credentials for papal candidates. This led to a renewed interest in electing monks who were deemed as having the intense piety and asceticism needed to abstain from corruption. The culmination of this process was the election of Pope Kyrillos VI (r. 1959-1971), a reclusive monk known for his intense spirituality and rigid asceticism. Over the course of his reign, Pope Kyrillos served as the culmination of the populist shift through the development of a cult of personality around his leadership.

The populists shifts of the 1950s and 1960s were accompanied by a developing discourse on the convergence of socialism and Christianity. While Coptic press articles on “Christian Socialism” appeared intermittently throughout the 1950s, they spread rapidly in the early 1960s. Most notably, this discourse picked up in 1961 when the Church was consolidating its authority over the community at the expense of the Communal Council and after President Gamal Abdel Nasser announced a series of sweeping socialist measures. Key figures writing in this discourse were prominent members of the Sunday School generation who were being cultivated as future leaders of the Church.

Coptic writers on “Christian socialism” primarily understood socialism on welfare terms, emphasizing it as a set of redistributive choices and politics to aid the poor. These were tied to an ideal of a unified, cooperative society, unbound by divisive class categories, and joined by “the sanctity of labor.” The purpose of these articles was to create a Christian genealogy for socialism in practice rooted in scripture and Coptic history. Within this discourse, Jesus was the first teacher of socialism, the apostles of the early Church constituted a model socialist community, and Pachomian monasticism offered a spiritual framework for cooperative and anti-materialist living. More antagonistic contributions to this discourse took an explicitly oppositional tone against capitalists, factory owners, and landholders, with some articles explicitly justifying the state’s redistributive policies and land seizure on scriptural grounds.

Both the populist electoral current and the Christian socialism discourse were fueled by the revolutionary sentiments of the 1950s and early 1960s. Accordingly, they were by appearances two faces of an antiestablishment thrust in Coptic political and religious life. Their result, however, was to signal the affinities and loyalties of the community and clerical establishment with the emerging authoritarian regime. These loyalties were key to the formation of what I call “the Republican Church” in the 1960s—a Church that was not only loyal to, but restructured in the image of the Egyptian Republic.