Authentic Arabs, authentic Christians: Antiochian Orthodox and the mobilization of cultural identity

Abstract

My dissertation agues that Arab American Christians construct and market a specific Arab cultural identity within the space of the church. I focus on the Antiochian Orthodox Church in the U.S., which is an ancient Christian faith of primarily Palestinian, Lebanese, Syrian, and Jordanian adherents. Since establishing churches in the late 1890s, Antiochian Orthodox Christians have become one of the largest Arab Christian communities in the U.S. I trace Antiochian Orthodox Christians’ selective participation in U.S. multiculturalism from the historical moment of the celebration of the U.S. Bicentennial in the 1970s through the eight year period following the attacks of September 11th, 2001. I investigate the everyday expressions of religious identity for Arab American Christians, highlighting the significance of religion as a structuring force in the lives of adherents and the cultural identity that they construct. Cultural identity within the space of the church is constructed in relation to events in the homeland (mostly war and humanitarian crisis) and U.S. political and popular culture representations of Arabs that are informed by Orientalist modes of knowledge production. Given this positionality, my work complicates attempts to define Arab American Christians as either “loyal Americans” or “loyal Arabs,” as they celebrate a U.S.-based religious and cultural identity, mostly through ethnic food festivals, and engage in transnational politicized action that runs against the grain of popular U.S. political discourses about Arabs and the Middle East. The chapters are broken up into analyses of cultural identity and its mobilization for politicized action and humanitarian aid (chapter 2), claims to cultural authenticity through the celebration of ethnic food festivals (chapters 3, 4, and 5), and claims to an authentic Holy Land Christianity (chapter 6). My dissertation is based on archival research and an ethnographic project in Greater Detroit, Michigan, home to one of the largest, most diverse populations of Arabs outside of the Middle East.

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