"Someday We Will Be Like the Jews": Secular Futures and Liturgical Selves

You cannot be a secular Suryoyo, like you can be a secular Jew. In thirty years, yes. Right now, no.  Among the immigrant Syriac Orthodox Christian, or Suryoyo, diaspora in the Netherlands, secularizing elites frequently assert that it is only a matter of time before ordinary members of their community will begin to imagine themselves in possession of an ethnic identity, irrespective of individual religious belief. These elites imagine an inevitably secular future, complete with land rights and legal protections, as a recognized ethno-religious minority. There are, however, multiple versions of this secular future. These futures are not merely debated in the abstract, but are, paradoxically enough, produced within the sacred practice of liturgical singing.  

Multiple secular futures proliferate in competing narratives about the past, as different elites invoke alternative textual traditions of western scholarship on Middle Eastern religious minorities. What seems at first glance to be a debate over post-Ottoman naming practices—are we Assyrian, Aramean, or simply Syriac?—is on further inspection a complex contest over the future of the ethical Syriac Orthodox self.  The majority of diasporic Suryoye understand Christianity to be a kinship practice, making the ethnic fundamentally indivisible from the religious.  In light of the fact that even the most determined secularists can only authenticate their claims with appeals to the liturgical tradition, this paper examines the ways in which the sung liturgy is used to fashion an array of experimental futures for Syriac Christianity against the grain of conventional European notions of secular identity.