Coptic Christians have, since 1952, lived according to what might be considered a tacit agreement between the church and the state, one whereby the state committed itself to the protection of Copts, the principles and rules of equality before the law, and equal opportunity, and the church reciprocated by absorbing the activities of Coptic Christians within its walls. The state considered the confinement of Copts inside the church a way to distance these individuals from oppositional political activity, which the state had criminalised. Clergymen at the time welcomed the overwhelming presence of Copts inside their churches, and the phenomenon was linked to the general religious wave that took hold in both Egypt and the outside world beginning from the end of the 1960s and peaking in the mid-1980s.