Sarah Riccardi-Swartz – författare

How is religious conversion transforming American democracy? In one corner of Appalachia, a group of American citizens has embraced the Russian Orthodox Church and through it Putin's New Russia. Historically a minority immigrant faith in the United States, Russian Orthodoxy is attracting Americans who look to Russian religion and politics for answers to Western secularism and the loss of traditional family values in the face of accelerating progressivism. This ethnography highlights an intentional community of converts who are exemplary of much broader networks of Russian Orthodox converts in the United States. These converts sought and found a conservatism more authentic than Christian American Republicanism and a nationalism unburdened by the broken promises of American exceptionalism. Ultimately, both converts and the Church that welcomes them deploy the subversive act of adopting the ideals and faith of a foreign power for larger, transnational political ends.Offering insights into this rarely considered religious world, including its far-right political roots that nourish the embrace of Putin's Russia, this ethnography shows how religious conversion is tied to larger issues of social politics, allegiance, (anti)democracy, and citizenship. These conversions offer us a window onto both global politics and foreign affairs, while also allowing us to see how particular U.S. communities are grappling with social transformations in the twenty-first century. With broad implications for our understanding of both conservative Christianity and right-wing politics, as well as contemporary Russian–American relations, this book provides insight in the growing constellations of far-right conservatism. While Russian Orthodox converts are more likely to form the moral minority rather than the moral majority, they are an important gauge for understanding the powerful philosophical shifts occurring in the current political climate in the United States and what they might mean for the future of American values, ideals, and democracy.

How is religious conversion transforming American democracy? In one corner of Appalachia, a group of American citizens has embraced the Russian Orthodox Church and through it Putin's New Russia. Historically a minority immigrant faith in the United States, Russian Orthodoxy is attracting Americans who look to Russian religion and politics for answers to Western secularism and the loss of traditional family values in the face of accelerating progressivism. This ethnography highlights an intentional community of converts who are exemplary of much broader networks of Russian Orthodox converts in the United States. These converts sought and found a conservatism more authentic than Christian American Republicanism and a nationalism unburdened by the broken promises of American exceptionalism. Ultimately, both converts and the Church that welcomes them deploy the subversive act of adopting the ideals and faith of a foreign power for larger, transnational political ends.Offering insights into this rarely considered religious world, including its far-right political roots that nourish the embrace of Putin's Russia, this ethnography shows how religious conversion is tied to larger issues of social politics, allegiance, (anti)democracy, and citizenship. These conversions offer us a window onto both global politics and foreign affairs, while also allowing us to see how particular U.S. communities are grappling with social transformations in the twenty-first century. With broad implications for our understanding of both conservative Christianity and right-wing politics, as well as contemporary Russian–American relations, this book provides insight in the growing constellations of far-right conservatism. While Russian Orthodox converts are more likely to form the moral minority rather than the moral majority, they are an important gauge for understanding the powerful philosophical shifts occurring in the current political climate in the United States and what they might mean for the future of American values, ideals, and democracy.

Orthodox Christianity in America: An Introduction offers a thematically driven, anthropological account of how Orthodox Christian life has been shaped in the United States through migration, empire, and racial formation. Rather than presenting a single linear history, the book examines Orthodoxy as a dynamic and contested field of transnational religious practice, institutional development, and cultural negotiation.Drawing on historical and ethnographic approaches, the book traces how Orthodox communities—from Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia—have established religious worlds across the United States while navigating shifting conditions of belonging and exclusion. It foregrounds key forces—colonialism, capitalism, and communism—that have structured Orthodox subjectivities and institutions across homelands and diaspora. Through case studies and thematic chapters, the book explores migration infrastructures, racialization, jurisdictional tensions, conversion, and digital religious publics. It demonstrates that Orthodoxy’s presence in America is both enduring and unevenly recognized, shaped by overlapping national affiliations, transnational ecclesial authority, and the racial and political conditions that determine when Orthodoxy becomes visible or remains marginal within dominant narratives of American religion.This book is designed for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in religious studies, anthropology, history, theology, and American studies, as well as scholars of Christianity, migration, and Middle Eastern and Eastern European diasporas. It also serves as an accessible resource for readers seeking a critical anthropological introduction to Orthodox Christian histories in the United States.

Orthodox Christianity in America: An Introduction offers a thematically driven, anthropological account of how Orthodox Christian life has been shaped in the United States through migration, empire, and racial formation. Rather than presenting a single linear history, the book examines Orthodoxy as a dynamic and contested field of transnational religious practice, institutional development, and cultural negotiation.Drawing on historical and ethnographic approaches, the book traces how Orthodox communities—from Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia—have established religious worlds across the United States while navigating shifting conditions of belonging and exclusion. It foregrounds key forces—colonialism, capitalism, and communism—that have structured Orthodox subjectivities and institutions across homelands and diaspora. Through case studies and thematic chapters, the book explores migration infrastructures, racialization, jurisdictional tensions, conversion, and digital religious publics. It demonstrates that Orthodoxy’s presence in America is both enduring and unevenly recognized, shaped by overlapping national affiliations, transnational ecclesial authority, and the racial and political conditions that determine when Orthodoxy becomes visible or remains marginal within dominant narratives of American religion.This book is designed for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in religious studies, anthropology, history, theology, and American studies, as well as scholars of Christianity, migration, and Middle Eastern and Eastern European diasporas. It also serves as an accessible resource for readers seeking a critical anthropological introduction to Orthodox Christian histories in the United States.

Anthropologically explores the entanglement of theology and politics among contemporary Orthodox Christians.Much of the anthropological literature on Christianity tends to concentrate on Protestants and Catholics in the Global South. The contemporary scholarly interest in such communities descends from histories of missionization and colonization of these regions, as well as a sense of their theological kinship with the secularized visions of Western political and social life. Orthodox Christianity, however, has largely been rendered marginal in mainstream anthropological engagement because of its theological and social alterity from such Western anthropological traditions of knowledge production. Because of this, Orthodox Christian lifeworlds in and beyond the academy are created, contested, and transformed in relation to various "others," whether they be religious, political, secular, or historical, with an eye toward a discursive opposition between modernity and Orthodoxy. Each of the essays in Anthropologies of Orthodox Christianity texture a new trajectory in the study of this religious tradition that take seriously the theopolitical aspects of Orthodox life through anthropological inquiry. The volume engages and moves beyond the tension between populist and institutional framings of religion, and critically addresses the ontological gap in both anthropology and theology as social, cultural, and geopolitical interest in Orthodox Christianity continues to expand and grow.