Between Heaven and Russia: Religious Conversion and Political Apostasy in Appalachia by Sarah Riccardi-Swartz

Abstract

Reviewed by: Between Heaven and Russia: Religious Conversion and Political Apostasy in Appalachia by Sarah Riccardi-Swartz Aram G. Sarkisian Sarah Riccardi-Swartz, Between Heaven and Russia: Religious Conversion and Political Apostasy in Appalachia (New York: Fordham University Press, 2022) Published just weeks after Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, Sarah Riccardi-Swartz's book offers a timely and discomfiting lens into two, interconnected Russian Orthodox Christian communities perched among the mountain hollers of rural Appalachia. Located in pseudonymous Woodford, West Virginia, St. Basil's Monastery and St. John's Parish belong to the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR). Founded in 1920 by clergy and laity displaced by the Russian Civil War, ROCOR sought to preserve pre-revolutionary Russian Orthodoxy outside Soviet borders until such time as a post-communist Russia could be evangelized. In 2008, under the watchful eye of Vladimir Putin, ROCOR reunited with the Moscow Patriarchate, widening the reach of a global Russian Church closely allied with Putin's authoritarian regime. Formerly a mostly urban church in the United States, ROCOR by then was expanding into suburban and rural areas like Woodford, where a community formed in the early 2000s. This growth came from an influx of ideologically-motivated converts seeking a traditional and conservative faith, and one which aligned with their values on "culture war" issues like abortion, sexuality, gender roles, and perceived moral decline. ROCOR stood athwart shifting social, moral, and political tides, with its nostalgic emphasis on Holy Orthodox Russia. For some, aligning with [End Page 125] ROCOR led to affinities with Putin, a self-professed Orthodox Christian. In time, the community began to attract far-right converts drawn to ROCOR's conservatism because it spoke to their political inclinations, including some with white nationalist views. Riccardi-Swartz endeavored to discover what might compel twenty-first-century Americans in rural Appalachia to embrace this iteration of Russian Orthodoxy, much less identify with an autocratic leader usually seen as a geopolitical foe. "Why Russia?" she asks. "Why now? Why Appalachia?" (12). Riccardi-Swartz has done exceptional work in setting a much-needed cornerstone in an emerging scholarly literature on Orthodox Christianity in North America. Yet this is not only a book about Orthodoxy. Rather, it also offers a perceptive snapshot of the United States during the age of Donald Trump. Riccardi-Swartz arrived in Woodford shortly after the 2016 US presidential election, a seismic event which placed the US within a global, right-wing project that posed authoritarianism and traditionalism as antidotes to liberalism and progressivism. Having come to study the digital reproduction of icons, Riccardi-Swartz instead found her interlocutors stuck on the Trumpian moment, interested not so much in discussing iconography as they were their spiritual geopolitics, and too their concerns over the "culture war" issues upon which Trump built his electoral appeal. At first glance, a community of religious traditionalists and social conservatives in borscht-red West Virginia might appear tailor-made for MAGA Nation, eager to embrace a president who promised to reflect their values, and who made Christianity a central, if paradoxical, component of his political persona. Yet many interlocutors expressed indifference, even disdain, for Trump and showed general dissatisfaction with US politics. Riccardi-Swartz shines in her exploration of these nuances, explaining that understanding Orthodox practice in Woodford necessitates navigating both the oft-misunderstood complexities of Appalachia and the tensions of fostering transnational faith. Her interlocutors expressed keen awareness of the stereotypes often assigned to Appalachia, and as Russian Orthodox Christians, they were sensitive to being perceived as un-American. All the same, they had inverted the Cold War perception of the Soviet Union as an "evil empire" to instead argue that Putin's Russia was their last, best hope for making America great again. For these converts, Russia was "their only hope for social salvation, for reclaiming America for God, and for preserving the status quo of Christian hegemony in an increasingly diversifying Western world" (3). Gender hierarchies are critical in Woodford. The abbot of St. Basil's Monastery required verbal consent from Riccardi-Swartz's husband before she could begin interviewing the monks, educated autodidacts who sought the ascetic rigidity of ROCOR monasticism...