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Q&A: What Can a Russian Orthodox Community Tell Us about Rural America? [1]
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Date: 2025-03-21
Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week.
Dr. Sarah Riccardi-Swartz, a professor of religion and anthropology at Northeastern University, spent a year living with a community of Russian Orthodox monks and laypeople, nestled in a small West Virginia mountain town. What she found there was a portrait of rural religious life far different than the often-caricatured ‘white clapboard church’ of Trump-tinged Protestantism. The reality is, as always, much stranger. She documented her findings in her book Between Heaven and Russia: Religious Conversion and Political Apostasy in Appalachia.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Christiana Wayne, The Daily Yonder: Could you broadly describe the political and religious character of this West Virginia Russian Orthodox community?
Sarah Riccardi-Swartz: When I went to visit for the first time, I was really fascinated by two things. First, the community is comprised of a men’s monastery. A few miles down the road, there’s a church that was created to support people who wanted to move to the area to be close to this men’s monastery. And I was really struck by the fact that, in a place where largely Orthodoxy is an immigrant faith – Russian and Ukrainian coal miners in Appalachia and in the Rust Belt region – what we have in this community is white American converts who come from faith communities that are more closely associated with Appalachia like Evangelical Pentecostal, various types of Protestants. And they’ve all found a new home in the Russian Orthodox Church. Sarah Riccardi-Swartz is an assistant professor of religion and anthropology at Northeastern University. (Photo via Northeastern University College of Social Sciences and Humanities.)
When I came back to the community, it was about nine months after Trump was inaugurated [in 2017], I found a community that was largely the same as the community I had visited over and over, but they were also really concerned about global geopolitics. When I started the process of interviewing them, they were really keen on talking to me about the importance of Russia in saving the United States from itself. And so I spent a year living with this community, and what I found was ultimately a right-wing community of people who converted to Russian Orthodoxy because they believed that it was a more authentic form of Christianity, but also because they found within Russian politics something that they thought was missing from the American political system. That’s what the book is about, their experiences of converting and what they find meaningful about being Orthodox and particularly being Russian Orthodox.
DY: Many political pundits talk about religious people in kind of purely political terms. What do you think that sort of narrative misses about actual belief and the metaphysics of these people, especially the community you lived with?
SRS: That’s a really great question. I have seen both in reporting and among social scientists whose work focuses on right wing or far right communities, an interesting journey around the religious lives of people. What I mean by that is they often will talk about their political subjectivities, but they’re not so much interested in their moral or ethical frameworks for how they got to those political subjectivities. It actually does a disservice to understanding the political patchwork of our nation because politics is an extension of one’s own place in the world and how a person views the world from where they stand.
When someone has a particular religious bent, that affects how they view everything from politics to science to legislation at the local level and even geopolitics … and I think that’s what I try to do with the book on a grassroots level: show folks how important esoteric religious ideas are to the larger political conversation people are having with each other.
DY: Is there anything that these Russian Orthodox members see as essentially rural Appalachian about their religious practice?
SRS: The parish had started a yearly event that was focused on something called Old Christmas. And your readers in Appalachia will remember that Old Christmas has been a tradition in Appalachia for a long time, having Christmas in January. But for Orthodox interlocutors, it is aligned with something called the Old Calendar in the Orthodox Church, which is a calendar that does not line up with the calendar that we use in the West. They would often take things that they found within Appalachia and try to, for lack of a better term, make them orthodox. The congregants said that, because West Virginia has such economically depressed areas and it doesn’t have a lot of development in high-speed internet or infrastructure in small towns, they actually saw that as a benefit to them because it allowed for them to get back to a more rural simplistic way of life. And it neared, for them, what folks would do historically in Russia, which is to go live near a monastery out in the Russian countryside. Being in a rural, very isolated area actually was critical, not only for the monks, but also for the people at the parish nearby, because they believed they were sort of cut off from the ill effects of modernity in the United States.
DY: Rural voters are portrayed as almost entirely nationalist and populist, but members of this Orthodox community, though right-wing, were Russian exceptionalist and monarchist. What does this community have to say about the state of things on the right and the state of things in rural America that’s so shallowly understood?
SRS: I teach a class on the anthropology of rural America. We really take the time to think about the flourishing of LGBTQ+ life in Appalachia, and we take time to think about the Appalachian movement. We talk a lot about the different political and economic conditions that shape communities. And one of the things I try to get my students to think about really seriously is that all of these preconceived understandings that we have of rural America, it’s not really rural America.
Between Heaven and Russia: Religious Conversion and Political Apostasy in Appalachia was published on April 5, 2022. (Image: Fordham University Press) That’s a longstanding curation of rural America, and particularly Appalachia that we’ve had in the American public consciousness since before Johnson’s War on Poverty, and definitely after. And when I tell my students that folks that I worked with didn’t vote for Trump, largely, they’re kind of shocked. When I tell them that, on the local level, the elections often skewed Democratic, they were also kind of shocked. And that just reinforces that we don’t really, outside of Appalachia, have a good understanding of the history of things like the labor movement, the socialist movements within Appalachia that really do have strongholds.
This Orthodox group, even though they are far right, they challenge our assumptions about what the far right looks like and what they hold to be valuable. For example, I interviewed a pastor and his wife who were really quite in love with Trump, but they found Orthodox community even more right wing than them. So I think it challenges us to see the diversity on both sides, both in terms of right-wing populations and in terms of the fact that in rural communities there are Democrats, there are socialists, there are far right people there, it’s not homogenous in any way. And I hope that the book deconstructs that a bit for people.
DY: As we enter this new presidential administration, what are you looking out for as a scholar of religion and a citizen?
SRS: This is a very critical moment in our democracy. And we have seen for the last few years, across the globe, rising forms of illiberalism and authoritarianism. And now we’re seeing it truly come home to the United States in a way that could transform our country quite drastically in the next few years if we don’t recognize that this is the same playbook that’s happening in other countries. And I am hopeful that our country recognizes where we’re headed, and that we do something about the course which we seem to have found ourselves on since January 20th. I anticipate that things are going to become far worse in our country unless something changes and we see more grassroots mobility to hold accountable people who are destroying the federal government from the inside out.
This interview first appeared in Path Finders, a weekly email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each Monday, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Join the mailing list today, to have these illuminating conversations delivered straight to your inbox.
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