Between Heaven and Russia

Sarah Riccardi-Swartz is Assistant Professor of Religion and Anthropology at Northeastern University, where she is also an affiliate faculty member in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program. Her research focuses on politics, race, media gender and sexuality, and Orthodox Christianity. She is the author of Between Heaven and Russia: Religious Conversion and Political Authority in Appalachia.Sarah Riccardi-Swartz is a postdoctoral fellow in the Luce-funded Recovering Truth: Religion, Journalism, and Democracy in a Post-Truth Era project at the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict at Arizona State University.

The book Between Heaven and Russia by American anthropologist Sarah Riccardi-Swartz offers fascinating insights into a specific variant of the current Orthodox convert scene in the USA. With many examples and picturesque retellings, Riccardi-Swartz analyzes the Orthodox community in a small town in West Virginia, which has both an Orthodox monastery and an Orthodox congregation. . . It highlights the danger of viewing the partly astonishing growth of the Orthodox Church in the USA through rose-colored glasses. The book is highly recommended, also because of its lively and captivating language.

Between Heaven and Russia, remarkably, takes us to rural West Virginia, inside a small patriarchal community of American converts to Russian Orthodoxy, who yearn for a restoration of tsarist Russia, and whose admiration of Vladimir Putin is exceeded only by their reverence for Nicholas II. Lest you assume this is a straightforward ethnography of a peculiar Appalachian outpost, think again. Sarah Riccardi-Swartz has crafted a gripping narrative of the American radical right's growing fixation with the fascist ideologues of Eurasia, and their interconnectedness with a global movement that poses a dire threat to secular democracy around the world.

In this engrossing and revelatory study of what she calls 'Reactive Orthodoxy,' Sarah Riccardi-Swartz finds in a rural West Virginia community of Christian converts to the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR) a key to the emerging shape of contemporary transnational far-right political religion. Her interlocutors say the U.S. is on the eve of destruction, broken by secularism, the betrayal of whiteness, and LGBTQ rights. They look to pre-1917 Tsarist Russia for a model of Christian government and to post-Soviet Russia and Vladimir Putin for protection and hope. Between Heaven and Russia establishes itself immediately as essential reading for understanding religion and politics in the 21st century. It is also a model for studying religion beyond the protective screen of good religion/bad religion.