Orthodox Christianity in the United States PDF

Received: 1 December 2022 Accepted: 27 April 2023 DOI: 10.1111/rec3.12461 ARTICLE Orthodox Christianity in the United States: A challenge for the study of American religion Sarah Riccardi-Swartz1,2 1 Department of Philosophy and Religion, Northeastern University, Boston,...

Received: 1 December 2022 Accepted: 27 April 2023 DOI: 10.1111/rec3.12461 ARTICLE Orthodox Christianity in the United States: A challenge for the study of American religion Sarah Riccardi-Swartz1,2 1 Department of Philosophy and Religion, Northeastern University, Boston, Abstract Massachusetts, USA Arguably one of the oldest forms of Christianity, with a 2 Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Northeastern University, Boston, global population of more than 260 million adherents, Massachusetts, USA Orthodox Christianity is a major religious system, with networks of believers on almost every continent. However, Correspondence Sarah Riccardi-Swartz. within the study of American religion, as well as most of Email: [email protected] the social sciences and humanities (not including theology), Orthodoxy has received minimal research and interest. The broad omission of Orthodoxy from the history of American religions pushes a question to the fore: Why are some forms of Christianity at the very edge of our academic topography? This article explores existing literature on Orthodox Christi- anity in the United States, looking at issues between emic and etic studies, notions of Eastern Christian alterity, and the rise in new research at the intersection of contemporary social issues, Orthodox theology, and religious practice. In doing so, this article draws out how Orthodoxy provides rich American religious histories tied to global politics, immigra- tion, and nationalism, while also prompting us to reconfigure how we study religion in the United States. 1 | ORTHODOX CHRISTIANITY IN THE UNITED STATES: A CHALLENGE FOR THE STUDY OF AMERICAN RELIGION Arguably one of the oldest forms of Christianity, with a global population of more than 260 million adherents, Ortho- dox Christianity is a major religious system, with networks of believers on almost every continent (Pew Research Center, 2017). In the United States, where Orthodoxy is comprised of diasporic, immigrant, and convert populations, This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made. © 2023 The Authors. Religion Compass published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Religion Compass. 2023;17:e12461. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/rec3 1 of 9 https://doi.org/10.1111/rec3.12461  17498171, 2023, 5-6, Downloaded from https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/rec3.12461 by University Of San Diego, Wiley Online Library on [04/11/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License 2 of 9 RICCARDI-SWARTZ it has received minimal academic research and inquiry. This article explores some of the existing literature on Ortho- dox Christianity in the United States, looking at issues between emic (coming from within a group) and etic (coming from outside of a group) studies, notions of Eastern Christian alterity or difference, and the new rise in research on contemporary social issues that are in conversation with Orthodox theology and practice. Beyond Eastern Ortho- doxy, which is the form of Orthodox Christianity I address in this essay, Oriental Orthodox communities (Coptic, Armenian, and Ethiopian, and many others) have had their own rich histories also ignored in the scope of American religion. The broad omission of Orthodox Christianity, both Oriental and Eastern, from the history of American reli- gions pushes a question to the fore: Why are some forms of Christianity at the very edge of our academic topography? This article considers why that might be case, before turning to how (Eastern) Orthodoxy provides American histories tied intimately to global politics, immigration, and nationalism, while also prompting us to reconfigure how we study religions in the United States. While this is not meant to be a historical overview of Orthodox immigration, a bit of background is in order. Orthodoxy in the United States is a diasporic religion tied deeply to national origin. Greek, Russian, Antiochian, Roma- nian, and Serbian are just some of the many nationalistic labels attached to Orthodoxy depending on the communi- ties' homelands or regions. The late eighteenth century saw some of the first waves of Orthodox migration to North America. In the 1700s, Russian Orthodoxy arrived in what is now the United States via fur traders and monks to the Alaskan territory. During this same time period, Greek Orthodox missions began in parts of Florida colonized by the Spanish; eventually missionaries founded a community in New Smyrna (Panagopulos, 1956). While Orthodoxy primarily came to the shores of North America via the migration of practicing Orthodox Christians (often Orthodox from infancy—colloquially termed cradle Orthodox) from Russia, Eastern Europe, and the Mediterranean, conversion to this branch of Christianity was also part of the American narrative early on. In Alaska, indigenous populations adopted Orthodoxy, often creating a syncretistic form of the faith that flexibly allowed for the inclusion of cultural heritage practices. In the Southern region of what becomes the United States, one notable convert during this period was Colonel Philip Ludwell III, who in the late 1700s converted to Russian Orthodoxy while in London (Associates of Colonel Philip Ludwell III). During the mid-to-late twentieth century, meta- physical converts came to Orthodoxy through a variety of New Religious Movements, including the Holy Order of MANS (Lucas, 1995). Orthodoxy in the 21st century has also attracted converts, and, of political interest, an influx of right-wing White Americans during the late 2010s and early 2020s. In the contemporary context, conversions have become a means through which this immigrant religion has transformed socially and politically. However, immigra- tion is still a key part of Orthodox historical narratives in the United States. As Orthodox Christians began to settle in America, they founded parishes, monasteries, schools, and a variety of charitable organizations. Present in the waves of immigration that helped shape the United States, Orthodox Christians often settled in dense urban areas, including New York, Chicago, New Orleans, Detroit, and San Francisco, and the surrounding metro areas, working to both assimilate to American culture and to preserve their cultural heritage practices including native language use, something that perhaps made their communities seemingly more closed off to scholars of American religion in the twentieth century (Crisan, 2019). 2 | LOCATING ORTHODOXY IN AMERICAN RELIGIONS In the 1950s, sociologist Will Herberg set forth a tri-partite paradigm of American religiosity—Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish (Herberg, 1983). For the most part, the subfield of American religions, or religions in the United States, has left behind Herberg's paradigm, giving more attention now to other religious and spiritual traditions, and to the relationship between secularity and religiosity. Starting in the latter half of the twentieth century, scholars began to interrogate the political, historical, and social value of American religion in the broader cultural and even geopolitical contexts. While the rise in research on Native American religions, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and metaphysical movements has increased our historical, sociological, and anthropological understandings of religion in the United  17498171, 2023, 5-6, Downloaded from https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/rec3.12461 by University Of San Diego, Wiley Online Library on [04/11/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License RICCARDI-SWARTZ 3 of 9 States, attention to Orthodox Christianity is still limited. Perhaps this is because although Orthodox Christianity is a global religion, it is also a minority religious tradition in the United States. 2017 statistics place the number of Orthodox Christians in America at one percent of the global total (Pew Research Center, 2017). While the number of U.S.-based Orthodox Christians is slightly less than the Muslim population but higher than those who describe themselves as practitioners of metaphysical or New Age spiritualities, the lack of scholarly research on Orthodoxy poses a question about what counts in the study of American religions, thereby gesturing to focal lens problem and, ultimately, a bias in our academic mapping of what counts as an American religion. Certainly, this essay is not the first time the exclusion of Orthodoxy from critical inquiry in American religious history has been noted. In 1972, historian Sydney Eckman Ahlstrom wrote about this lack of consideration, For most Americans, nevertheless, these churches had been—or still are—a closed book. A Greek was a restaurateur, not a bearer of a rich and ancient Christian tradition. A Russian is variously suspected as White or Red. The historic testimony and ways of about one hundred thousand Unitarians or four hundred thousand Christian Scientists or a handful of Shakers are better known, even in many seminar- ies, than the faith and practice of America’s nearly three million Orthodox (Ahlstrom, 1972, pp. 985–6). Ahlstrom's appraisal of this omission points to the social marginalization of Orthodox Christians in the United States. Greek Orthodoxy was (and even still is) viewed through foodways and immigrant entrepreneurship. Russian Ortho- doxy was considered only in relationship to Soviet politics, especially during the Cold War. Orthodoxy was read as cultural, as immigrant, as other, and not as religion. It has been over 40 years since Ahlstrom underscored a very important aspect of disremembering Orthodoxy in the scholarship of American religious history; that is, long-standing ethnic and political prejudices and an overarching bias in the field toward Protestantism. Perhaps this is the bias that American Catholic studies scholar Robert Orsi, one of Ahlstrom's last students, described almost 2 decades ago: “Implicit (sometimes explicit) and unacknowledged Protestant Christian (and anti-Catholic) models dominated the way religions were imagined and constructed, even what constituted “religion” and certainly what good religion was and what was appropriate for religious scholarship and pedagogy in this democracy” (Orsi, 2004, p. 590). At the time Ahlstrom was writing, three million Orthodox Christians lived in the United States, and yet their historical forms of religious practice, theological traditions, and material culture even, were absent from curriculum on American religions. Even worse still was the lack of research on Oriental Orthodox Churches in the United States, including Assyrian, Armenian, Coptic, and Ethiopian. Furthermore, when Orthodoxy was mentioned, it was (and still is) typically portrayed as an exotic form of Christianity, and generally viewed through the lens of Orientalism, as we can see from the Ahlstrom reading (Jensen & Rothstein, 2000). While Ahlstrom aptly points out the dismissal of Orthodoxy, he also, unfortunately, uses the stereotypical ethnic identification often attached to Orthodox Christians to make his point about the lack of critical engagement. The rich traditions of Greek Orthodoxy, its influential theo- logians, its historical ties to the political economy of Byzantium, its aesthetic features and vibrant sensorium (music, art, ritual, and more), and, within the context of the United States, its involvement with the Civil Rights movement, are reduced to the food service industry, to spanakopita so to speak (1972, pp. 985–6). Russian Orthodoxy, as it is in so many other works, is relegated to a pre-Soviet artifact that is caught up in Cold War tensions between the USSR and the United States. Even within the confines of a work that decries the lack of focus on Eastern Orthodoxy, Ahlstrom's words still convey a sense of orientalism. By and large, the assumed foreignness or exotic nature of Orthodoxy has led to its exclusion from historical narratives in a field that is still, to some extent, steeped in Protestant Church history (Dolan, 1988) I use Ahlstrom's writing as an example of the ongoing academic work on Orthodoxy in American religious history that is both cogent and yet fails to reflexively acknowledge why Orthodoxy has been a missing as a point of critical engagement for scholars until recently. Despite the broad omission of Orthodoxy from the secular study of American religion(s), the  17498171, 2023, 5-6, Downloaded from https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/rec3.12461 by University Of San Diego, Wiley Online Library on [04/11/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License 4 of 9 RICCARDI-SWARTZ twentieth century (particularly the latter half) saw works beginning to emerge. This body of research often took two different methodological trajectories—encyclopedic and ethnographic. 3 | CLASSIFICATION AND CLOSED COMMUNITIES Early works on Orthodox Christianity in the American context were often encyclopedic in nature. The content of these works generally followed a similar construction, focusing on the hierarchical structure of the various ethnically identified jurisdictions, reinforcing an almanac style of documentation (Stanoyevich, 1921). Ukrainian-American civic organizer Yaroslav Chyz's 1939 text on Ukrainian immigrants to the United States is an excellent example of encyclo- paedical style, as is Barbara Sweetland Smith's 1980 historical inventory of Russian Orthodoxy in Alaska (Chyz, 1939; Sweetland Smith, 1980). Even Theodore Saloutos's 1964 important The Greeks in United States, which traces the historical immigration of Greek populations in narrative form, also utilizes a highly detailed system that emphasizes dates and names with very little focus on Orthodox religiosity (Saloutos, 1964) Not surprisingly, much of that ency- clopedic impulse remains today, where we see U.S Orthodoxy included in handbooks, textbooks, and encyclopedias of religion, while rarely being the focus of a major monograph (Atwood, 2010; McGuckin, ed. 2011). Even theologian Thomas FitzGerald's introduction to Orthodoxy, produced in the late 1990s, was a succinct historical overview that focused more on facts and figures rather than the social development and cultural transformations of Orthodoxy throughout American history (FitzGerald, 1998). Certainly the historical and encyclopedic documentation provided a much needed acknowledgment of Orthodoxy, but it lacks sociocultural critique and intersectional frameworks that can provide us with more nuanced and interconnected understandings of Orthodox communities in the United States. Orthodox community studies in the late 1990s into the beginning of the 2000s were often historical in nature, typically included as part of a broader work on Russian immigration or Russian Orthodoxy abroad. The Pacific North- west was a prime location to study Russian migration and sociality, and scholars such as Susan Wiley Hardwick and Gwen A. Miller both provide keen insights into the intersection of migration, religious diversity, and Russian forms of heritage belonging in this region (Hardwick, 1993; Miller, 2010). The experiential lived history focus of these works is also a method utilized in the anthropology of Orthodoxy. Anthropology, as a field, arguably provides another form of classification; not encyclopedic, at least in the contemporary context, but as a way to identify and document social forms. Anthropologist Jessica Catellino reminds us that “Anthropology has the power to name spatial and cultural units where they might otherwise remain invisible or disconnected (Catellino, 2010, p. 278). While the anthropology of Orthodoxy in the United States was scattered at best during the early part of the twen- tieth century, the 1970s and 1980s saw folklore, anthropology's methodological cousin, take interest in the social dimensions of Orthodox piety. Robert Teske's work on Greek Orthodox votive practices and domestic spheres in Pennsylvania provided a window on to how religious piety materialized in the lifeworlds of practitioners (Teske, 1979, 1985). Then came anthropologist and ethnohistorian Sergei Kan's exceptional fieldwork and rich archival stories of indigenous Orthodoxy in Alaska, which often refutes internal clergy narratives, such as those by missionary priest Fr. Michael Oleska, about the importance of Native cultural heritage inclusion among Indigenous Orthodox groups (Kan, 1985, 1987, 1999, 2021; Oleska, 1987). Far removed from Oleska's theological assessment of Indigenous spirit- uality, Kan's work provided some of the first ethnographic opportunities to think about Orthodoxy intersectionally in the United States. Indigeneity, gender, sexuality, migration, and economics were all part of Kan's synthetic analysis of how Orthodoxy was transformed, adapted, and even contested in Indigenous Alaskan communities. At the same time, the early anthropological inquiry into U.S.-based Orthodox communities experienced the same disciplinary problem that Sherry Ortner pointed to more generally in the beginning of 1990s. Ortner showed how the anthropology of the United States had a perpetual tendency “to ‘ethnicize’ the groups under study, to treat them as so many isolated and exotic tribes,” in part because of “the classic anthropological desire to see the cultures of these communities as having a certain authenticity in their own terms” (2006, pp. 166–67). This was the case with  17498171, 2023, 5-6, Downloaded from https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/rec3.12461 by University Of San Diego, Wiley Online Library on [04/11/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License RICCARDI-SWARTZ 5 of 9 anthropological work on Orthodoxy in the United States, especially during the twentieth century. While Ortner's excellent critique of anthropological inquiry on American soil draws out the importance of thinking about class, race, and gender, she ignores the religious dimensions of social groups. This omission is especially startling given Ortner's suggestion that anthropology tends to ethnize the other and not take seriously interiority and social lifeworlds. Building on Ortner's work, Nicholas De Genova, in the mid-2000s, reminded us that the anthropology of the United States is beholden, in many respects, to the colonial formations of nationalism that ultimately created racialized anxi- eties and suspicions about immigrant bodies and those seen as socially other (De Genova, 2007). It is arguably this colonialist impulse created the academic parameters by which Orthodoxy has long been ignored because of ethnic or spiritual alterity (difference). 4 | THE INSIDER/OUTSIDER GENRE While so-called secular (outsider) scholarship on Orthodoxy in the United States was minimal during the twentieth century, there was a vital histo-theological genre of confessional research that flourish. Hagiographical histographies of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, the Orthodox Church in America, and the Greek Orthodox Church helped Orthodox communities make theological and social sense of their place in the American context (Maximovitch, 1997). While work from Orthodox theological thinkers, through personal correspondence and writing, abounds during this time period, the content they produced are not synthetic analyses of Orthodoxy in relationship to American religion; instead, these are primary documents through which we can better understand the social, religious, and even political dimensions of immigrant life, jurisdictional conflicts, and diasporic negotiations present among Orthodox Christians. At the same time, there were Orthodox clerics and practitioners who worked to create academic histories of the Church in the United States. John Erickson's emic historical account of Orthodoxy in North America is most often referenced by American religious history scholars and those working in Orthodox Studies (2008). Erickson's condensed study is helpful for tracing the early years of Orthodoxy in America, specifically the influx of Russian and Greek émigrés, but fails to fully contextualize Orthodoxy into the broader scope of American religious history, provid- ing an insular view of the religion. Erikson's study of Orthodoxy is not unlike other texts from other scholar-practioners, including the much-cited work by Mark Stokoe and Leonid Kishkovsky on the internal history of Orthodoxy in North America (Stokoe & Kishkovsky, 1995). Beyond these more academic histories, there are far too many emic local and regional histories of Orthodox parishes and communities during this period to include here, and it is not my intent to be encyclopedic. Rather the question for those of us researching American religion is how to place these texts into the broader analysis of Orthodox history. Orthodox historical texts are foundational primary documents that often, but not always, provide timelines, information about institutional authority, and a bit about internal theological debates, issues, and transformations. Crucial to understand is that the hagiographical nature of many of these texts means that historical fact(or)s, social movements, contestations, and recalibrations are often excised or overlooked in favor of a narrative that emphasizes holiness or saintliness of important figures within jurisdictions. Orthodox-produced literature through the twentieth century generally did not address the larger social and political issues in and through which Orthodoxy was lived and transformed on American soil, although the writings of theological figures such as Father Georges Florovsky do give us a bit of insight into the relationship between immigration to the United States and global Orthodoxy (Gavrilyuk, 2014). While these internal, often theological or ecclesiastical, works are vital to understanding the social and religious life worlds of Orthodox Christians, including how they relate to large-scale issues such as geopolitics, they have typically not been utilized by secular scholars of American religion until recently. It is important to note that many of the early primary documents from Orthodox Christians in the United States were written in their heritage languages. Thus, language limitations might have been one of the main reasons for the lack of critical investigation by scholars of American religion. However, the limited interest in Orthodoxy theology, hymnody, and prayers in English suggests a lack of interdisciplinary research. Indeed, from my vantage point, it is arguable that the interdisciplinary turn in American Orthodox studies, both emic and etic, did not occur until the 2000s.  17498171, 2023, 5-6, Downloaded from https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/rec3.12461 by University Of San Diego, Wiley Online Library on [04/11/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License 6 of 9 RICCARDI-SWARTZ 5 | U.S. ORTHODOXY: THE INTERDISCIPLINARY TURN AND THE GLOBAL CONTEXT The 21st century saw Orthodox Studies, as a subfield of Religious Studies, turn its attention to the United States as site of critical social, not just theological, inquiry. In both emic and etic accounts of U.S./American Orthodoxy, Russian immigration and Indigenous conversions in Alaska figure prominently into the discourse about the history and social transformation of religious practice and belief. Within the 21st century, the geographical locus of inquiry has shifted, as contemporary scholars of Orthodoxy in the United States have become keenly aware of how the religion is transforming because of convert populations, and how Orthodox religiosity, politics, and practices are not unmoored from the global formations of the faith. While some work was done in the 1990s, it has largely been within the 21st century that scholars have begun to deeply interrogate American conversions to the immigrant, diasporic formations of Orthodoxy beyond Alaska (Herbel, 2014; Kravchenko, 2018; Riccardi-Swartz, 2016, 2019, 2021, 2022; Slagle, 2011; Whitesides, 1997; Winchester, 2015). More recently, a young cohort of scholars have begun to take on pressing interdisciplinary issues in the study of U.S. Orthodoxy. Returning to the troubled political historiographies of Slavic immigrants during the twentieth century, historian Aram Sarkisian highlights how nativism, political disagreements, and social policing were part of the lived experiences of Russian Orthodox Christians in the late-1910s Detroit (Sarkisian, 2022). Further illuminating the every- day experiences, and particularly the insecurities and anxieties, of immigrant life, Sarkisian explores how the influenza epidemic of 1918 affected the social and religious practices of Carpatho-Rusyn believers, before turning his attention to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on contemporary Orthodoxy (Sarkisian, 2021). Sarkisian's keen attention to labor, economics, social policies, and immigration politics provides the critical lived perspectives often missing in the wholesale analyses of Slavic immigrant religiosity offered in the latter part of the twentieth century. Furthermore, Sarkisian moves the conversation about Slavic forms of Orthodoxy away from the typical historic narratives written about Alaska and the Pacific Northwest, to show us how urban forms of religiosity intersect with issues of labor, policing, and civic organizing. Lived religion and ethnographic inquiry into the experiences, practices, and beliefs of Orthodox Christians in the United States is an important part of the new research being conducted. Elizabeth Boosahda's expansive study of Arab Americans, that highlights the historical complexities of immigration and identity, provides a vital explo- ration of Middle Eastern Christianity in the United States (Boosahda, 2003). Similarly, Matthew Stiffler offers us a window onto Orthodoxy and Arab identity post-9/11 through his rich ethnography of an Antiochian parish in Detroit (Stiffler, 2011). Religious Studies scholar Elena Kravchenko has brought our attention to how religious art and racial reconciliation are key aspects of contemporary African American conversions to Orthodoxy (Kravchenko, 2020, 2021). Additionally, Kravchenko provides new ways to think about the construction of both diasporic and convert Orthodox identities through religious narratives, holy or sacred images, and spiritual geographies of belonging (Kravchenko, 2018) Also interested in materiality, Nicholas Denysenko's work on Church architecture in the United States offers insight into how Orthodoxy is built in community spaces (Denysenko, 2017). Teasing out the globalized spiritual and social geographies of Orthodoxy in relationship to tourism, Julia Klimova's work on a Greek Orthodox monastery in Arizona traces out how communities are formed and sustained through Russian Orthodox pilgrimage (Klimova, 2011). The work of qualitative sociologist Frances Kostarelos on contested discourses and cultural transformations around Elder Ephraim and his monastic movement in the United States reminds us that identity politics still need to be examined in Orthodox spaces (Kostarelos, 2020). Chris Durante's work on ethno-religiosity identity and belong among Greek Orthodox communities pushes us to think about the relationship between heritage negotiation and social solidarity projects in diasporic groups (Durante, 2015). In the historical context, Matthew Lee Miller troubles our conceptions of ethnic and cultural preservation, charity, and Protestant-Orthodox engagement with his study of the YMCA (formerly called the Young Christian Men's Associa- tion) and Russian Orthodoxy, gesturing to larger issues of immigration and global religiosity (Miller, 2013). Focusing on social transformation, Alexander Kitroeff's contemporary history of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese highlights the institution's role in the lives of Greek immigrants and in the broader political climate of twentieth-century Amer- ica (Kitroeff, 2020).  17498171, 2023, 5-6, Downloaded from https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/rec3.12461 by University Of San Diego, Wiley Online Library on [04/11/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License RICCARDI-SWARTZ 7 of 9 Sociologist Kristina Stoeckl and philosopher Dmitry Uzlaner, who work primarily in Eurasia, have drawn out the dynamic social histories between conservative American and Russian actors who are active participants in the perpet- uation of the new global culture wars (Anderson, 2014; Stoeckl & Uzlaner, 2022; Stoeckl and Uzlaner, eds., 2021; Uzlaner & Stoeckl, 2018). My own work on religious conversion in relationship to U.S.-Russian geopolitics, alterna- tive forms of far-right American conservatism, and Orthodox Christian Nationalism, has shown forth the globalized political dimensions of spiritual conversion (Riccardi-Swartz, 2022). Theological and cultural critic Robert Saler has interrogated the relationships among punk culture, aesthetics, and the cult of the saints in the contemporary vener- ation of American convert to Orthodoxy, Fr. Seraphim (Eugene) Rose (Saler, 2023, forthcoming). These new scholarly modes of inquiry recognize that Orthodoxy in the United States is not set apart from American religious history, nor is it unmoored from the global flows of Christianity both in the historical and contemporary context. Certainly, there is the need for more intersectional research, including a deep dive into issues of gender, sexuality, class, and disability, to name just a few. However, if the current avenues of research are indication of the field ahead, it is safe to say that Orthodoxy has finally become a vital interlocutor in the study of American religions. 6 | CONCLUSION While American religious history has begun including studies on groups other than Protestants in the last 40 plus years, there is still the need for more studies on minority religious movements. We must actively continue to address the problematic exclusion of Orthodoxy in American religious history in order to highlight the possibility for growth in the (sub)field. By doing so, the patchwork assemblage of American religious history is laid bare, showing the varied and distinct religious groups, cultures, and lifeways that come together to create a vibrant religious landscape. Certainly, scholarship on Orthodox Christianity in the United States is beginning to proliferate and be taken seriously in academe. However, those us who study Orthodoxy are still faced with the challenge of convincing publishers and editors to value the social, political, and cultural lifeworld of communities that are quite small statistically within the geographical confines of the States. Yet, despite its small statistical footprint in the U.S., Orthodoxy is one of the most geographical diffuse, transnationally engaged religions worldwide. Opening space for Orthodoxy means expanding the study of American religions to move beyond the geographical confines of the subfield, and to acknowledge that religions in the United States are global interlocutors in the networked forms of religiosity around the world, not isolated socio-spiritual phenomena curated by cartographic boarders. O RC ID Sarah Riccardi-Swartz https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9226-975X P EER RE VI E W The peer review history for this article is available at https://www.webofscience.com/api/gateway/wos/peer- review/10.1111/rec3.12461. 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Stoeckl (2018). “The Legacy of Pitirim Sorokin in the transnational alliances of moral conservatives,” Journal of Classical Sociology 18 (2) (S), pp 133–153, Available from: https://doi.org/10.1177/1468795x17740734 Whitesides, P.B. (1997) Ethnics and evangelicals: theological tensions within American orthodox Christianity. Saint Vladimir's Theological Quarterly, 41(1), 19–35. Winchester, D. (2015) Converting to continuity: temporality and self in Eastern orthodox conversion narratives. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 54(3), 439–460. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1111/jssr.12211 AUT HOR BI OGRAPHY Sarah Riccardi-Swartz is an Assistant Professor of Religion and Anthropology and an affiliate faculty member in the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Northeastern University. She has a Ph.D. in Anthropol- ogy from New York University. An interdisciplinary scholar, she also holds a B.A. and M.A. in Religious Studies from Missouri State University, plus a graduate certificate in Culture and Media (ethnographic filmmaking) and an M.Phil. in Anthropology from NYU. Her research focuses on far-right politics, media worlds, and Orthodox Christianity. Her first book is Between Heaven and Russia: Religious Conversion and Political Apostasy in Appalachia (Fordham University Press, 2022). How to cite this article: Riccardi-Swartz, S. (2023) Orthodox Christianity in the United States: a challenge for the study of American religion. Religion Compass, 17(5-6), e12461. Available from: https://doi. org/10.1111/rec3.12461