The Daily Yonder, March 2025
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.
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.
