For the most damning positions—fascism, transphobia, and white supremacy—supposedly held by many in her study, she supplies no concrete evidence. In fact, statements consistently contradict the study’s conclusions. The parish priest in Wayne told two persons holding white supremacist sympathies to renounce their views or leave the church as “ROCOR does not subscribe to hate beliefs or actions.” Politics is purported to be the motivating factor for ROCOR conversions and yet Riccardi-Swartz relates that “numerous times” people would tell her: “I don’t like to talk about politics.” The repeated presentation of a few individuals to demonstrate the radicalization of the whole and the reliance throughout the book on statements made on social media and unaffiliated websites instead of quantifiable, real-world data, makes one wonder if the author became fixated on outliers.
The subject matter of
Between Heaven and Russia is both fascinating and relevant for those seeking to explain the exodus of rural Americans from mainstream religious and political thought. I would have loved to have seen the balanced, objective, and deeply researched approach found in, for example, Suzanne Tallichet’s
Daughters of the Mountain or Robert Wuthnow’s
The Left Behind. Regrettably, I found Riccardi-Swartz’s book to be predictable in its biases and pedestrian in its presentation of sociology as little more than opinion journalism.
The circumstances that led to veneration of the tsar and his family cannot be so easily reduced to a reactionary craving for Christian theocracy.
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