Between heaven and Russia: religious conversion and political apostasy in Appalachia

Abstract

This book is a pioneering anthropological study of two largely self-sustained Orthodox communities in rural and mountainous West Virginia. Its publication ignited a firestorm of praise and denunciation on social media and in reviews on the book’s amazon.com webpage, where most ratings clustered at five stars (the highest) or one star (the lowest). 1 The book spawned an extreme polarisation of views because it became cannon fodder in the Orthodox subset of American culture wars, depending on attitudes towards Russia, its leaders (especially Tsar Nicholas II and Vladimir Putin), and the Russian Orthodox Church (especially its principal US affiliate, the Russian Orthodox Church outside Russia, ROCOR). If most anthropological studies of small or isolated religious communities are typically read by mainly by academics, here we have a minor cause célèbre , either hailed as the best thing since apple pie, or trashed as rubbish, ‘little more than opinion journalism’. 2 This makes a sober academic review of Between Heaven and Russia a hazardous but necessary undertaking.