Brad speaks with Dr. Sarah Riccardi-Swartz, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Recovering Truth Project (Arizona State University) about her recent article, "The Hybridity of Rural Fascism." She discusses the Evangelical converts to Orthodoxy in rural Appalachia, at least one of which self-identifies as a fascist. She explains how the group sees Trump as too conservative, and instead looks to Putin as the model leader for this--and any--country. As her and Brad explore, the community represents the extreme end of Christian patriarchy, authoritarianism, and trad-values. While it would be easy to label it as a fringe movement, Dr. Riccardi-Swartz reminds us just how prevalent these values are in contemporary White Christian America.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
I am Brad Onishi, faculty in religion at Skidmore College.
Our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at UCSB.
I am joined today by a friend and colleague who does amazing work, and that is Sarah Riccardi Swartz, who is a postdoctoral fellow for the Loose Funded Recovering Truth Project, and that project is on religion, journalism, democracy in a post-truth era.
It's hosted at the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict at Arizona State University.
Sarah is an anthropologist, a scholar of American religion, and trained documentary filmmaker who specializes in social politics, media, and Orthodox Christianity.
Her research has been funded by New York University, the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia, the Louisville Institute, a Charlotte Newcomb Fellowship, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Fordham University, and A Religion, Spirituality, and Democratic Renewal Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council and the Fetzer Institute.
Her first book manuscript is titled Political Apostasy, American Conversions to Russian Orthodoxy During the Trump-Putin Era.
Sarah, thanks so much for taking the time to be here.
Thank you so much for having me on your amazing show.
No, I mean, it's a pleasure and we're here to talk about a piece of writing you did recently that is what I described to you as a gut punch.
What I meant by that was that it's a very concise piece of writing, but it is absolutely breathtaking in terms of not only the writing, which is just dazzling, but also the reporting and the analysis you do here.
So the piece I'm talking about, friends, is The Hybridity of Rural Fascism, and it was published at the website for the Society for Cultural Anthropology as part of a series on American fascism.
I mean, we'll dig into this, Sarah, but it's one of those pieces of writing that leaves you impressed, first of all, but just absolutely terrified in the second breath.
And so let's jump into that.
Let me ask you this.
Tell us about your field work for this article.
Where were you?
You know, it takes place, spoiler alert, in rural Appalachia.
But who are you with?
Who are the people you're talking to?
And why did you decide that you needed to go there?
That's a really complicated question, and I'm going to try my best to answer it in a really complicated way.
I first want to say that only one, I want to clarify this for your listeners, that only one person in the group self-identified as a fascist.
But if we look on the whole at the community's sort of social and political ideas, they could be, and I think should be, labeled as fascist.
So I just, I want to put that out there as a disclaimer, because I think that that is important.
Let me say this for the listeners.
The opening lines of the piece is this.
In terms of politics, how would you describe yourself?
I asked Gwen, I being you, a young woman living in the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia.
I'm a fascist, she replied.
I'm trad, so on and so forth.
But line two, Sarah, we have Gwen saying, I'm a fascist, openly, in West Virginia.
So anyway, that's what we're talking about, friends.
I should have put that at the top.
Anyway, go ahead.
No, that's fine, that's fine.
I just want to put that out there as a disclaimer.
Okay, so in terms of the project and the community.
So, as you mentioned, this community is in rural Appalachia.
I first visited this group in 2015.
I was looking for a film project and I had been referred by another monastery that was very, very Russian and very, very Well, it was a men's monastery, so it was sort of, um, slightly misogynistic and, uh, they didn't want me there.
So that's fine.
Uh, they, they told me there's, Hey, there's a monastery in Appalachia.
You might be interested in working there.
And I went there and I was really at that point looking for my film project.
And I met with a clergy member who had, um, an icon print shop.
And I decided to film a short documentary about his work, um, about the digitization of holy images.
And eventually, after living with that community and filming, I decided I wanted to return full-time to do fieldwork with this group.
Now this is 2015, so keep these dates in mind.
And I was really interested in the reproduction of both religious art and the reproduction of Russian Orthodoxy by converts in the United States.
So these two different registers of reproduction.
So I go back for my fieldwork.
I'm, you know, I'm geared up, ready to go.
2017, September 2017.
I lived there for 12 months with this group.
They are members of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, which is known as ROCOR.
was originally split off from the Moscow Patriarchate for a while.
There's a whole complicated history that we do not need to go into.
It is now reunified.
It was reunified under Putin's watchful eyes, I like to say, with the Moscow Patriarchate, so we can consider them converts to Russian Orthodoxy proper.
This group was located in West Virginia, in the western part of the state, and it was in a small town of about a thousand people.
So I had two places in my field site where I conducted research.
It was a men's monastery, which at the time was the largest English-speaking Russian Orthodox monastery in the world.
It had about 30 monks, a few lay folk, and then there was a parish about seven miles away that had about a hundred people in the books.
But, you know, the demographics of who's showing up on a Sunday would vary.
Um, one of the sort of unique things about my field site was that it was, uh, the demographics were heavily male identifying.
Um, this was in large part due to the monastery, um, and the fact that Orthodox clergy are male and the fact that most converts to Roquefort are male.
Um, women usually convert because of male influence.
So we see, we see a trend here, male, male, male.
Um, I want to give your listeners a sort of, if it's okay, a sort of like, um, an identifier of what a typical male convert might be.
Is that okay?
It is.
It is.
And I was going to ask you even to maybe even back up one more step, which is to say you're an expert in, Basically Orthodox Christianity in the United States.
Would you give us just a window into like the conversion here?
Like who converts to Russian Orthodoxy?
And why do they do so?
And then how does that play into the sort of overwhelming maleness of this group that you're with?
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