Growing up in western Kentucky, with its specific religious composition, I was unaware of the fact that Orthodox Christians make up an important part of the confessional landscape of the United States. It was only upon my arrival in Boston in the mid-1980s and a late-night viewing of The Deer Hunter around the same time that I realized that parts of New England and the Midwest were home to various Orthodox communities. Even after dedicating much of my graduate education to the study of Russian history and Russian Orthodoxy, I remained largely ignorant about Orthodox Christians in the US, even when those communities and churches were populated by immigrants from the Russian Empire and their descendants.

Thanks to Aram Sarkisian’s excellent and engaging book, Orthodoxy on the Line: Russian Orthodox Christians and Labor Migration in the Progressive Era, my academic ignorance of Russian Orthodoxy in the US has greatly receded. Drawing upon archival documents, published primary sources, labor and migration studies, and scholarship about lived religion in both the US and Russia, Sarkisian illuminates the vicissitudes of what contemporaries called “American Orthodox Rusʹ” (4), a collection of more than one hundred “Russian” parishes stretching from the Aleutian Islands to San Francisco, through the Upper Midwest, to the core of this community in the small towns and big cities of Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, and other northeastern states. Mainly composed of immigrants from present-day western Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and the Carpatho-Rusyn region of eastern Europe, these Orthodox believers generally settled in the US for the most practical of reasons: the search for greater work opportunities and higher incomes than they could find in their home countries. In Sarkisian’s account, we learn about on-the-ground attempts by Orthodox priests and parishioners to establish their ideal church, one framed by memory, longing, homesickness, and the spiritual needs of the soul, as well as by the everyday demands of living in a foreign country and working under duress in difficult material conditions. These communities set up Orthodox schools to sustain native languages and religious traditions, while also seeking to assimilate their members into the norms of American culture. They founded aid groups, such as the Russian Immigrant Home, to help alleviate poverty and housing problems and to navigate unfamiliar social and legal systems. In a move that paralleled contemporaneous developments in Siberia, Russian Orthodox priests in the US regularly performed missionary work among those immigrant communities without access to liturgy, helping to seed new churches.

Beyond the institutional, socioeconomic, and spiritual history of American Orthodox Rusʹ, Sarkisian explores a variety of dilemmas and paradoxes common to a group of people entangled not just in the events of their home country, but also in the responses of their adopted country to those same events. For example, the First World War allowed Orthodox immigrants from eastern Europe and the Russian Empire to demonstrate their fidelity to America through acts of patriotism, including joining the US Army to fight against the enemies of Holy Rusʹ, all while being under the surveillance of federal authorities. More broadly, the revolutions of 1917, the subsequent Red Scare in America, religious reform and oppression in Russia, and the Influenza Epidemic of 1918 generated significant tensions in these immigrant communities. To demonstrate to the US government that they were anti-Bolshevik, the Russian Orthodox faithful in America declared their commitment to church and monarchy, which in turn made them susceptible to claims that they were a threat to American Christianity and American democracy. Ecclesiastical reforms enacted before and immediately after 1917 split the Orthodox Church in Russia between antagonistic groups promoting either greater clerical control or more lay authority, divisions that were replicated in Russian Orthodox churches across the US. The Bolshevik persecution of the Orthodox Church in Russia threatened the financial and institutional stability of its North American Archdiocese, which was still dependent on the Russian Church for money, priests, and theological and doctrinal guidance. And the widespread crisis brought about by a deadly subtype of the influenza A virus placed clergy, parishioners, and the Orthodox organizations that they relied on under tremendous strain at the very moment that American Orthodox Rusʹ was buffeted by war, revolution, and their related challenges. Through a wonderful combination of the academic and the personal, including reflections on his own family’s experiences, Sarkisian has done us all a great service by bringing this rich, complex history to life, reminding us once again about the variety and contingency of Russian Orthodoxy, wherever it is practiced.