This remarkable book examines how the Orthodox Christians in America have encountered and reacted to the unfolding movement toward the realization of rights and its attendant language. The author, the Rev. Dr. A. G. Rober, Emeritus Professor of Early Modern History and Religious Studies at Pennsylvania State University and Professor of Church History at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary has produced several authoritative studies on the history of religion in America and his accumulated knowledge and expertise has resulted in a study which will remain the authoritative text on the relationship of the Orthodox and rights for a very long time. The depth and breadth of this study are impressive because, by way of framing the investigation, it delves into the evolution of human rights in America writ large. Moreover, in focusing on the Orthodox in America the study manages to address all of this religion’s ethnic constituencies, Arabic, Greek, Russian, and Slavic comprehensively and in great detail. It achieves this by consulting an enormous corpus of primary and secondary sources that range from philosophical treatises to patristic texts, from Byzantine-era texts to contemporary church documents. In doing so, the author demonstrates this interaction has meant a selective embrace and rejection of language rights and its social implications. But in examining the current state of the debate of rights in America and invoking the religious freedoms that these provided in the past, the author suggests that the Orthodox are now in a position to defend the liberal, democratic, and pluralistic society that nurtured them and is currently being questioned if not attacked.

There are eight chapters in this study, bookended by a prologue, and introduction and a chapter with conclusions. The prologue and the introduction provide some definitional and historical background that presents what is a thread that runs through the study, the different conceptions of rights that evolved in the Western world and America, and the Orthodox understanding of rights. The introduction also pinpoints the post-World War Two moment when the concept of human rights overshadows the earlier concepts of natural and civil rights demands a greater engagement of the Orthodox in the theories and practices unfolding in America through to the emergence of present-day identity politics. The first chapter, entitled “Deferential Society and Church? Protestant to Orthodox Social Ethnos” takes the reader back to seventeenth and eighteenth century America in order to explain the evolution of rights in what was then a predominantly Protestant society before the arrival of Orthodox Christians. It ends by asserting that the horrors of the First World War undermined the belief that a liberal cultural Protestant social vision could be reconciled “with notions of reason, progress, and inevitable, if gradual improvement of human affairs directed by an easily recognized deity” (p. 65). But before the Orthodox would encounter this trend they – in this case Russians – had arrived in Alaska which was acquired by the United States in 1867. There we learn in Chapter 2 they came up against the Presbyterian emphasis on individualism while at the same time, there came the rise of claims of national rights in the Old World, Russia and especially the Ottoman Empire. The old Orthodox sense of collective rights was being challenged from without and within the church and this would become acute when mass emigration to the rest of the United States would produce separate Greek, Russian, Slavic, and Syrian (Arab) churches. The third chapter focuses on pluralism and rights in that new era. The ensuing two chapters examine the ethnic Orthodox churches in the twentieth century, their interrelationships, their connections to the Old World, and how this network of relationships interfaced with law and rights in America. The next three chapters pivot away from the intra-church relations over to the Orthodox attitudes towards the world outside the church and the burgeoning rights movement. Chapter 6 deals with the rise of the women’s rights movement and new understandings of marriage and sex and the next chapter the ensuing issue of gender definitions, discussions in which the Orthodox due to their relatively small size in the United States have not been major participants much less leaders. Roeber suggests that the orthodox need to become more fully engaged in those debates. In contrast, there has been considerable discussion on human (political, civil) rights within Orthodoxy, not all of it well known we learn in Chapter 8. This potential, Rober hopes can lead to a more active public engagement on the part of the Orthodox communities in America. For that to happen, this magisterial in-depth study should be read carefully by all within the American Orthodox churches and all those interested in the issue of religion and rights in America.