In Orthodoxy on the Line, Aram Sarkisian offers a much-needed recalibration of American religious history by placing Russian and Carpatho-Rusyn Orthodox Christians at the center of the story of immigrant labor, state surveillance, and ecclesial contestation in the early twentieth century. Since Will Herberg’s articulation of a “tri-faith America,” Orthodox Christians have occupied an ambiguous and often racialized space – simultaneously cast as foreign to the national narrative while subsumed within a normative category of “Christianity” that renders their minoritized histories and imperial entanglements difficult to apprehend. Sarkisian’s intervention unsettles these longstanding frames. He argues convincingly that Orthodox Christians constituted not an overlooked “fourth faith” but a people structurally produced as outsiders, whose experiences illuminate the racial contours of immigration policy, the coercive dynamics of wartime nationalism, and the fraught making of religious authority in a settler-imperial context.

Central to Sarkisian’s approach is his analytic category of American Orthodox Rus’, a formation built through ecclesiastical networks, kinship ties, and the social infrastructures of the Russian Archdiocese. These communities were forged within the industrial capitalism of the Progressive Era – mines, mills, factories – and their liturgical life and institutional aspirations were inseparable from the bodily and economic tolls of wage labor. Sarkisian thus situates Orthodoxy not as a timeless “Old World” tradition transplanted intact onto American soil, but as a religious project continually reshaped by labor exploitation, class conflict, and the regulatory power of the US state. These pressures, he shows, produced an immigrant church that was neither simply nostalgic nor purely adaptive but instead a site where imperial entanglements, racialization, and class difference collided.

Methodologically, Sarkisian extends lived religion approaches while decisively refusing to bracket questions of power and scale. Orthodox clergy, most of them married and embedded in the rhythms of working-class life, did not possess the institutional buffers enjoyed by Roman Catholic priests or Protestant ministers. Their spiritual authority was exercised through material vulnerability – low wages, itineracy, housing instability, and the emotional burden of caring for parishioners facing harsh labor conditions. Their wives, frequently unseen in ecclesiastical archives, become crucial figures in this narrative as cultural mediators, institutional anchors, and bearers of the gendered labor that sustained parish life. Sarkisian’s integration of these intimate histories with ecclesiological analysis underscores how hierarchical traditions operate through the uneven distribution of care, labor, and precarity.

Part I charts how the institutions of American Orthodox Rus’ emerged through encounters with the racialized gatekeeping policies of Ellis Island and the coercive machinery of US immigration control. The Russian Orthodox Immigration Society, for instance, appears not only as a pastoral institution but also as a community-based strategy for navigating the racial hierarchies and exclusionary logics that Mae Ngai has identified as fundamental to the making of the “illegal alien.” Sarkisian follows migrants from transatlantic passage into the industrial workforce, highlighting how their status as Slavic, Orthodox, and working-class shaped their experience of Americanness as a fragile and often contested achievement. By foregrounding race – understood as a shifting amalgam of religion, nationality, class, and perceived political affect – Sarkisian deftly positions Orthodox history within wider histories of whiteness and labor in the United States.

Part II deepens this analysis by showing how the entanglements of empire and ecclesiology profoundly shaped Orthodox life during World War I, the Russian Revolutions, and the Red Scare. The book’s rendering of wartime patriotism – Archbishop Evdokim blessing an American flag, clergy and laypeople marching in parades, churches performing loyalty rituals – demonstrates how immigrant Orthodox communities navigated a national landscape where patriotic performance could function as both necessity and coercive spectacle. Sarkisian makes clear that these rituals unfolded under the shadow of an increasingly muscular surveillance state, which cast Russian-speaking immigrants as potential “Huns” or “Reds.” In this context, Orthodoxy became a site of geopolitical suspicion; a religious tradition tethered to an empire now recoded as an enemy.

It is in Sarkisian’s treatment of ecclesiology where the book makes one of its most original contributions. The rise of independent Orthodox parishes – congregations that challenged episcopal authority, asserted lay control over property, and experimented with democratic governance – reveals the profound instability of Orthodox hierarchy when refracted through the pressures of American racial capitalism and post-imperial dislocation. These disputes were not simply doctrinal or administrative; they were battles over who constituted the legitimate body of the church amid collapsing transnational authority. The Detroit case, All Saints Russian Orthodox Church v. Darin et al., becomes a powerful window into how ecclesial identity was litigated through US courts, exposing the material underpinnings of sacramental life – salaries, deeds, mortgages – while forcing Orthodox actors to translate their ecclesiology into categories legible to the American legal imagination. Sarkisian shows how these conflicts drew federal policing agencies into the heart of Orthodox ecclesial life, entangling questions of sacramental legitimacy with state interests in monitoring radicalism.

The epilogue traces the longue durée of these tensions into the Cold War and post-Soviet eras, demonstrating how narratives of martyrdom, canonization, and diaspora memory emerged as responses to both Soviet repression and the fracturing of Orthodox jurisdictions abroad. Sarkisian situates these commemorative practices within broader struggles over imperial violence, ecclesial legitimacy, and the racialized politics of global Orthodoxy. His discussion of how information about Soviet antireligious persecution circulated through diplomats, journalists, and ecumenical intermediaries illuminates the uneven channels through which Orthodox communities abroad sought to verify suffering, preserve memory, and sustain ecclesial authority under conditions of imperial rupture.

If the study occasionally leaves readers wanting more comparative work with other Orthodox or Eastern Catholic groups, this is largely because Sarkisian’s argument is so generative. He opens pathways for rethinking Eastern Christianity not as an eccentric appendage to American religious history but as a key site for analyzing how empire, labor, race, and ecclesiology, as well as theology, intersect. Indeed, Orthodoxy on the Line demonstrates that Orthodox history offers a powerful lens into the racial formation of European immigrants, the coercive making of loyal American subjects, the tensions between hierarchical authority and democratic aspiration, and the lived, theopolitical consequences of geopolitical transformation.

In sum, Sarkisian has produced a field-shifting work. Orthodoxy on the Line not only recovers a community long relegated to the margins but makes a broader claim for Orthodox Christianity as indispensable to understanding the entangled histories of US religion, state power, and global empire. Scholars of Christianity, American religion, migration, and political theology will find this book both empirically rich and conceptually illuminating – a model for how to write histories that take seriously the structural forces that shape religious life and the religious imaginations that, in turn, confront those forces.