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This highly sophisticated yet eminently readable book on religion in America adds much to our understanding of Russian Orthodoxy and how it is lived in Appalachia. Riccardi-Swartz is a gifted scholar and storyteller who sweeps her reader up into the lives of her interlocutors. ---Kristy Nabhan-Warren, University of Iowa Between Heaven and Russia, remarkably, takes us to rural West Virginia, inside a small patriarchal community of American converts to Russian Orthodoxy, who yearn for a restoration of tsarist Russia, and whose admiration of Vladimir Putin is exceeded only by their reverence for Nicholas II. Lest you assume this is a straightforward ethnography of a peculiar Appalachian outpost, think again. Sarah Riccardi-Swartz has crafted a gripping narrative of the American radical right's growing fixation with the fascist ideologues of Eurasia, and their interconnectedness with a global movement that poses a dire threat to secular democracy around the world. ---Sarah Posner, author of Unholy: How White Christian Nationalists Powered the Trump Presidency, and the Devastating Legacy They Left Behind, In this engrossing and revelatory study of what she calls 'Reactive Orthodoxy, ' Sarah Riccardi-Swartz finds in a rural West Virginia community of Christian converts to the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR) a key to the emerging shape of contemporary transnational far-right political religion. Her interlocutors say the U.S. is on the eve of destruction, broken by secularism, the betrayal of whiteness, and LGBTQ rights. They look to pre-1917 Tsarist Russia for a model of Christian government and to post-Soviet Russia and Vladimir Putin for protection and hope. Between Heaven and Russia establishes itself immediately as essential reading for understanding religion and politics in the 21st century. It is also a model for studying religion beyond the protective screen of good religion/bad religion. ---Robert Orsi, author of History and Presence,

In this engrossing and revelatory study of what she calls Reactive Orthodoxy, Sarah Riccardi-Swartz finds in a rural West Virginia community of Christian converts to the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR) a key to the emerging shape of contemporary transnational far-right political religion. Her interlocutors say the U.S. is on the eve of destruction, broken by secularism, the betrayal of whiteness, and LGBTQ rights. They look to pre-1917 Tsarist Russia for a model of Christian government and to post-Soviet Russia and Vladimir Putin for protection and hope. Between Heaven and Russia establishes itself immediately as essential reading for understanding religion and politics in the 21st century. It is also a model for studying religion beyond the protective screen of good religion/bad religion. ---Robert Orsi, author of History and Presence,

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Sarah Riccardi-Swartz is a postdoctoral fellow in the Luce-funded Recovering Truth: Religion, Journalism, and Democracy in a Post-Truth Era project at the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict at Arizona State University.

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