The Convert's Tsar
What Some American Converts Have Traded Freedom For
This is not about cradle Orthodox Christians. Say that plainly, first, before anything else. Millions of Americans are Orthodox because their grandparents carried the faith across an ocean, from Greece, from Syria and Lebanon, from Serbia, from Romania, from Russia itself, and raised their children in it the way faith is normally handed down, as inheritance, not ideology. That inheritance deserves respect, not suspicion, and nothing that follows is aimed at it.
This is about something newer and stranger: American converts, with no Orthodox ancestry at all, who came to the faith as adults and, in a specific and now well-documented subset, have found themselves drawn not to a man but to a method, the confident, socially conservative order an unaccountable ruler can produce when nothing stands in his way. Vladimir Putin is the current face of it, but the pull is older than he is, a pattern running from the Tsars through the Soviet state to the Kremlin today: a single ruler imposing by will what a fractious, self-governing people must instead persuade each other into, slowly, imperfectly, with no guarantee of the result. On a weekend built around the memory of men who chose the slower, harder method on purpose, it is worth asking what it means that some of their descendants are trading it for the other one.
The documented pattern
Anthropologist Sarah Riccardi-Swartz spent a year embedded in a convert community of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, ROCOR, in rural West Virginia, and published the results as Between Heaven and Russia. What she found matches, almost line for line, what any outside observer of this world eventually notices: sharply defined, traditional gender roles presented as spiritually necessary, and open reverence for Putin, some converts calling him a possible “last tsar,” a king-like figure standing against a secular West they had already come to despise before they ever heard of Orthodoxy. NPR’s reporting on her work found the same pattern well beyond one Appalachian parish, describing “strong strains of nativism, white nationalism and pro-authoritarianism” among a real, if numerically small, slice of American converts.
The names attached to this are not anonymous internet accounts. Priest Joseph Gleason moved his family from Illinois to Russia and now runs a site devoted to praising Putin’s Christian leadership. Lauren Witzke, a former Republican Senate candidate, converted to ROCOR while telling a far-right talk show she identifies more with “Putin’s Christian values” than with her own president. And this is not history. In August 2025, following Putin’s summit with President Trump, Archbishop Alexei of Sitka and Alaska, of the Orthodox Church in America, met Putin at a cemetery in Anchorage and thanked him on the record: “Russia has given us what’s most precious of all, which is the Orthodox faith, and we are forever grateful.” He later said the gratitude was for nineteenth-century missionaries, not “present politics.” But he also told Putin he visits Russia regularly, and that his priests and seminarians report back after their own visits, “I’ve been home.” His own superior in the OCA, Metropolitan Tikhon, publicly distanced the church from the meeting and revealed Alexei had gone without the notice canonical tradition requires a bishop to give. That is not a fringe blogger. That is a sitting archbishop, acting without his own church’s authorization, and still speaking for a diocese when he did it.
Be precise about the size of this, because overclaiming here would be the same mistake this whole project has tried to avoid everywhere else. ROCOR counted roughly 27,000 adherents against some 800,000 Orthodox Christians in America as of the count researchers cite, a small fraction, and the scholars who study this phenomenon call it fringe in raw numbers, dangerous mainly for how loudly it networks online and who it draws in. This is not what is happening at a Greek parish, an Antiochian parish, or most OCA parishes on a given Sunday. It is a real and specific current within convert Orthodoxy, not evidence about the tradition as a whole.
None of this happens in a vacuum, and it does not require anything unique to Russia to get started. It runs through structures already built into Orthodox practice, present in every parish, cradle or convert, structures that train a specific reflex long before a person ever hears Putin’s name. To see how the capture actually works, start with what it works on.
What trains a person to bow to an unaccountable man
Four practices sit underneath everything documented above, present in a Greek parish exactly as much as a ROCOR mission. They are the raw material the capture runs on, not a separate concern set beside it, and Scripture is the standard this whole project has used from the start to test them, regardless of what political fruit they do or don’t eventually bear.
A priest’s hand, kissed for a blessing. The Orthodox answer is that the priest acts in the person of Christ at the altar, so reverence shown him passes through to Christ, not idolatry of a man. Take that seriously, it isn’t nothing. But Peter tells the whole church, not a separate caste within it, that believers are “a royal priesthood, a holy nation” (1 Peter 2:9). If every believer already stands in that priestly relationship to God directly, a required physical submission to one man as uniquely bearing Christ’s presence sits uneasily next to a text that grants no believer that kind of exclusive access in the first place. Paul does tell Timothy that elders who lead well deserve “double honor” (1 Timothy 5:17). Respect for real spiritual labor is one thing. A physical gesture of submission toward a man believed to hold something the one bowing does not is another, and the text supporting the second claim is thinner than the practice built on it.
The spoon. The clergy do not use it on themselves. At every Divine Liturgy, the priest receives the consecrated bread directly in his own hand and drinks directly from the chalice, exactly as every Christian, clergy and laity alike, did for roughly the Church’s first thousand years. The spoon administered to the laity is the newer practice, not the ancient one, a shift historians trace to around the eleventh or twelfth century. The Church’s own ancient law had already spoken to the underlying question, using anything but the hand to receive the Bread, and had ruled against it. The Quinisext Council, in 691, rejected the practice by name: the Church would “nowise welcome those men who make certain receptacles out of gold or any other material to serve instead of their hands for the reception of the divine gift” (Canon 101). Set beside that, Hebrews: believers have “confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way he opened for us,” and are told plainly, “let us draw near” (Hebrews 4:16, 10:19-22). Scripture argues for direct access. The Church’s own seventh-century canon agreed, and forbade the alternative by name. What a communicant receives today is neither. It is the very practice both were written against, and the one they were written for is the one only the priest still gets.
Calling a man father. This is the sharpest of the four, because Christ says it in so many words: “call no man your father on earth, for you have one Father, who is in heaven” (Matthew 23:9), in the same breath He forbids “rabbi” and “teacher” too (Matthew 23:8, 10), titles used constantly and without controversy across nearly every Christian tradition, including whichever one raised the person asking. Paul complicates the easy reading further, calling himself father to the Corinthians “through the gospel” (1 Corinthians 4:15). The distinction that survives both texts is between a relational word, earned through actual spiritual labor, and an installed title of office, worn regardless of the relationship, carrying an expectation of deference simply because the collar is on. Christ’s warning falls on status and office claimed as a right. It does not fall on real spiritual fatherhood, freely acknowledged. Whether a given parish’s use of the title is the first kind or the second is worth asking honestly, not assumed either way.
Confession, and a priest’s control of what the Church calls essential to salvation. This is the most serious of the four, because it touches not just practice but what a person is taught their eternal standing depends on. The Orthodox case is real: Christ tells the apostles, “if you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them” (John 20:23), and James tells the sick to call for the elders of the church to pray over them (James 5:14-15). Grant both texts their full weight. The more careful answer does not claim a second mediator competing with Christ. It holds that Christ’s one mediation is exercised derivatively, through ordained men acting only in His name, not replacing Him but announcing what He has already done. That is a real position and it deserves to be met at its strongest, not its simplest. But set it beside the flattest statement in the New Testament on this exact question: “there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Timothy 2:5). John writes to ordinary believers, not to clergy exercising an office, that “if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins” (1 John 1:9), the confessing and the forgiving both happening in direct address to God, with no third party named in the transaction at all. And the same James who has elders pray over the sick also tells the whole congregation, without restricting it to any office, to “confess your sins to one another” (James 5:16). A derivative mediation is still a mediation. What the New Testament’s plainest statement on forgiveness describes is a transaction with one fewer party in the room than the practice built on top of it.
Together, these four practices train a single reflex, repeated in gesture, in confession, in the very mechanics of receiving grace: that access to God, and by extension to truth, runs through submission to a human office not answerable to the one submitting. Each one also trains something more specific than submission in general. A kissed hand is not evaluated by what stands behind the man whose hand it is, only by the blessing felt in the gesture. A confession is not evaluated by what recourse exists if the priest handles it badly, only by whether it brings relief. Communion administered rather than received is not questioned for its process, only trusted for its result. That is a habit of judging authority by its fruit and never by its accountability, practiced weekly for years before politics ever enters the picture. It is exactly the muscle a self-governing people has to keep exercising, and exactly the one these four practices spend years quietly letting atrophy. That is the switch an outside influence needs already thrown before it can work anything on a person. It does not need to install new machinery. It only needs to find someone already trained to judge a man by his results and never by what checks him, and then become that man, or stand close enough to him.
What decides where that reflex points
The four practices do not, by themselves, point toward Russia specifically, and the man currently in the Kremlin matters less here than what he represents. Autocratic Russia has produced this same pull under different names for a long time, under Tsars claiming divine right, under a Soviet state that demanded loyalty in place of God and largely got it, and now under a president draped in the vestments of a church his predecessors spent seventy years trying to erase. What points the trained reflex there, for some converts, is documented plainly enough. Disillusionment with secular American culture, often carried in from evangelical circles already fluent in culture-war framing before Orthodoxy ever entered the picture. Small, tightly bounded convert communities that function as an escape from that culture rather than a witness to it, insulated enough that a leader’s word goes largely unchallenged. Clergy who travel to Russia and bring Kremlin-friendly narratives back with them directly, arriving with exactly the authority the four practices have already trained a convert to submit to without cross-examination. And a ready-made monarchist mythology waiting to receive the devotion, the martyred Tsar, “Third Rome” theology, a role a modern president can be dressed in with very little alteration. None of this is subtle when it is laid out end to end. It is subtle only in how it arrives, one gesture, one confession, one deferential habit at a time, until the capacity to question an unaccountable man in vestments has already been spent on smaller things before the large claim ever gets made.
It is worth asking why the same four practices do not produce the same result in cradle parishes, since the reflex they train there is identical. Riccardi-Swartz’s own fieldwork supplies the answer. Russian-born women inside that same West Virginia community pushed back hard on the enthusiasm around them. One, who left Russia during Boris Yeltsin’s presidency for the sake of economic survival, saw her homeland’s trajectory since perestroika as decline, not a model to import. Another, watching American-born converts embrace a devotion to Russia she had never felt herself, called it strange, “just in our blood, in our bones,” bemused by a loyalty toward a country she had chosen to leave. A third worried that the church’s actual relationship with Putin was far less clean than the converts around her assumed. The trained reflex is present in a cradle believer as much as a convert. What is missing is not the switch. It is anything left to flip it toward Russia specifically. Most families who actually carried Orthodoxy here from Russia, Greece, or the Levant did so to get free of exactly the kind of state built around a single unaccountable strongman, and that lived memory stands in the way. A convert who lacks it entirely has nothing built in to resist the same trained deference once it finds a political direction to run in.
What an unchecked seat produces
This matters for more than politics, and it connects to something this publication has argued from the start. Patriarch Kirill of Moscow gave Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine explicit religious cover, framing it as a defense of Orthodox Ukrainians against Western decadence. Set that beside everything already argued here about authority that answers to nothing outside itself. A claimed seat of spiritual authority, unaccountable to any higher court, did not merely fail to restrain state violence. It blessed it. That is not a hypothetical danger this project has been warning about. It is a current event.
And here is the detail worth sitting with longest: Orthodox Christians themselves are the loudest people objecting to it. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the USA, led by Metropolitan Antony and Archbishop Daniel, called the Anchorage meeting “a betrayal of the Gospel of Christ and scandalous to the faithful,” and said that extending warm welcome to Putin was “nothing less than an endorsement of his actions.” A lifelong ROCOR member, Lena Zezulin, has said she no longer recognizes her own church and has watched fellow parishioners leave over exactly this drift. A nun, Sister Vassa, was reportedly defrocked after criticizing Moscow’s role in this. When public pressure finally produced a statement from Archbishop Alexei himself, an Orthodox priest and scholar of ecclesiology, Cyril Hovorun, called it not really an apology at all, since it expressed regret for the outcry rather than for the meeting. This is not outsiders attacking Orthodoxy. It is Orthodox Christians fighting, in public, inside their own communion, against a captured strand of it, and losing more often than they should, because there is no enforceable mechanism above a bishop that reliably stops him before the damage is done, or compels a real reckoning after. That is the same structural gap this project has already named in a different context: a rule condemned on paper, phyletism in 1872, and still unenforced in practice today.
What the founders wagered instead
This project has run the same test on ecclesial authority already, an unchecked seat is unsafe whether it claims to speak for God or merely to govern men, not because a bishop and a president hold identical offices, but because both are one man exercising power over other men, and Scripture arrived at that suspicion long before any founder did. Independence Day marks a specific and deliberate choice, and it was not a choice for better outcomes. The men who made it had just spent a war being governed badly by a confident king and would spend the next several years being governed messily by their own fractious selves, printing bad currency, deadlocking over debts, arguing themselves in circles. They knew self-rule could be slower and clumsier than a strong man’s decree. They built the Constitution on process anyway, and said exactly why. Defending the separation of powers in Federalist No. 51, James Madison put the whole argument in two sentences: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.” The entire design assumes the ruler will not be an angel this year or any year, and answers that assumption with structure, not with a search for a better man.
That is the wager some American converts are quietly declining when they admire a strongman’s results. A given autocrat can, in a given decade, produce outcomes that look better than a noisy republic’s, more pious, more ordered, more confident of itself. Madison never denied that. His argument was that a system depending on a good ruler has no answer for the next one, and the next one is not optional, only a matter of time. Judge the Kremlin only by this year’s advertised results, defended piety, restored families, a church draped in gold, and the autocrat looks vindicated. Judge the same structure by what an unaccountable seat does once its occupant decides on war, already shown above, Patriarch Kirill blessing an invasion with no court anywhere able to stop him, and it is not a different regime producing a different result. It is the same one. Process was never the autocrat’s strength. It was never supposed to be. That was always the trade.
Israel had already run this exact experiment once, and Scripture does not leave the results comfortably in the past. Its kings were not uniformly bad. David united the kingdom. Josiah tore down idols his own fathers had built. God even covenants David’s throne as a lasting good, promising a kingdom that would endure forever (2 Samuel 7:12-16). Take that seriously, it is not a footnote to wave past. But read what the same chapter actually says next: David’s sons, when they sin, will be disciplined for it (2 Samuel 7:14), and the history that follows is not a story of kingship redeemed and made safe. It runs through Manasseh, a descendant of David, who filled Jerusalem with innocent blood and offered his own son in the fire (2 Kings 21:6, 21:16), and it ends in exile, the covenant’s own warned discipline finally landing on a throne no process had ever been able to check while it sinned in real time. The everlasting kingdom God actually promised was never a blank check handed to whoever next sat in David’s chair. It was a promise kept by waiting for one specific heir who would not need to be checked, because He was not merely a good man who happened to be sitting there (Luke 1:32-33). A good king proves nothing about the office. He only proves that a good man was sitting, for a while, in a chair with no check on it, and a people who have staked their future on that chance eventually get a Manasseh in the same chair, restrained by nothing but his own character, because that was the design God warned them about from the start (1 Samuel 8:7, 8:11-18). Some American converts, weary of a secularizing culture in ways that are often understandable, have made a smaller version of Israel’s trade, a president who leaves office and answers to courts and elections, for reverence toward a foreign strongman blessed by a captured clergy, judged, for now, only by the results he is currently advertising.
Sources: Sarah Riccardi-Swartz, Between Heaven and Russia: Religious Conversion and Political Apostasy in Appalachia (Fordham University Press); NPR, “Orthodox Christian churches are drawing in far-right American converts” (May 2022); Anchorage Daily News and Alaska’s News Source, reporting on Archbishop Alexei’s meeting with Vladimir Putin and its aftermath (August 2025); OrthodoxWiki, “Chalice,” “Spoon (liturgy),” and “Divine Liturgy”; Orthodox Christian Laity, “A Note on the Common Communion Spoon”; James Madison, Federalist No. 51 (1788).