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Aram G. Sarkisian, "Orthodoxy on the Line: Russian Orthodox Christians and Labor Migration in the Progressive Era" (NYU Press, 2025)
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Jenna Pittman
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Aram Sarkisian
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:35]
Jenna Pittman
Hello everybody and welcome back to the New Books Network. I'm Jenna Pittman, a host for the network. Today we'll be talking to Aram Sarkisian about his new book Orthodoxy on the Russian Orthodox Christians and Labor Migration in the Progressive era, published by NYU Press in 2025. RM Sarkisian is a historian of religion, immigration and labor in the United States, and his Orthodoxy on the Line explores the influx of immigrants from the Russian and Austria Hungarian Empire borderlands to the United States at the turn of the 20th century and the creation of the American Orthodox Rus religious community. With that, I'm really excited to welcome you to the show.
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Aram Sarkisian
Thanks for having me. This is really great.
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Jenna Pittman
Yeah. I wonder if you could begin the episode just by telling us a little bit about yourself and what brought you to writing Orthodoxy on the Line.
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Aram Sarkisian
Sure. I'm a historian of immigration, religion and labor. I did my PhD at Northwestern. I also have degrees from the University of Michigan and the University of Chicago. I'm originally from Metro Detroit. I live now in Chicago. And what brought me to writing this book really is. And this is super cliche, I know, but writing the book that I Always wanted to read. I come from, on my mother's side, a Russian family. I grew up in and around Russian Orthodox communities for much of my life. And I was one of those kids that was really interested in listening to the stories that older people told my grandparents, their friends, the elders in their communities. And what always struck me when I would hear those stories is the fact that I didn't hear or see them anywhere else. They weren't really in history books. They weren't really in the sort of common vernacular of US History. They seemed to be isolated in their own world. And when I started working on this project as an undergraduate, this started as a freshman seminar paper at the University of Michigan. I was really just continually intrigued by the fact when I would talk about what I was working on, no one ever really knew what I was talking about. And when I got to graduate school and was starting to dive into North American religions as a scholarly corpus for the first time, I was really shocked to find out that there was virtually nothing about Orthodox Christian communities in North America in the literature, aside from very, very small pockets of work on very particular places. And the communities that I knew were entirely absent. And it was frustrating to me to find that I had to do so much explaining that there weren't things that I could point to. There wasn't the shelves of books that my colleagues had about their particular research interests. So for me, this was a very personal project, but also one of really wanting to see how the scholarly methodologies that I was working on as a graduate student could be applied to this really, really rich of people whose experiences range just as much as other religious communities in North America. And it really just kind of went from there.
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Jenna Pittman
Yeah, that's really fascinating. Thank you for sharing that. Yeah. And that's really interesting that I guess this is not my bread and butter. I'm not diving into this literature super heavily. But it's interesting being from the Midwest and kind of knowing that that history is present and then that vacuum of scholarship that exists on it. So I think that's definitely a reasonable frustration that brought you to writing this book and kind of wanting to understand this history.
- [05:14]
Aram Sarkisian
Yeah, I think the Midwestern angle. As someone who comes from Detroit and has lived my entire life more or less in the Midwest, I took for granted the diversity of Orthodox experiences that were around me. I grew up around, really, the full gamut of ethnic Orthodox churches in metro Detroit. It's one of the most diverse, if not the most diverse, Orthodox communities in North America. And I always kind of took it for granted that that was a reality, but I never really understood the extent to which, you know, they were existing in kind of their own world, isolated from the awareness of others, really. So in a lot of ways, yeah, I think that Midwest angle is really important.
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Jenna Pittman
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So I guess I'm interested in this title, Orthodoxy on the Line. Would you be able to explain that a little bit?
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Aram Sarkisian
Sure. So it's a bit of a play on words. So, of course, it's because this is a labor history in a lot of ways. This covers a period of time from the 1890s to the early 1920s. The American progressive Era, industrialization, the introduction of the assembly line by Henry Ford in Detroit, but also the growth of industrialized labor as a way of life. The people that I'm working on in this book and the people I'm working with in this book are working people that were working in those industries. And so on the line, of course, is a reference to the assembly line, to the meatpacking industry in Chicago, the textile mills in the Northeast. But also it's a book about contestation. So the fact that changing conditions geopolitically, in this case the First World War and the Russian Revolutions of 1917, make this Orthodox practice in these people's lives really a contested thing. They have to fight for what it means to be an Orthodox Christian in this world. So their faith itself is really on the line as well. And their religious communities and the ways that they exist in the world is on the line as well.
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Jenna Pittman
Yeah. Thank you for that. That's definitely a very good explanation. And I always love a play on words. So I like that title. So kind of diving into the book here, would you mind describing the kind of period subject that this book covers to our listeners that are not familiar with the American Midwest and kind of immigration and all of the things that are setting the condition for this book to do, its labor history and this social and cultural stuff.
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Aram Sarkisian
So this period of time in this book is the American Progressive Era. It's largely from the 1890s 90s to the mid-1920s. And this is a period of time in which Orthodox communities in the United States are growing both in size and diversity. Orthodox Christianity has been present in the North American continent Since the late 18th century, of course, rooted in Russian colonial and commercial interests in what is now Alaska and the Pacific Rim. But really, what I'm looking at is the separate emergence of these Orthodox communities in the Northeast and the Midwest as those industries begin to grow beginning at the end of the 19th century. And the people that I'm looking at are coming from the borderlands of Austria, Hungary and Russia, the Russian Empire, what is today Belarus and Ukraine. These are rural people, agricultural people, really coming from, in a lot of examples, pre industrial societies to work at the forefront of human industry at the beginning of the 20th century. These are people that come from, you know, haystacks and farmland and all of a sudden are thrust into a world with, you know, machines the size of buildings and, you know, industries that are. Are far more fast paced and technologically advanced than anything they had ever seen. So I'm looking at how these people exist as workers, as people in the United States at this moment of industrialization, but also how they're filtering that through their Orthodox Christianity. And, and the overarching institution that kind of ties all of them together is the Russian Orthodox Archdiocese of North America, which, again, rooted in Alaska in the 18th century. The headquarters moved from Alaska to San Francisco in 1872, but then moved to New York in 1905 to kind of begin to address the large communities that are beginning to emerge in places like New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and then later, as we'll talk about, I think, in a little bit in the upper Midwest as well. And so what we're looking at is the way that the church is building this community for these people by creating a dense social, religious and material support network to help them make their way in the United States, to bring them into the industrial economy, to make sure that they're secure, that they have social support, material support, in many cases vocational support, but also that they're spiritually grounded. And they. They create this religious and social world called American Orthodox Rus, which is designed to help these people, these immigrant communities kind of root themselves in the United States as workers, while also keeping them rooted as well in this transnational, idealized version of wholly Orthodox Russia. Russian language, Russian culture, Russian politics. So, and of course, above all, the Russian Orthodox Church. And what's really interesting about this is that they want them to kind of keep an equal foot in both camps. They want them to participate in American life. They want them to vote, they want them to become citizens, they want them to send their children to public schools, they want them to be a part of American society, but also keep those identities as this sort of idealized, Russified version of themselves. And this sort of delicate dance is done to encourage them to think of themselves as people whose Orthodox Christianity is amplified and made better by exposure to American life, but also that American life is made better by exposure to Orthodox ways of life as well. It's sort of a mutual, beneficial, beneficial thing. So, yeah, I'm really intrigued by this pattern because it kind of challenges our notions of assimilation, of what it means to be a transnational person at a time when really the overwhelming prevailing notion in the United States was the melting pot and really bringing people into a full sense of being American while shedding their immigrant identities.
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Jenna Pittman
Yeah, I mean, that's very fascinating because it does kind of feel like it challenges this kind of maybe mainstream idea of what assimilation looked like, because it's the way that I'm understanding how you just described it. It's this idea of assimilate and be an active member of the US Economy and these communities and engage with these very American structures and values, but also retain your relationship to the Russian Orthodox Church and to your language and your culture through that. I guess I'm curious, kind of where this study contributes. You're talking a lot about kind of these identity, kind of push and pull things and where this study might contribute to this immigration, this transnational history that you're talking about labor and just kind of all of those. Those like, main topics, I guess, among the other things that this book also addresses.
- [13:16]
Aram Sarkisian
Sure. I'm trying to contribute to an understanding of Orthodox Church expansion in the United States and really contributing to a literature on the expansion of other largely immigrant faith traditions in the United States as being really hand in hand tied into the history of labor migration. And one of the aspects of this book, I think is really important where I think Orthodoxy contributes to a different perspective on religious communities in the United States, especially ones that are liturgical. You know, of course, the common comparison is the Roman Catholic Church is the fact that Orthodox communities are constituted a little bit differently because of the notion and practice of clerical marriage. So priests can be married, priests have families. Priests are part of the church community in a very, very different way. Upwards of 85% of clergy operating in the Russian archdiocese at this period of time are married, they have families. And so they exist in this community in a much different way. And so what I'm looking at in terms of labor is understanding industrial people as workers, immigrant people as workers, but also the clergymen who are serving these communities, most of whom, almost all of whom are immigrants themselves, also as workers, also as parts of these communities, and kind of challenging our notions of what constitutes labor. Right. It's not just people working in factories and foundries and mines. It's people working in churches as well. So I'm trying to understand the transnational push and pull that are bringing all of these people to the United States. Not just sort of people that are expecting to work in factories, but also the people that want to work within the structure of the church itself. And thinking of the church itself is a bit of a corporate structure in its own right. So I'm trying to understand this community as a community for working people, by working people comprised of working people in all of its dimensions, with all of these different social structures that kind of challenge how we think about clerical lay divides, what constitutes work. And really kind of expansively consider this as the history of a working church that has again, push and pull across the Atlantic. And thinking also about the fact that until the First World War, the people that are coming to work in the United States that would comprise American Orthodox Rus, most of them did not intend to stay in the United States. These are people that in some cases are treating the United States as seasonal labor. They want to come to the United States to work, to make a lot of money, to go back, buy more farmland, improve their family's lives. A lot of them are men coming by themselves without their families. Um, so also challenging the notion of the sort of golden door vision of American immigration, that everybody is coming here to seek freedom and prosperity and making new lives, when for a lot of these people it was a means to an end. It was something that they tolerated for the paychecks to make their lives better. Of course, a lot of them do end up staying and after the First World War, they really have no choice. But for the first half of the book, really sort of thinking about the Constitution of American Orthodox Rus. This is a two direction story. People moving back and forth across the ocean and not necessarily thinking of themselves as being grounded in this continent.
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Jenna Pittman
$15 per month equivalent required. New customer offer first three months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. Cementmobile.com yeah, that's really interesting, I guess. And that starts to make me think of kind of this other side of kind of a main topic that this book covers, which is that of social mobility in class and kind of, I don't know, I'm having a hard time putting it into words, but where you talk a little bit about the idea that this was a means to an end and that maybe this was going to be a temporary thing and the desire to come to the US Work, get the paycheck, go back, buy land. And I guess in my mind, you know, buying, buying land and having your, your family's, your family's livelihood tied to, tied to land ownership that can then be passed down to children. That's very much a social mobility thing, the way that I look at it. So I guess I'm curious if you would like to talk a little bit about that, both on that aspect, but then also on the side of, you know, them not being, not being perceived as high class or still being perceived as an immigrant and tied to that stigma within American society. I feel like I like word vomited there. I guess just generally I'm kind of interested in this idea of social mobility in class and how there's, you know, this goal of social mobility, but then in the US still being kind of restrained to the status of being an immigrant and being part of an immigrant community.
- [19:50]
Aram Sarkisian
I can think of this perhaps through one of the vignettes in the book. There's a priest working in the United States. His name is Father Theophan Bukhatov. And he wrote these really evocative autobiographical sort of short stories that are observational about his life in America. And one of them is about being on a train and perceiving the class differences in the other people he sees on the train who are, he can very obviously tell which ones he considers to be Russian and the ways that he can perceive how long someone has been in the United States. Their dress, their mannerisms, how they're acting, their mood, sort of the way that he can sort of perceive, okay, this is someone who just got here versus this is somebody who's been here for a few years because they dress differently, they act differently, they have a different air about themselves because they've made money, they've been exposed to American culture, they've been exposed to the American workforce, they have this sort of very different way of thinking than someone who obviously just got here. So there's an awareness of class mobility within the church itself and how the conditions of possibility for people change the longer that they're here. And this also ties into a lot of the social and educational programming of the church as well. Because the first half of the book is really about how the church is beginning to think about, well, what are the different ways that we can address this community? What are the institutions that are important? What are the things that are going to be important for us to build a more permanent mission in North America that serves kind of the whole person? So things like schools, seminaries, there's an orphanage. Thinking about church industries to produce things like church books, investments and icons domestically, rather than having to send for them from abroad. All of these sort of big visions of what this diocese can be, which is really far outstripping their material resources, but they're really thinking big. But of course, after 1917, when funding from Russia to support the mission ends, a lot of that falls away because they simply can't afford it anymore. These church institutions start to collapse one by one. So that's really the second half of the book is trying to excavate sort of the negotiation of, well, what does this look like now? Now that we don't really have this grand vision anym. How do we preserve what we have, save what we have, keep going with the resources that we have? So the church is really thinking about, well, how can we sort of make people's lives better through things like literacy, the education of children, the education of clergy here, rather than having to depend on seminaries abroad? How can we think about the class mobility, social mobility, sort of intellectual mobility of our communities, of working people coming from pre industrial spaces in this very, very different world of North America and thinking about it in a more permanent way. So, you know, there's this push and pull back and forth across the ocean, but there's also this notion that the church can serve a very important social, intellectual, Educational, cultural purpose as well, to really bring people up and make their lives richer and more informed and, you know, ensure better success?
- [23:19]
Jenna Pittman
Yeah, of course. Yeah. That's very fascinating. Thank you for that. I think when you mentioned church funding from Russia and that falling apart in 1917, which is a very distinct year, it kind of brought me back to this question of the trans. Transnational dimensions that the study explores. And I. I don't think the funding from Russia to the church is a central pillar of this study, but I do think it kind of brings up this broader relationship between the Orthodox Church in the US And Russia in this long and kind of tumultuous period of Russian and European history. So I guess would you mind explaining a little bit about the Russian. Would that be Imperial Russia funding the church and then how that relationship changed in 1917, and then maybe how the transnational relationship changed also throughout the Bolshevik Revolution and then leading up to World War I, or I guess World War I would be a little bit before that. But kind of all of those crazy, like, 10 years that was going on and where that history is.
- [24:28]
Aram Sarkisian
Sure. So beginning in the end of the 19th century, as the church is beginning to expand into the Northeast, there's a lot of dynamics happening all at once. There are mass conversions of people from the Greek Catholic Church, which is the Eastern Oriental Byzantine rites of the Catholic Church, which were present a little bit earlier than Orthodox communities. These are people that are coming from Austro Hungary who are arriving as Greek Catholics and are not necessarily received particularly well by the Roman Catholic hierarchy in the United States. And so beginning in Minneapolis in the 1890s and then spreading across Pennsylvania and the Northeast a little bit later, through the 1920s and 30s, Greek Catholic communities are converting en masse into the Russian Archdiocese, becoming Orthodox. And this is a major source of growth for the archdiocese kind of all at once. This is one of the things that's really spurring a very, very rapid expansion of the archdiocese outside of sort of its historical missionary territory in the Pacific Rim in Alaska and California. So all of a sudden there are a lot more communities very, very quickly, in addition to communities that are being generated by people that are arriving as Orthodox Christians. So there's a need to fund this in some way. And so there's a missionary stipend that comes from the Holy Synod, which at this point before 1917, is based in St. Petersburg to fund missionary activities in North America. There's also sort of small scale individual philanthropy from the Tsar himself, from imperial Russian officials to support specific church projects. There's gifts of vestments and other church objects from the Tsar himself, a lot of which are still present in Orthodox churches across the United States today. You'll see a little plaque donated by Czar Nicholas ii. There's all sorts of sort of big and small ways in which funding is coming to the archdiocese, but the largest is this sort of stipend that's doing a lot of the legwork for supporting missionary clergy. There's supplemental funds for clergy salaries for places where someone's not getting paid very much. The archdiocese will kind of top that off a little bit. That's supporting also a lot of the larger church institutions like the seminary and the orphanage. But by 1917, this is vastly inadequate for what is needed in North America. And the Archbishop of The archdiocese in 1917 asks for a significant increase in this funding to be able to meet all of these various needs. This happens almost concurrently with the February Revolution, which overturns the House of Romanovs. The Tsarist regime replaces it with a provisional government that lasts until the October Revolution, at which point the beginning of Bolshevik power starts and all this sort of turn towards what becomes the Soviet Union occurs after the February Revolution. All funding for the North American Archdiocese stops within a matter of weeks. They're having trouble meeting mortgage payments. They're having trouble meeting clerical salaries. It's very, very, very quick. And that money really never starts again. And that's sort of the huge part, the sort of underlying current of the second half of the book is this financial crisis. Clergy aren't getting paid. Church institutions aren't being funded. For example, the church orphanage is in Springfield, Vermont. They're having trouble feeding the children. There's all of these really horrible things that are happening because there's just no money anymore. And so the impact of geopolitical change in Russia has immediate impacts on church life in the United States and really changes the conditions of possibility for the vision of the archdiocese itself. And so, you know, that's kind of what really transforms everything at a sort of macro micro level is this lack of funding that for a long time, while inadequate, was a really, really big part of what can make the archdiocese go.
- [29:05]
Jenna Pittman
Sure. I mean, that is absolutely fascinating thinking about the changes happening in Russia and how that has just this immediate and substantial impact on church life and what the church was doing in these local communities. And definitely that right there is a history that I have not read a lot about, so not ever really heard before. So that's definitely very fascinating. And I think that's one of the things that makes this study so, so important is looking at those transnational dimensions.
- [29:35]
Aram Sarkisian
Yeah. And there's another aspect to it, too, in that the. The other sort of undercurrent is that transatlantic migration basically ends at the moment the First World War begins. And so there's no longer. When you talk about transnational change, there's no longer an influx as many new immigrants coming into these communities from 1914 and 1915, and then with immigration restrictions in the United States beginning in the late teens, culminating in the Johnson reed Act of 1924. You know, the people that are here are here, and there's really not very much additions into the community. So that kind of need to meet the concerns and sort of acute problems of immediately arrived immigrants really begins to change as well.
- [30:24]
Jenna Pittman
Sure, sure. Yeah. That's very fascinating. Thank you for that. So another large theme of this book is the American Midwest industrialization and subsequently kind of this migration or immigration from. Sorry. Of Russian Orthodox Christians from the Northeast to the American Midwest. And I was wondering if you can describe some of the factors that prompted the movement of the Russian Orthodox community members away from kind of the east coast, the Northeast, westward to the American Midwest.
- [31:02]
Aram Sarkisian
Sure. So, of course, as I mentioned earlier, I'm trying to tell a story of how Orthodox growth in North America is tied hand in hand with changes in American industrialization. So early on, a lot of the people that are coming that are settling in the Northeast are working in coal mining, the early steel industry, textile work, things like that. And that's, of course, the dominant industries in that part of the country. But what really begins to change is the emergence of new industries in places like Chicago and Detroit and Cleveland and Minneapolis. So, of course, the meatpacking industry in Chicago, the steel industry in the Lake Michigan shore, and Gary, Indiana. Gary, Indiana, is a big part of this book as well. But also Detroit and the lure of the assembly line and the growth of the automotive industry is a really huge catalyst. And what I found when I was really diving into immigration records and trying to tease out individual stories in this book is that people move around a lot within these communities. Someone will initially live in Pennsylvania and then will move to, you know, North Carolina to work somewhere in a logging plant. And then we'll move to Chicago to chase a job in meatpacking, and then we'll end up in Detroit on the assembly line. They have no hesitation to move to where the jobs are. And one of the primary ways that this occurred as well is Chapter one of the book focuses on the Russian Immigration Society, which is a church Operated immigrant aid network. They have a representative on Ellis island that's helping people get through immigration control. They have the Russian immigrant home in Lower Manhattan, which is sort of a way station for people who have no one to turn to, don't really have the resources or the wherewithal to know where to go. So they're connecting people with jobs in places far flung. From New York, they're sending people to Chicago, they're sending people to Gary, they're sending people to Kenosha. They're sending people all across the United States where they know that there's work, but also this Orthodox communities that can support them. So there's a lot of labor migration happening within the United States, which is really important as well, because for these immigrant people that are coming from. From Russia and Austro Hungary, mobility is not something they were sort of ingrained to think about. It's very difficult to move around in Imperial Russia. You need passports, you need permission. Labor migration out of Imperial Russia is actually very difficult until 1905, 6, 7, because of immigration or emigration restrictions that made it very, very difficult for people to get passports to leave. There's this practice of what's called stealing the border, where people pay immigrant agents to get them across the border and out of Imperial Russia. It's perilous, it's dangerous, it's expensive. But that's really, in a lot of cases, the only ways that people can get out. That changes over time, of course, but once they're in the United States, the ability to move about the country is a really, really strong lure, especially when there's dollars on the other side of it. So what's interesting about the Midwest in particular is that it becomes one of the most populous and diverse Orthodox areas in the United States. But the development is somewhat later. For instance, Detroit, the first parish, wasn't founded until 1907, versus there were parishes in Pennsylvania in the 1890s. There's parishes in New York in the 1890s. So the expansion is a little bit later. But it's all tied into this industrialization. You know, Detroit in particular. That's one of the main focuses of the second half of the book. The Orthodox communities there grow exponentially after 1913 and 14 with the introduction of the assembly line and the greater opportunity for automotive work. And then it filters through out from Detroit into other places in Michigan, like Lansing, like Flint, other places that there are also automotive work, and there's also industrial work to be done. And larger parishes in places like Detroit beget smaller parishes in places like Lansing and Flint. Detroit itself was an expansion from missionary work being done from Cleveland and Chicago. So there's kind of this missionary network that's happening as well, helping the church expand across the Midwest with these sort of hubs like Minneapolis, Chicago and Cleveland that can help other places grow as well.
- [36:03]
Jenna Pittman
Yeah, that's really interesting. That brings me to kind of another question that came up in my mind while you were talking and just kind of talking about these broader developments that are happening in the US The American Midwest becoming kind of this hub of industry. And I don't know, I mean, really, all of these cities along the Great Lakes are just absolutely booming in this period. It kind of made me wonder if the, you know, within America, the migration of people in the labor migration that was happening was that. I'm trying to think of how to phrase this. Was that the desire of the church community members to go westward, or was it that there was just a lot of opportunity in the American Midwest at that time?
- [36:52]
Aram Sarkisian
A lot of opportunity. And I'll tell you one, one sort of vignette. Now, I mentioned that I have an ancestral familial connection with this book through my maternal grandparents. My great grandfather, my great grandparents were actually married at the Russian Cathedral in New York City. They met through friends in the parish community, and their first three children were born in New York. And my great grandmother was pregnant with her fourth grand coming across on the train to meet my grandfather in Detroit because he had gone ahead to get a job at the Ford plant in Highland park outside of Detroit. He was chasing the $5 daily wage in 1914. My grandmother was born in August of 1914. So that was an opportunity for him. He went alone and sent for his wife later because there was an opportunity. He ended up working at ford for almost 50 years, never left. So that's the kind of story that, you know, there's all sorts of examples of that. I knew so many people who were active as Orthodox Christians in metro Detroit, whose families had lived in Pennsylvania, in New Jersey, in New York, who had family members all across the Northeast from, you know, that part of their family's histories, but had become sort of scattered as people were chasing different job opportunities. So that's kind of how. That's how it worked, right? People were chasing opportunity. And, you know, this was. The Midwest was a bonanza for really good paying jobs for immigrant people who did not have advanced technical skills, because these people are coming from agricultural backgrounds. Right? So this is the kind of place that you can make a way, make a life, make A career.
- [38:49]
Jenna Pittman
Right. I mean, it's also fascinating to think about the labor demands and the kind of vacuum of skilled technical labor and knowledge of these machines. I mean, such a crucial part of like the Fortis business model is training people in how to use these. And it's almost like you start to think about how the opportunity was accessible because you didn't have to know how to. They would teach you. It's just. It's very interesting to think about like this moment in labor and the labor demands that kind of allowed for this mass movement and mass labor migration of people, mass training of people into these kind of, well, very foreign assembly line and like factory structures that just are like very unnatural when you think about.
- [39:40]
Aram Sarkisian
It, Monotonous and difficult. Right. I mean, that's people that worked in the Ford plants. And this isn't in the book, but this is something that's historically true. They would get repetitive stress injuries, what was called forditis. Their bodies would become contorted to the single task they would do all day, every day. And these were not safe jobs. These were not cushy jobs. This was difficult work. And that's also the aspect that I want to underscore, is that because these people are coming from pre industrial societies, they're taking jobs at the lowest levels of the American economy, and their lives are very difficult. Their housing is substandard, their access to food and healthcare is incredibly low. So this is not the most glorious of ways of life, but it's an incredible opportunity. Right. And that's kind of what the church is trying to do, is create a network around these folks so that they have safety and security. In particular, there's a chapter in the book about the influenza epidemic in 1918 and the network of support for people who get sick and mortality benefits because there's no private insurance, really, there's no corporate benefits like we have today. And these people have not great access to healthcare. So the church has to step in and church affiliated organizations have to step in to kind of take that, take that mantle before really corporate paternalism. And, you know, workplace benefits are really a standard part of the American workforce.
- [41:18]
Jenna Pittman
Yeah, that's very interesting to think about the role of the church in providing care, like community care for its members. And that feels like a whole, whole tangent on its own that I could definitely dive into. But I also am just curious about your archival process as a historian, being that there's so much labor migration. I'm sure your archive was a little scattered, or at least your research process. You had to have been everywhere.
- [41:50]
Aram Sarkisian
So I do a lot with. Luckily, there's a very rich corpus of church newspapers produced in this period of time, which have incredible insight into so many different aspects of church life. I also utilized a lot the records of what becomes the FBI, also what becomes the ins. It's the Labor Department archives at that point in time, then becomes the ins. So I'm looking at a lot of sort of deep deportation records, can tell you a lot. And the Red Scare, which is the beginning, really, of the American deportation infrastructure and the federal surveillance. State. Federal documentation is scarily efficient and significantly thorough. Of course, you have to read it carefully, but there's lots of ways to kind of think about and extrapolate larger stories from those kinds of documents. I didn't have, as unfortunately, did not have as much access to the archives of the church as I hoped to have. There was an ongoing renovation project that really restricted my access for basically the entire time I was writing this book. But I was able to make one short trip that yielded a lot that I was able to use. So if anybody is interested in studying this community, the Orthodox Church in America archives are fantastic, and they are now open again. So please do use those resources to sort of supplement what I wasn't able to do. But I'm sort of. The thing about this community is that there are ways in which it's extremely well documented and a lot of ways in which it's not. And so you have to kind of work around the absences. Luckily for me, I was able to kind of pick and choose particular case studies and things like that, that I could kind of fill a lot of those gaps and tell really rich stories. But the thing that's really wonderful about working on this particular project, I could have picked an entirely different set of case studies and written virtually the same book. There's so much material out there, and there's so many opportunities, if you have faculties in Russian. Carpatho Rusyn Ukrainian to really dive into all of these corners that have been virtually unexplored by historians. And so I think that what I want this book to be is kind of a cornerstone for growing literature, not just on people that were part of the Russian church, but other Orthodox churches as well, because there's this rich diversity of experiences. I can't write a book about Greeks because I don't read Greek. I can't write a book about Serbians because I'm not. I don't have faculties in Serbian or Arabic to study, you know, Orthodox people from the Middle East. There's all these pockets that are, are open for exploration. But for me, the archival process is something I love the most because I love a good puzzle, I love a good mystery. And I can dive further into maybe particular chapters if you want to know sort of how my archival process works. But there are all of these incredible opportunities to really flesh out personal stories, which is what I really wanted to do. I really wanted to tell you a social bottom up history of a community, not just an ecclesiastical history, although that's important, but to really bring out the people and the stories to make you understand that this is a really rich community of experiences that deserve to be explored and to be understood on their own terms.
- [45:34]
Jenna Pittman
Yeah, absolutely. I think your comment about you could have used completely different case studies and ended up with the exact same book, the exact same argument. I think that that really speaks to the strength of this book. Just as the narrative that it puts forth. If you could replicate it with just, you know, things that say pretty much the exact same thing but are completely different representations. I think that, that, in my opinion that just shows you're not picking and choosing exceptional, exceptional, exceptional moments that reflect what you want this book to say. It's this is just you're finding things that best represent this broader image or narrative of this community. And I think that that's so important. But also, you know, your comment on this being more of a bottom up, a social history. I think that bottom up approach works so well here because it very much is, at least in my opinion. Being from the Midwest and being a part of, you know, my church in the Midwest, you see that a lot of Midwest churches and church communities come from this idea of all of a sudden you're in a pretty foreign setting and all that you have are people who maybe speak the same language of as you have the same path to how they've gotten to this country. And you see these, these church communities that have been around for so long that have really come out of this very bottom up, like people just being like, hey, yeah, we're all the same religion and we've all had this crazy path to get to Detroit or Toledo or Columbus or wherever it might be. So you kind of start to see, even though there is this, this church organizational structure that, you know, organizes these, these communities, you also start to see like very organically people coming together, just finding shared commonality in kind of a period of hardship. And I think that that's where that bottom up approach is so effective.
- [47:36]
Aram Sarkisian
Yeah, I think what really struck me, and I think the chapter on the influenza epidemic is kind of where I saw this the most. The way that church communities in American Orthodox Rus really became familial. Where people are here alone, they don't have their family structures around them, they don't have their village structures around them. When a beloved person from a parish dies from influenza in a really terribly gruesome way, and because of public health concerns, there can't be a funeral in the church. The only thing they can do is in the cemetery. And the people from the community who love this person, who is not their family member, come and mourn at the graveside in the middle of a public health emergency because they can't bear the idea of this person being buried without some modicum of their faith tradition. And people that care and love them is. It was so powerful to me to be able to sort of see the ways that these communities became family. And where it was not blood kinship, it was cultural, linguistic, but most of all, faith. And that's, I think, what really resonated the most. The more I dove into this was the way that, you know, the, the chapter on clerical work, the way that clerical friendship becomes a critical part of the experience in North America and becomes lifelong connections. Even after some of these clergy leave the United States and return to Russia, the connections between these people that are formed out of this missionary experience.
- [49:21]
Capella University Narrator
Or.
- [49:22]
Aram Sarkisian
The experience of being in a parish together, the experience of being in a community together, you know, the notion of these communities, the neighborhoods, all the ways to tie people together, I think is what made this so powerful and resonant for me.
- [49:38]
Jenna Pittman
Yeah, absolutely. I think there's so much more that we could continue to say, but I think that's a really beautiful note to start to wrap up on. So I kind of want to ask my classic transitioning to our conclusion here, question of just what you're working on now and what your next steps are.
- [49:56]
Aram Sarkisian
So I want to be transparent about the fact that I no longer have an academic appointment. I don't have a tenure track job, I don't have an institutional affiliation. And I think that that's going to be increasingly the case for a lot of people that are producing first books in the current academic landscape. A lot of us, this is the culmination of dissertation projects, of long standing research projects, which is what this was for me. And we're looking on the other side of wanting to do more work and not having the support to do it. So anything I'm doing now is kind of on my own time and for lack of a better way of putting it on my own dime. But I have a large backlog of things that I have been working on. And I kind of have two projects that I'm focusing on. One is a collection of essays about what I'm calling the problems of Orthodoxy in North America, focusing mostly on the post World War II era. So I'm looking at Cold War geopolitics. I'm looking at the sort of aftermath of the Second World War and anti communism and anti fascism and sort of the challenges of transnational churches in places that are now geopolitical enemies of the United States. I'm looking at suburbanization and urbanization changes in communities. I have two chapters on clerical sexual abuse, focusing on a particularly heinous example of clerical abuse in an Orthodox monastery over the course of several decades. That's sort of all collected kind of together. I'm kind of poking at it and it's in various stages of completion. But I'm also working on a short book which is an outcropping of my dissertation research on the early history of English language Orthodoxy in North America. So there's a mention of it in the book. There's a vicarit within the Russian archdiocese for English speakers. It's called The English Speaking Department, established in 1905, largely comprised of converts to Orthodoxy from the Episcopal Church, but also the old Catholic churches. And I'm particularly looking at a group of converts that joined the church in early 1920 who have all these really interesting political associations and interests and motivations rooted in progressive era politics and society. Um, there's connections to the temperance movement, to the suffrage movement, to a various array of ethnic, social or ethnic national identity movements and ethnic self determination movements. The Irish Freedom movement, the Marcus Garvey Universal Negro Improvement Association. There's all of these really strange things that these, these people are doing while they're working as Orthodox priests and it's influencing how they view their work as people trying to promote English language Orthodoxy in a church of immigrants. For, you know, the vast majority of these folks, English is a second, third, fourth language. So you can kind of see that that may not go over particularly well. Particularly because they're also couching their advocacy for English language Orthodoxy through the lens of American nativism. So they're promoting ideas of 100% Americanism and this very hyper Americanism patriotism to an immigrant community while trying to promote English language Orthodoxy. It's this very strange story that fascinates and compels me. And it couldn't really fit in the book, but it's something that's kind of always been its own thing. So I'm working on kind of working that into a short book to kind of tell this very interesting and strange story about these very compelling historical actors that I can't get out of my mind. So that's kind of what I have on the horizon.
- [53:45]
Jenna Pittman
Yeah, I think that's very fascinating. I'm very interested to see where those projects both go. But I also appreciate your transparency on just the state of academia as a grad student. I do think it's so important to look at like your book is a wonderfully written book and sometimes that doesn't match the job market, and it's very unfortunate. But I do think it's important for grad students to continue to hear. So for the grad students who have stuck around to this point in the episode, I think you'll definitely appreciate that. So for our listeners, RMG Sikhissian's Orthodoxy on the Line, Russian Orthodox Christians and Labor Migration in the Progressive era, published by NYU Press in 2025, is available wherever you get your books. Thank you so much again for being on the show today. I really enjoyed reading your book and chatting with you.
- [54:36]
Aram Sarkisian
Thank you. This has been a really great conversation. I appreciate it.