By Rev. Dr. Paul Siewers
3rd Annual Ludwell Orthodox Fellowship Conference
September 6, 2025
Stafford, Virginia
I have been asked in discussions with Russian Orthodox Christians how an American like myself ended up becoming a clergyman in the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad. The better question remains how I an unworthy sinner did, by God’s grace. But as to why I an American found a calling in the Orthodox Church, this seems complicated. I am in a melded Russian-American family. But that happened after I became Orthodox. My surname is associated with Estonia, in which Russian Orthodoxy is a predominate faith. Yet I am significantly Celtic and Scandinavian in ancestry. One part of my background includes Puritans and an ancestor militiaman who grabbed a musket to fight at the Battle of Lexington. My path to Orthodox Christianity lay through study in graduate school of early Irish literature and culture, early Welsh, Norse sagas and Viking history. How in all that was I led to Russian Orthodoxy as a spiritual tradition, recognizing that I was not in one sense any more Russian than many Roman Catholics are Roman?
I told them that I found surprising “overlaps” between aspects of American and Russian cultural models, along with the obvious differences. I referred to aspects of American cultural views that are not only hyper-self-assertive, the kind of Western “rational egoism” that Dostoevsky criticized in his novels, but that also contrariwise can evoke a Jacobite imaginative community, awaiting “the return of the king,” yearning for a hidden lost faith and country (jacobite being a particular historical term in Britain for a kind of outlaw tradition, explained more below). This echoes through American life from a strange meld of Anglo-Irish-Scottish Appalachian culture, out of sync with mainstream Enlightenment-based norms. In literary terms, it could be considered typified by James McPherson’s Lays of Ossian and the writings of the Anglo-Irish Edmund Burke, with hidden loyalties to a secret king and a lost faith best realized in rediscovery of the Orthodox Church by the West today. I think that cultural orientation overlaps partly with the monarchist exile history of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad. Therein lies an element of what J.R.R. Tolkien called the long defeat of the Elves, perhaps parallelling why some modern men still dress up in kilts for Robbie Burns’ dinners featuring haggis in the face of cultural disaster in the West. This may be a weird theory of mine. But I will try to describe it here further, nonetheless.
First, my study of early Irish literature included a focus on saints’ lives, especially on Saint Columba and traditions of his monastic community of Iona. Saint Columba, who lived around the year 600, is not only one of the most prominent and influential holy men of the early Celtic or Irish Sea world. He is also, relevant to this talk, the patron saint of the Scots Irish, having bridged both island realms, indeed having played a role in establishing what became Scotland. I learned how the early monasticism of the Columban monasteries and many other saints and communities of early Ireland and Wales reflected the influence of the desert monasticism of the Byzantine world in the East. Indeed, the Irish Sea was said in many ways to have the most continuity from early Christian culture in the West of any other region in Western Europe. From that Irish Sea world came much Christian influence on what became Scotland, England, and also the Vikings who themselves participated in the founding of what became Russia. This was also in modern times of course the home zone of the Scots-Irish.
To return to that more recent history, I mentioned my thesis that American culture has shown forth a type of imaginative Jacobitism, perhaps especially influential in Appalachia, which bridges the South and the North heartland of America’s core east of the Mississippi. In a minute I’ll return to that term Jacobitism as a shorthand label for what I am trying to describe. But the controversial Russian philosopher and polemicist Alexander Dugin has argued that certain civilizations are thassalocratic or sea-based, such as the British Empire and the Trans-Atlantic culture of the Global West today. However, some cultures are more what he calls land-based or homeland-based. He has argued interestingly that America is a culture that has tendencies in both directions. It is part of the Trans-Atlantic culture of globalization but also has roots in a land-based homeland culture, which again I would identify foundationally with Appalachia. Likewise, JRR Tolkien wrote of his love for little England and not the British Empire of Great Britain. It is in the localized culture of a homeland sense of America, rather than the secular technological modernity of globalization, that I think Orthodox Christian evangelism has its greatest hope of taking root in North America today.
Our mission in central Pennsylvania, a part of northern Appalachia known as Pennsyltucky, just opened a modest country Church, and already we have several catechumens, glory to God, a large number for our little community, in an area where Orthodoxy is pretty much brand new. Our area is rooted in local cultural networks that include family connections to the South, but also affinities ranging from Holy Trinity Monastery and Seminary in Jordanville in the north all the way to Holy Cross Monastery in West Virginia in the south, both in the Appalachian region.
To get back to Jacobitism, the term links the biblical style of the name of King James of Scotland and England, enduring in the translation of the Bible that bears his name, through his grandson the deposed King James II, to the younger James’ grandson Charles Edward Stuart, better known as Bonnie Prince Charlies. Legends of the latter’s exile, with the loss of old-style kingship and ancient faith, and hopes for their return. shaped Christian monarchist undertones in an American Jacobitism of the imagination (the Jacobite uprising with the Battle of Culloden occured in 1745, just a generation before the American Revolution). A lingering American Jacobite sensibility arguably informs local cultural resistance to technocracy and to gnostic virtual realities, preserving hopes for a hidden traditional Christian order to be renewed. Tolkien’s fantasy mythology, influenced by Celtic traditions, offers a reminder of the continuing power of the idea of the return of a lost king and lost faith, evoked in the title The Return of the King. Tolkien, according to Kentucky essayist Guy Davenport, drew on Appalachian American culture for his Shire of Hobbits, drawing on extensive correspondence with a former student living in Kentucky. The epidemic of loneliness and meaninglessness felt among people in the West today (evidenced in continued popularity of Tolkien’s fantasy) includes a yearning for hidden and lost meanings that the Orthodox Church fills.
Perhaps the anthem for Jacobitism is a cross-genre lullaby and protest folk song, the Skye Boat Song, about the disappearance of Bonnie Prince Charlie and hopes for his return. Jacobitism strictly speaking involved Scottish, Irish, and English sympathies for restoration of the House of Stuart, which was vanquished in the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, in which James II of England (Prince Charlie’s grandfather), was deposed. The Glorious Revolution set the basis for England’s modern parliamentary government. That involved the Whiggish embrace of secular progress that Dostoevsky criticized in his depictions of London’s Crystal Palace in the Victorian age, alongside accelerated secularization of English religious culture. The result can be seen today in Britain’s current “post-Christian” state with its weak Anglicanism and Toryism.
But Jacobitism remained an ongoing tendency toward resistance against modernity, reflected in the literary works of Sir Walter Scott, in the views of some British Romantics, most notably Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and in the Arts and Crafts movement and efforts to revive folk arts and “High Church” Protestant and Catholic movements. In America, echoes of this were represented in ongoing and renewed attachment to the King James Bible, even among Scots-Irish believers in America, often not “high church” or liturgical Protestants, but populist in orientation. It seems strange that the seal of the Stuart Monarch authorizing the translation, together with its old-school beauty of language, helped shape a certain aura of Christian kingship around the Bible itself. But it fit paradoxically the restive rebelliousness, a devotion to the last Stuarts and the ultimate outlaw King Jesus, of this Jacobite imagination.
The idea of the monarch having an affinity for the common people, as opposed to grandees oppressing them, helped inform the movement toward the American Revolution, including aspects of both Federalist thinking and paradoxically Jacksonian democracy. So, a leading American myth-maker, James Fenimore Cooper, flipped effortlessly from a Federalist background to being a Jacksonian Democrat. The center of Cooper’s myth-making, Cooperstown, NY, lies coincidentally near to the American Russian Orthodox center of Jordanville today. Cooper’s novel The Pioneers includes a sympathetic depiction of an underground Tory history of his fictional landscape in upstate New York. Such American tendencies show surprising parallels to the slogan “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality” under Tsar Nicholas I in Russia. In America they mingle with the declaration of a nation “under God” as in the Gettysburg Address. That phrase, “nation under God,” gained popularity over time and was put into the Pledge of Allegiance, not so much because of any in-depth analysis in political science, but because of resistance to exclusively Enlightenment neopaganism, which would seek to disestablish and erase older Christian faith in America over time. Like flying the Gadsen or Liberty Tree flags, “in God we trust” ended up on our currency in Jacobite fashion.
More U.S. Presidents were of Scots-Irish background than any other, mixed with Anglo backgrounds. That meld of folk cultures was a significant influence in Appalachia as it crosses southern and middle and northern states, including where I live in central Pennsylvania. Those of Ulster background did not necessarily become American Jacobites, but Protestant Scots-Irish culture lingering in Northern Ireland today remains arguably both more religious and more supportive of monarchy than any other constituency in the fragmenting United Kingdom. Imaginative American Jacobitism, the yearning for a lost king of an old community faith at odds with modern norms, linking populism to absent monarchism in a framework of frontier Christian faith, found broad cultural resonance with those of English, Irish, and other backgrounds. The Stuarts were Catholics, but Scottish Episcopalians in Aberdeenshire, Convenanters in the southwest of Scotland near where you cross to Ulster, as well as High-Church English and Anglo-Irish folks, also shared Jacobite tendencies with Highlander Catholics. Scottish Catholics in North Carolina and Scots Covenanters in South brought their distinct and paradoxically Jacobite (not Jacobin) revolutionary tendencies with them to America, for example.
Northern Appalachia can seem a region apart but remains connected to some of these trends, as apart from coastal elites, locally focused, often oriented toward agrarian communities or old coal and steel neighborhoods. As mentioned, set in Northern Appalachia, Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, a foundational literary myth for America, illustrates Jacobite emphases in a Tory subplot. Cooper’s The American Democrat and other writings illustrated his unhappiness with Whiggish business plutocracy in his day and what he saw as ensuing moral corruption of America by big business and finance interests. Jacobitism of the imagination in American culture went beyond the institutionalized coastal “Anglo-Saxon” or WASP establishment culture, which remains an object of both nostalgia and opprobrium, and often subverted WASP elitism in America.
Arguably Jacobite-style themes also played a role in literary themes of what the Southern Catholic writer Flannery O’Connnor famously called the “Christ-haunted” South. These include Southern Gothic writings like hers, and what has been called “implied nobility” in the tone of Shelby Foote’s epic history The Civil War, backgrounded by critiques of technocracy in Depression-era Southern Agrarianist writings and their modernist-malcontents like the work of Walker Percy, with all their virtues and vices, as well as Southern Black spirituals and spirituality that emerged from slavery, and American gospel-folk and hillbilly music. It echoes on in pop culture in diverse roots of American Country music in English, Irish, Scottish, African folk-music traditions. Kris Kristofferson, after a night out drinking in Nashville, stumbled unbelieving into a Sunday-morning Protestant worship service. He came out after answering the altar call weeping, to his surprise, and wrote “Why Me Lord.” It became his top-selling single and signature finale. The king is no more, but the Lord is the King Who will return, Jesus Christ.
Eric Nelson of Harvard argues that a “Neo-Stuart” view of royalist privilege informed the U.S. Constitution and the shaping of the U.S. Presidency as a quasi-kingship, in his book The Royalist Revolution: Monarchy and the American Founding. “Royalist patriots” argued for George III to revive monarchical powers in the “spirit of ’75” in defense of the people against moneyed English interests in Parliament, and carried those views to the Philadelphia Convention in 1787 where the Constitution was drawn up. Even recent voting patterns in Appalachia, from the South up through Pennsylvania, still show echoes of these tendencies— in strong support for President Trump as a kind of mythic figure whose re-election legendarily was stolen and would return for good or bad, thumbing a nose at “coastal elites” in favor of an unlikely surrogate “king” figure seen as heroically surviving assasination.
More deeply, as historian Nelson has noted, the U.S. Constitution, as it emerged from the Declaration of Independence and was extended by the Bill of Rights and the memory of the “under God” phrase of the Gettysburg Address, came to involve a remarkably monarchical sense of the central executive, unique among developed constitutional democracies, yet also linked to mysterious layers of federalism and checks-and-balances including the filibuster, Supreme Court, composition of the Senate, First and Second Amendments, and ideas of a civil religion originally based in Christian culture. All of these together proximate weirdly aspects of Orthodox Christian culture of conciliarity, sobornost, symphonia, and pre-revolutionary Russian and Byzantine ideas of monarchy, with a commonality of old Christian culture in America translated from the Reformation era, different in form but still reminiscent of University of Chicago historian Anthony Kaldellis’ argument for recognizing the Christian Roman Empire known as Byzantium as a republic.
Think of Tolkien’s own admission that he was both an unconstitutional monarchist and an anarchist at the same time. This could be a description of a Jacobite, old English Catholic that he was, as well as of an adherent of sobornost in old Russian tsarism. Sobornost involved a mystical spiritual unity. The term originated as a gloss on the Greek catholicos, adopted into Latin, in the Nicene Creed. But while in the West catholic took on the meaning of spatially universal, as in papism and globalization, in Slavonic sobornost had the deeper meaning of solidarity energized by God’s uncreated grace.The Orthodox Christian preservation of the true sense of the uncreated energies encouraged this. Orthodoxy properly distinguishes in doctrine and practice between essence and energy, while recognizing their unity as a well. Jacobitism offers a typology of this in the sense of a spiritual unity of community based in traditional Christian faith, even if heterodox, but awaiting the coming of the American Orthodox mission in whose era we now stand.
Speaking of sobornost and Jacobitism, consider the Russian Orthodox Christian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn. I did not mention how his writing also set me up for my Orthodox conversion along with the other factors already mentioned. I was in high school when his Gulag Archipelago came out in English and gobbled it up. I especially was entranced by accounts of faith amid the prison camps of Communism. Solzhenitsyn and family in exile lived in a small township in Northern Appalachia, Cavendish, Vermont. There he was said especially to admire the old New England town meeting system that still functioned as local governance there, in which community members voted on all measures of governance. This perhaps typified Tolkien’s idea of a kind of localism bordering on anarchism, which he nonetheless felt should be mingled with unconstitutional monarchy, a combination that could also be summed up again as both Jacobite and sobornost in spirit. For Solzhenitsyn, who loved a similar system of local governance in rural Switzerland, which had served as a way station in his exile too, this exemplified the type of governance he felt traditionally best for Russia—local communes combined with tsarism, so to speak, township Zemsky Sobors. Thomas Jefferson, a Southern writer unfortunately tended toward Unitarian Deism religiously, but imbibing of a similar spirit inspired the Anti-Federalists in advocating for New England town meetings as a model of local governance from the roots up, while referencing God’s monarchical rule as an ultimate measure of human rulers in the Declaration of Independence. Even controversial Scots-Irish firebrand John Calhoun’s idea of concurrent majorities or social compact resonates with the Jacobite spirit, despite Calhoun’s Unitarian tendencies and other problem views, most notably his pro-slavery racialism.
Today the term Jacobitism is easily confused with its near-homophonic Jacobinism, and obscured by it. Jacobinism means radical revolutionary tendencies, originally from a French Revolution club that took its name paradoxically from a Catholic monastery. Jacobinism in Russia, in the form of Leninist Bolshevism, killed the king and sought to kill the Church. In America, twenty-first-century Jacobinists seek to kill our surrogate working monarchy, the old Constitution, while also looking to erase traditional Christian faith, primarily by making it invisible in the schooling, cyberspace, and careers where many young people today grow up. The revolution will be televised because it is in line with the technocracy we’ve got.
But, still. imaginative Jacobite yearning for lost faith and king finds resonance in a country with deep religious roots amid rising domination of educational, media, governmental, and corporate realms by Jacobinism increasingly intolerant of imaginative cultural community, Appalachian deplorables, and traditional Christianity. One poll shows that 43% of millennial Americans don’t know or care about or believe in God, a percentage that undoubtedly is higher for up-and-coming Generation Z. Russia today (unbelievably for Americans with Cold War memories) is the pre-eminent major Christian country in the world. Yet even so, “Christ-haunted” America lingers, awaiting a stronger faith than Protestantism or Catholicism can provide.
During the twentieth century and beyond, the Russian Church in exile kept in its culture a spirit of monarchism, anti-Jacobinism, and what the exile Russian Orthodox philosopher S.L. Frank called “strange love” for a homeland that no longer exists. That is acutely the condition of modern human beings, but chronically of human nature since the Fall. Hence the continued relevance of this tradition, not in terms of politics, but the cultural contexts in which many Americans convert to Russian Orthodoxy today, amid efforts to convert America to an Orthodox Christian country over time. Those within the Orthodox Church find fulfillment in desire for the return of the Emperor of Emperors, our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ. This fully Apostolic Christian faith is not lost, if somewhat hidden to worldly thought at large in places as humble as our small Russian Orthodox mission in northern Appalachia, because it is in the heart. I fell into Russian Orthodoxy as a literary graduate student because of my Celtic studies, my reading of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, and my encounter with the Orthodox monasticism of one of the communities founded in America by Elder Ephraim. My Celtic and Baltic ancestral connections seemed to respond to the call of Orthodoxy, which thankfully swept away my earlier religious backgrounds in Yankee Unitarian-Universalism and Christian Science.
The typology of old Anglo-Scottish-Irish Jacobitism of the imagination in America, Tolkien’s kingship, points to the true faith, in contradistinction to modern Jacobinism that would erase it. That is true so long as Jacobitism can be realized as not an endpoint but typology. Recognizing this may help with Orthodox evangelism in Appalachian and heartland America, reaching those with such native human longings for God in their hearts of whatever culture or age, in our era of digital wasteland. But that fulfillment remains in the heart, or more properly in the nous or “eye of the soul” coming into the heart, through God’s grace, in the Orthodox Church returning to the West after an exile of centuries that was never complete. This is the real “Return of the King.”
Once with students I visited the Tadadaho or spiritual leader of the Iroquois Confederacy at their longhouse in upstate New York, not far from Jordanville. The conversation focused on nature. Asked what the greatest environmental problem facing America was, he answered “the separation of Church and state.” He said that America had adopted, according to Iroquois historical lore, the mechanics of federal government and checks and balances in the Constitution from the Iroquois, but not the spiritual solidarity needed for it to work. In Orthodox terms, that missing element is sobornost typed by what can be called this Jacobitism of the imagination.
In our little Appalachian mission’s altar stands a seven-branched candlestick from Russia. It reminds us of the old Temple menorah, which symbolized the glory of God in the Temple that departed at the time of the Babylonian exile, yet was figured as returning at the fulfillment of the Temple in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. The candelabra figures in the account of the Maccabees. It was taken by the Romans during the destruction of Jerusalem and the Second Temple in AD 70, and various accounts say it was taken to Rome, later to Constantinople under the Christian Emperor St. Justinian, and Jerusalem. All three cities across time fell to the enemies of the Church. But this candelabra still graces the altar tables of Orthodox Churches worldwide, showing the fulfillment of Old Testament Israel in the Orthodox Church, even in our small country mission in central Pennsylvania. For our mission of Russian exile it also points to historical and cultural associations of the tradition of Moscow being the Third Rome. But it is the symbolized illumination of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit in unity, sobornost, that makes the lamp stand known also from the Book of Revelation, fulfilled there more than all the historical and cultural meanings. So it is with Jacobitism. It points to sobornost and the deep mystical community of the Church as the Body of Christ in Appalachia as a deeply rooted local fractal of the One Holy Catholic Apostolic Church for all peoples and nations.
Rev./Prof. Paul Siewers is a priest at a mission in Northern Appalachian “Pennsyltucky.” A Professor of English and Orthodox Chaplain at Bucknell University, he heads the Bucknell Program for American Leadership. A past fellow in Religion and Public Life at the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton, Fr. Paul previously worked as Urban Affairs Writer at “The Sun-Times in Chicago,” where he appreciated the legacy of Richard Weaver as a Southern agrarian dwelling in that city. His views are his own; he shares them at his blog Christian Ecopoetics and Apologetic Theology.
Feature image at top: “Highlanders at Culloden during the Jacobite Rising” by David Morier
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