Russia's Church in Texas

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. America is changing. And so is the world. But what's happening in America isn't just a cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere. I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C. I'm Tristan Redman in London. And this is The Global Story. Every weekday, we'll bring you a story from this intersection, where the world and America meet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

0:59The Interview. Listen now wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

1:09Thank you for downloading Assignment from the documentary podcast on the BBC World Service. We all know who the tech bros are, those latte-sipping geeks in Silicon Valley. But have you heard of the ortho bros? After the Covid pandemic, I was told that young American men tired of what they saw as excessive wokeism, are converting to Orthodox Christianity in record numbers, fasting for days on end, reading theological books and adorning themselves with Orthodox crosses. We wanted to find out why, so last year Linda Presley and I hit the road in Texas. 160 yards, arrive at your destination. Gosh, like, this is really extraordinary.

1:59we're coming up to a big sandstone sort of mansion with Roman colonnades looks like it could be the setting for a Victorian period drama or something out of a Jane Austen novel and it's got a big star the lone star of Texas over the portico

2:22nothing looks very orthodox here there's a statue of a girl clutching a red lily very skimpily clad.

2:34Hello. A powerfully built, bald-headed man in a cassock steps out of his pickup truck, the sun bouncing off the large gold cross on his chest. This is Father Moses Macpherson, and we're in the open countryside just north of Austin. We're going to build the church out here. To my left over here. Yeah, the east side, so facing east like a normal Orthodox church faces east. And then we'll renovate the building so that we can do services in the interim and have classrooms and all that other stuff, yeah. Father Moses serves as a priest in the Russian Orthodox Church outside Russia. It's known as Rokor, R-O-C-O-R, a self-governing offshoot of the Mother Church in Moscow.

3:21Headquartered in New York, this global network has been expanding across parts of the US. mainly because people from other faiths are converting in unprecedented numbers. They're preparing for baptism into orthodoxy. They're catechumen. We've made over 70 catechumen, just over 75 catechumen in the last six months. I would say our biggest Sunday recently I think was just over 170 people. So you've got to figure in the last year and a bit we probably are close to tripling in size. Compared to the millions of worshippers in America's evangelical megachurches, the numbers of Christian Orthodox are tiny, only about 1 % of the population.

4:07And that includes both Eastern Orthodoxy, as practiced across Russia, Ukraine, Eastern Europe and Greece, and the Oriental Orthodox from the Middle East and Africa. Yet this small religious community in the US is a very vocal one, and what's happening inside it reflects wider political shifts. I'm Lucy Ash, and in this week's assignment on the BBC World Service, I'm in Texas to chart a changing religious landscape and to ask what that means for America in the wake of President Donald Trump's dramatic pivot towards Moscow. Wow, this is like a ballroom, isn't it? With a chandelier and everything.

4:52It's a right proper mansion, isn't it? And there's a domed ceiling. So this is one of the main features in an Orthodox church, right, is to have a cupola like this. So ironically, the building is built with a perfect place. It's got fat little cherubs. Yeah, right now it does. So right now we're going to build that as the altar. Father Moses is excited about converting this luxury mansion into a new church for his flock, but he's coy about where the money came from to buy it.

5:34Sunday morning in Father Moses' current church, the Holy Mother of God in Georgetown. Everybody stands during the two-and-a-half-hour liturgy, although during the priest's homily they get a short break and sink gratefully to the floor.

5:56They're queuing up right at the end of the liturgy now to kiss the cross and it's a very impressive crowd of people, a lot of young men, some of them occasionally checking their cell phones but mainly looking very engaged and a lot of children writhing around on the floor and being scooped up by their parents and an extraordinary amount of catechumens, people who are getting ready to be baptised.

6:31Over lunch, Father Moses introduces me to one of his converts, a young software engineer. We escape the crowd and find a quiet spot in the corner of the church. Theodore's baby daughter sits on his lap. Like most convert families, his wife is staying at home to look after the children and later homeschool them. Theodore tells me his family was Catholic, but he rejected all religion until very recently. I was working my dream job. I was making more than ever anticipated. I was with a wife I loved her. At the time, I think we were just living as partners. I mean, I loved her dearly. I had everything as a kid I ever dreamed of.

7:09I worked hard in school growing up, and every goal I ever set for myself I had achieved. and I felt nothing. It meant nothing to me. I mean, to be honest, as an atheist, just trying to find meaning in life and purpose, it just kind of felt like an empty hole in my heart, to be honest. I think there's no better way of describing that. What's your analysis of the motivation of all the young men that we've seen today in the church who are catechaments? I think a lot of them are looking kind of like a father figure in many ways. I think they ultimately see Christ as a father figure. I think society's been very harsh on men as far as telling them what they ought to be, what they ought not to be, and it's very destructive often.

7:44The idea of a strong father figure, the idea of a father being the breadwinner and taking care of his wife and the wife being at home, I think for many people they're told that that's a very toxic relationship nowadays. That's not how it should be. And what about Father Moses? He's seen quite a lot as a father figure for some of these young men, perhaps. Oh, yeah. I mean, Father is definitely a great priest. I only can speak highly of him. I lift with him a lot. So we lift Monday, Wednesday, Fridays together. What are you talking about? You're talking about weightlifting? Yeah, powerlifting. Father Moses, he's big into lifting.

8:20Father Moses has posted a video of him bench pressing in his home gym with Theodore cheering him on to the sound of ear-splitting heavy metal. After a punishing 36 reps, the priest is elated.

8:38Not bad. 42 years young, baby! Although orthodoxy has its share of female saints, it is a traditionally male-dominated patriarchal religion. Is that part of its appeal for so many young men, nearly two-thirds of the converts, I asked Father Moses? It's not that orthodoxy is masculine. It's that in the West that everything has become very feminized, that it's seen as being more masculine. But that's because the things in the West have become very emotional, right? That's why the numbers are like 60 plus percent of Protestant churches are women. Is that right? Yeah. Somebody at lunch today commented on it and he said, you know, I don't want to go to the services that feel like a Taylor Swift concert.

9:22Because if you look at the language of the quote unquote worship music, it's all kind of like Jesus is my boyfriend. It's all emotion. That's not men. I think the crisis is existential, right? There's obviously a rebound against nihilism. There's only so much pot and masturbation and pornography that somebody can consume before they feel that their life is meaningless. And is that what some of these converts have been saying to you? Well, yeah, of course. Because this is I get bombarded with these things from young men, which is how do I stop looking at porn? Really? Oh my goodness. Yeah, the video that I did on it did hundreds of thousands of views.

10:05Number one, as a precondition, you have to have some sense of anger that pornography and fantasy does not define who you are and that they are pathetic, unmanly activities to be involved in. Standing in front of a whiteboard, Father Moses is lecturing young men addicted to what the church calls self-abuse.

10:36Father Moses has a big following online, but he's not alone. There are dozens of podcasts and videos here in the US presented by Orthodox clergy and an army of converts, largely zealous young men. A few wear t-shirts decorated with skulls and Orthodox crosses. Many film themselves against a backdrop of icons. The digital space is key in this wave of new followers of orthodoxy. South of Austin, we visit one of the best-known content creators, a musician who's worked as a firefighter for more than 25 years. What's up, you guys? Welcome back once again to the CounterFlow podcast. As always, I am your host and humble narrator Buck Johnson coming to you once again from Lockhart, Texas.

11:22in the midst of Holy Week. So you've got a lot of stuff on your fridge. Yes. Lots of letters. This one was cool because it's a listener who listened to my show and he's a punk rock kid, which I was, a firefighter, which I am, and he became Orthodox because of the show. Buck began his spiritual journey while hosting a show provocatively called Death to Tyrants. It started out as strictly a libertarian political podcast. I was an atheist for a long time, including when I started the podcast. And then I started to soften my heart towards Christianity. And then 2020 hit, which was the COVID year, of course.

12:07And stuff started happening that seemed darker. I just started thinking, well, there's some sort of evil steering some of this. During the pandemic, Buck's then wife, a hairdresser, was unable to work. Mounting frustration and boredom put a strain on their marriage. Around that time, Buck began talking to a couple of people on his show who were already into orthodoxy. They recommended a book, God's Revelation to the Human Heart, by Father Seraphim Rose. And this warm, tingling stuff was just erupting inside my chest as I read it. I learned that coincidentally there's an Orthodox church five minutes from my house in this small Texas town full of Baptist churches and Catholic churches.

12:53And I would drive by it like once or twice a week and I was like, I want to go in there, but I'm scared. I look different. I'm covered with tattoos. Did you think they wouldn't accept you? Yes. I was very wrong on that, by the way. One of his listeners invited Buck to that local Russian Orthodox church. He never looked back. He was impressed that unlike the other churches in his town, it stayed open throughout lockdown. Has also Doxy changed your view of the world? Yeah, absolutely. Yes. The stuff in Ukraine and between Russia, NATO, Ukraine, the US to a large extent, I pay attention to those things more so.

13:37What are your views of Russia? We are the Russian church outside of Russia. So negative American views on Russia are what worry me. I think there's a holdover from the boomer generation here in America that lived through the Cold War. And I don't quite grasp why, but it's like Russia's bad. There was a feeling here pushed by network news that Donald Trump was like working for Putin and that Putin still had KGB ties. But he does. Well, that Trump was part of that. And it was like, that's weird. Russia's president was a KGB colonel, and under his leadership, the security services have flourished.

14:23You're listening to the documentary from the BBC World Service. America is changing. And so is the world. But what's happening in America isn't just a cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere. I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C. I'm Tristan Redman in London, and this is The Global Story. Every weekday, we'll bring you a story from this intersection, where the world and America meet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

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15:46This is the Global Story podcast from the BBC and we've been finding out why men's beauty standards are being shaped by far-right influencers. Listen to the Global Story on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

16:03I'm Lucy Ash with Assignment, reporting on converts to Russian Orthodoxy in the US.

16:21The choir of the world's biggest English-speaking Russian Orthodox monastery, Holy Cross in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in West Virginia. During President Trump's first term, Sarah Riccardi-Schwartz, a young anthropologist and orthodox convert from Boston, went to live in a cabin near the monastery to do some fieldwork for her PhD. She planned to talk to monks and parishioners about religious art and icon printing. I remember at that time calling up my advisor and I said, look I don't know what to talk to these people about because they're not really interested in religious art they're really interested in Putin they really love Putin and he's like they're Americans who love Putin and I said yeah they're Americans who love Putin he said well you should write about that that's what they want to talk about let them guide you and when I sat down for my first interview and I asked this man who had converted from Catholicism born and raised in West Virginia what he thought about Vladimir Putin.

17:25And he said to me, I think he should invade the United States and we should crown him king. And he was being serious. Why was he so disillusioned with America? LGBTQ plus rights, feminism, what he saw as sort of this godless secularism that had taken over society. The monastery's abbot died last April, but in 2017, Sarah interviewed him along with other members of his community. He talked extensively about how the America of his youth, the America of the 1950s, has gone into this great slide morally, and how now Russia exemplifies the moral character that we saw in the 1950s in the United States.

18:12So it's the inversion of that Cold War model of propaganda, right, where America is sort of the saviour and Russia is the Red Scare. It's the opposite for them now. Perhaps what Sarah found at the Holy Cross monastery was an anomaly. The majority of Orthodox Christians in the US are not ultra conservative, and most belong to Greek rather than Russian parishes. But the Moscow Patriarchics brand of orthodoxy is spreading online. Sarah began to focus on the digital realm for a new book she's writing on converts in the US. There is a young man in Texas named Conrad Franz, who runs the World War Now podcast, who is connected to Alexander Dugan on social media.

18:59Alexander Dugan, a prominent voice on Russia's far right, has been called Putin's brain, or even Putin's Rasputin, the notorious mystic who advised Russia's last czar, Nicholas II. Dugin denies he has much influence on the president, but critics say he's a fascist who inspired Putin to invade Ukraine. So this young guy from Texas is having these conversations on social media with Alexander Dugin. And he then travels to Russia and meets with Alexander Dugin. I was in Russia twice. Conrad Frank's talking in 2024 on a YouTube video show called Church of the Eternal Logos, which has 37 ,000 subscribers.

19:46He's with two other young Orthodox influencers. Some people call men like this orthobros. I was there to speak at the International Movement of Russophiles conference. It's connected with the Zargrad Institute. I was able to talk to Dugan a few times. He's a nice man. I met his wife. She's very nice. The Zargrad Institute is also a religious TV station modelled on Fox News and owned by Russia's most influential Orthodox oligarch. But does all this really matter? It matters because for so long we've thought about radicalized people and communities as being isolationist. But in digital worlds, radicalized actors, so people who adhere to radical political values on whatever side of the spectrum, are connected to each other in these digital ways.

20:39So, you know, Conrad knows people in Australia and he knows people in Russia and he goes to a parish in Texas. And he has friends at parishes all across the United States and young men who listen to him and really believe that he's telling them the truth about geopolitics. Conrad and his co-hosts take turns in predicting the outcome of the war in Ukraine. These armchair generals appear even more hawkish than the Kremlin. Conrad argues that the takeover of Crimea and four other regions of Ukraine is not enough. After four years of fighting, he suggests Russia will seize even more of its neighbour's land.

21:21At the end of it all, I think most of the Black Sea, if not all of the Black Sea coast, is going to end up in Russian hands. The show is a strange mix of God and geopolitics. Conrad and his friends cite prophecies from Orthodox saints when discussing various conflicts. and almost seemed to relish the idea of World War III. I wanted to talk to Conrad. Initially he agreed, but later texted to say that after a night of prayer, he'd decided to pull out of our interview. A couple of hours away, just north of Houston, and not far from the endless strip malls and beige concrete flyovers, we turn off the highway.

22:03And then I spot it, a bright blue onion dome. incongruous in this Texan urban sprawl. The archpriest of the Church of St Jonah, Father John Whiteford, is Rockaw's most senior cleric in Texas. Like Father Moses, who we met at the beginning of the programme, he's been busy with adult baptisms and his font is a horse trough. Oh my, yeah, that's a very big tin bath. It must be about eight foot long. It's about eight feet. And is the water warm? Usually not. For infants, I'd try to use hot water from our faucet to make it least bearable, so it's triple immersion. Like an epiphany? Yeah. You don't cut holes in the ice in the shape of a cross here, do you?

22:46We don't have a lot of ice in Houston. Well, here's the icon of St Jonah right here. Inside the church, icons cover the walls. The Orthodox pray with their eyes open and see these images of saints as windows to heaven. But at close quarters, these Texan icons aren't quite as ancient as they seem. It looks from a distance like it's a painted icon, but it's actually a computer-generated icon. Really? Father John grew up in Oklahoma in the Evangelical Church of the Nazarene. And as a pastor, he picketed abortion clinics. He was an active member of the pro-life movement. That's how he first met his Orthodox counterpart.

23:30This priest walks in and he's wearing a black cassock, has a long white beard, a gold cross around his neck, and I turned to my wife and said, can you imagine me dressed like that? What did your wife say? I think she just kind of chuckled at the time. She didn't think that it was likely to happen. Father John's wife Patricia is originally from Hong Kong, and he tells me he has a diverse parish. Recent converts include two teenage girls and a female oil tanker captain, along with many Hispanics and some parishioners with Slav backgrounds from Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. At Orthodox Christmas this January, Patriarch Kirill in Moscow, the supreme head of Father John's church, called Russia the spiritual adversary of Western civilisation.

24:16He also described Russians who are against the war as traitors to the motherland. I asked Father John how he talks about the Ukraine invasion with his parishioners. Here we want to pray for the war to end, but it doesn't really matter what our opinions about who started it is anyway, because we're not in a position to do anything about it. Fortunately, we've not had many people who've left. No Ukrainians have left, but we've had maybe one or two families that were not happy with the fact that we even had the name Russian in our name or that we're commemorating Patriarch Kirill. I've got to ask you, how can you commemorate as holy someone who's actually not just failing to call for peace in the war in Ukraine, but actually championing it?

25:04Well, he actually has called for peace, but he's certainly made statements where he was supporting the war effort. In the case of Patriarch Kirill, a lot of what he said has actually been distorted. You know, he's the patriarch and I'm not. If he was asking for my advice, I would have advised him to word things a little bit more differently so that they wouldn't be so easily distorted. But, you know, he's in Russia. The Russian church, within living memory, was under persecution by the communists. And you can certainly understand why the Russian church wouldn't be trying to antagonize the Russian government and put themselves in a situation that might be back to what they had before.

25:42Father John portrays himself as a neutral observer, but on podcasts, he often criticises President Volodymyr Zelensky's government for allegedly attacking Christians and has urged the US government to stop supporting Ukraine. Today, there are two branches of orthodoxy in Ukraine, a self-governing church under the patriarch in Constantinople and one historically tied to Moscow. Father John's daughter, Catherine, who happens to be national co-chair of the Young Republicans, joined Orthodox Christian clergy last November to lobby Trump administration officials and members of Congress. The delegation complained about the persecution of the Moscow-linked church in Ukraine.