(Above) Holy Cross Russian Orthodox Christian Monastery in West Virginia

An Open Letter in response to an article on my work, sent to George Washington University administrators and others involved nationally in opposing anti-religious bias in U.S, higher education. A slightly edited version is posted online by the Union of Orthodox Journalists, together with the original Illiberalism article link, at https://uoj.news/defending-faith/an-illiberal-attack-on-orthodox-christianity/ My unworthy work is not significant but hopefully this correction may help make such unfair bias less acceptable in American academia in future. Lord have mercy!

                                                                                                                              July 21, 2026

Dear Illiberalism Editors,

Eliza Fisher in a recent Illiberalism post reviewing my work provides a humorless and biased stereotype of my writing about Orthodox Christianity and culture in Appalachia, which demeans my faith culture through inaccurate polemics.

That this is done under the aegis of a supposedly university-related center (ironically the Illiberalism studies program at George Washington University), which widely promotes it on social media, raises questions about the editorial standards and biases of the larger project. The article seems “illiberal” itself in the oldest meaning of the term.

Fisher’s June 30, 2026, article uses an unexamined framework of “Reactive Orthodoxy” as a Procrustrean Bed for un-nuanced critique. But her work could be subject to counter-analysis under another label: “Reductionist Anti-Orthodox Christian Bias,” such as reducing my faith unfairly to “weaponization” in the headline.

“Reactive Orthodoxy” is a theoretical framework attributed to anthropologist Sarah Riccardi-Swartz, whose study of a traditionally minded Orthodox Christian community in West Virginia was controversial, and methodologically questioned for progressive political bias. There is no questioning of this framework by Fisher, however, who in effect uses it as a cudgel.

Tellingly, in terms of the quality of research of the article as a whole, Fisher, who holds an M.A. but with no listed peer-reviewed or professional journalism publications, identifies me from the start incorrectly as a Deacon in the Orthodox Church.

I am a Priest, as clearly listed online in many places, including sources she claimed to have studied in her research. In addition, my Church name as a Priest (and before that as a Deacon), used in my publications and in my university work in recent years, is Paul. Yet she ignores this and “dead names” me as Alfred Kentigern Siewers, an older name from earlier publications and a secular identity, so to speak.

This is from a writer who identifies herself as “investigative researcher” on her Linked-In account. She also seems concerned in the article with marginalized identities. But would she be so slipshod in misidentifying and misnaming, say, a trans person? In my experience in the past as a professional journalist, such glaring inaccuracies are often earmarks of emotional involvement, rather than measured objectivity. It is at least also a failure of basic fact-checking.

She also erroneously identifies my particular Orthodox Christian religious jurisdiction, for which I do not speak (as I do not speak for my university), as the most influential in the U.S., when it is one of the smallest. The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese is the largest and most often visible Orthodox entity in public contexts in the US, but there are other larger and more influential jurisdictions as well.

Most fundamentally, she engages in a mix of personal analysis and reductionist theoretical framing that lands somewhere between an opinion piece and a class research paper (perhaps the origin of the blogpost?). It offers an immature level of scholarship and undisciplined journalism either way.

In engaging in cross-disciplinary  commentary, she doesn’t appreciate literary and poetic analysis in her  attempted re-presentation of my views. Thus, she says that I wrote that “Trump is Aragorn,” when I was referring to a metaphoric similarity between a Tolkienian mythos of “the return of the king” and Trump’s 2024 re-election in the eyes of some, not a literal identification.

She inaccurately implies a view on my part of Unitarian-Universalism and Christian Science as involved in global conspiracy, when I clearly identify these denominational movements in U.S. history as examples of theological tendencies and influence, not conspiratorial root causes. The spiritual problem with the unitarianism of them both is broader, in my view. It wasn’t clear that she understood their shared unitarian theology. 

Similarly, she speculatively looks up online a source she says may have been the basis for my descriptions of early Irish Sea Christianity, which not only was not a source for my work, but ignores detailed primary, historical, and archaeological sources on that topic in my writings, such as in my book Strange Beauty. That is not perhaps readily discovered in Google or AI searching, however.

In all this, she engages in what she criticizes my work for doing: Fantasy world-building.

From a writing standpoint, she lacks a sense of humor. When I criticized faculty “settler culture” in writing for First Things, it was in a tongue-in-cheek style, not concealing my own position as a faculty member, as she implies with her very serious literal reading.

More seriously, she claims in error (among other things) that I advocate silencing the voices of people of color and queer people, when I am critiquing from a theological-anthropological standpoint a dominant Western view of identitarianism. Her apparent advocacy informs her inaccurate summary. I do not advocate such silencing.

In the process of all this, following her unexamined “Reactive Orthodox” framework, the article engages with a spirit of Orientalism that seems to view the Russian Orthodox Christian religious minority in the U.S. as a kind of sinister fifth column. It is as if the shadowy background hides a Fu Manchu-style exotic spy story. Such a spirit would rightly be unacceptable in scholarship on, say, alleged Muslim illiberalism in America, even with the U.S. openly at war with Muslim Iran currently.

Finally, given the article’s underlying polemical ethos, which includes use of my own personal backgrounds and worldview, it would be fair for the author to disclose her own personal backgrounds and worldview as a source of bias, as well as the ideological orientation of institutional support, including funding sources for the blog and program.

In the end, deciding whether to write an opinion piece (with more of a generous sense of humor), or an accurate scholarly analysis (considering for example the theoretical framework of ecosemiotics, which she glosses over in bringing up that aspect of my work) would be a good start for needed revision. Not to mention the need for further research to know that ideas of mine Fisher concluded are innovative, about an Orthodox Christian aspect to the background of American life, are not new. They have been advanced in the past by other better-known Orthodox thinkers, such as the late Metropolitan Anthony Bashir of the Antiochian American Archdiocese, and the prolific writer and prominent Russian priest-martyr Daniel Sysoev.

As published, the article ironically is an example of illiberalism in the deepest and most personal sense—a lack of thoughtful grounding in approaching another culture or another human being, and thus a lack of generosity of heart and failure of true liberalism.

Sincerely,

Rev. Dr. Paul Siewers