The sociology of religion in the United States has not paid a great deal of attention to Orthodox Christianity—and this is particularly true in the area of religion and immigration. Cezara Crisan helps correct that oversight with an engaging examination of what she calls the crisis of legitimacy in current U.S. Orthodoxy. Orthodoxy has several different constituencies: descendants of Eastern European immigrants from the early 20th century, newer immigrants from Eastern Europe who arrived after the dissolution of the Soviet bloc, and U.S.-born converts to the faith. Each group has a different relationship to the historical connection between Orthodoxy and ethnicity, and varying beliefs about how the Church should adapt to contemporary cultural change. These two axes of change can be contentious, leading to potential crises within the faith. Using quantitative and qualitative data, Crisan examines dimensions of ethnicity, assimilation, and religious change in order to give an insightful portrait of Orthodoxy in the contemporary U.S.

Rhys Williams, Loyola University Chicago

Cezara Crisan’s The Legitimation Crisis of the Orthodox Church in the United States explores and reveals how recent immigration transformed the Orthodox Eastern European Church’s work in the United States in ways that induced a lack of confidence in its administrative functions and leadership among new immigrant parishioners. Crisan is a meticulous scholar whose evidence demonstrates how immigrants desire for incorporation—which no longer required the church to pursue the assimilation of immigrants—led to an administrative reorganization that prioritized the interests of its assimilated parishioners and U.S. converts for the sake of the church’s full-fledged integration into the United States’s “religious market.” Crisan argues that the Orthodox Church of America’s abandonment of its traditional role of aiding the social acclimation of immigrant parishioners insured they would not embrace and commit to the church as they did in their home countries. Crisan’s deft understanding of Orthodox Church in the U.S. and Eastern Europe painstakingly discloses how religion and religiosity are contingent upon and conditioned by sociopolitical dynamics and context.

Johnny E. Williams, Trinity College