An ‘Illiberal’ Attack on Orthodox Christianity

Dear Illiberalism Editors,

Eliza Fisher in a recent Illiberalism blogpost review of 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 project more broadly. 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 Procrustean Bed for un-nuanced critique. Her work could be subject to counter-analysis under another label: “Reductionist Anti-Orthodox Christian Bias."

“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 highly controversial, and her methodology widely critiqued for clear progressive political bias. Fisher offers no critical engagement with this framework, instead using it as a cudgel to reduce my faith to “weaponization” in the headline.

At the very start of the piece, Fisher, who holds an M.A. but with no listed peer-reviewed or professional journalistic publications, incorrectly identifies me as a Deacon in the Orthodox Church. This is quite revealing in terms of the quality of research of the article as a whole.

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, Deacon, and that used in my publications and in 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 an “investigative researcher” on her LinkedIn account. She seems so concerned in the article with marginalized identities, but would she be so slipshod in misidentifying and misnaming, say, a trans person? I worked as a professional journalist earlier in life; in my experience, such glaring inaccuracies are often earmarks of emotional involvement, rather than measured objectivity—not to mention a failure of basic factchecking.

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 of America is the largest and most visible Orthodox entity in American public life, but there are other jurisdictions larger and more influential than my jurisdiction 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—which I can only assume to be the origin of the blogpost. Either way, it offers an immature level of scholarship and undisciplined journalism far below those of the standards of GWU.

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 these groups is broader, in my view. It wasn’t clear that she understood their shared unitarian theology.

Similarly, she speculates that an online source may have formed the basis for my descriptions of early Irish Sea Christianity. In fact, that source played no role in my work, while her analysis overlooks the detailed primary, historical, and archaeological sources I cite in writings such as my book Strange Beauty. Those sources, however, may not be readily uncovered through a cursory Google or AI search.

In all this, she engages in the very thing she criticizes my work for allegedly 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 erroneously claims (among other things) that I advocate for 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 now, in the midst of open warfare between the U.S. and Muslim Iran.

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 supporters, including funding sources for the blog and program.

In the end, a necessary first step toward revision would be to decide whether the article is meant to be an opinion piece (one written with a more generous sense of humor) or a serious scholarly analysis. If the latter, it would need to engage more fully with the theoretical framework of ecosemiotics, which Fisher largely glosses over when discussing that aspect of my work. It would also require further research. Several ideas she presents as innovations of my own—particularly those concerning the Orthodox Christian dimension of American life—are not new. They have been advanced by better-known Orthodox thinkers, including the late Metropolitan Anthony Bashir of the Antiochian Archdiocese and the prolific Russian writer and 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

Rev. Dr. Paul Siewers is Rector of St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco Mission Church (ROCOR) in Winfield, PA, and is Associate Professor of Literature at Bucknell University (BU). He serves as an Orthodox Christian Chaplain at BU and the Muncy (PA) State Prison. Fr. Paul is a former Urban Affairs Writer for the Chicago Sun-Times and has written for outlets such as The Federalist, First Things, and Orthodox Life. You can follow Fr. Paul's writing at ecosemiotics.com