Freedom Believers 2020: anti-vaccine activism and political liberalism in Oregon

ABSTRACT

This contribution examines recent developments in the activism of a Russian religious minority community in the United States. After fleeing persecution in Russia to Manchuria, Turkey, and Brazil, since the 1960s 10,000 Old Believers have settled in the Williamette Valley, Oregon. The contribution describes how and why this paradigmatically ‘closed’ religious group, which has eschewed active political engagement for centuries, made a sudden and effective entry into Oregon politics in 2019–20. Initial political mobilisation was provoked by Oregon State Legislature’s attempt to pass a law to eliminate exemptions on religious or philosophical grounds for children’s vaccinations. Following the theorising of Rawls, I argue that the Old Believers formed with other Americans opposed to mandatory vaccinations an ‘overlapping consensus’ of political liberalism. Their exclusive reliance on political arguments grounded in the secular American tradition of liberal rights and freedoms conflicts with the influential thesis of ‘public religion’, articulated prominently by Casanova and Habermas, who highlight the spiritual and theological character of interventions by religious groups into modern politics. Notwithstanding the secular tenor of their political intervention, I argue that it constitutes a form of ‘religious activism’ motivated by the pursuit of values at the heart of their centuries-old religious project.

KEYWORDS:

• Old Believers
• liberalism
• anti-vaccination
• public religion
• Russian Orthodoxy

Introduction

‘Unprecedented’ is an overused word about the 2020 election in the United States. Not only for the first time had millions of American voters been forced to cast their ballots by mail because of an ongoing global pandemic, but no defeated presidential candidate in living memory had refused to concede defeat. There were also political developments without precedent at state level. In Marion County, Oregon, a region in the Williamette Valley, a local widow and mother of five, Anna Kasachev, became the first Russian Old Believer to contend a legislative seat. Kasachev decided to fight the State Representative seat for House District 22, the district whose precincts include the cities of Woodburn and Gervais, home to a population of 10,000 emigrant Old Believers. For a highly traditional, serially persecuted and therefore diffident religious group with a long history of flight from state power, such an entry into active political campaigning was a remarkable event that deserves exploration.¹

In this contribution I will describe Kasachev’s campaign and focus on the language and rhetoric that she and her Old Believer supporters used in the public political sphere. Because I am discussing the most public of public events, an election, I feel to some degree emboldened to forswear the anthropological dictum to always use pseudonyms. The analysis that follows draws on data all of which is in the public domain. The US 2020 election campaign was in large part conducted remotely and this contribution has used online ethnography of election materials, meetings, podcasts, and interviews to build an argument.² Following Pink, I attempt to explore ethnographically some of the discontinuities between the experienced realities of face-to-face and social media movement and socialities, thereby enabling the making of an ‘ethnographic place’ (Postill and Pink 2012, 123). Yet I do not simply report on what happened. Instead I endeavour to make a sympathetic interpretation of the Old Believers’ political campaign on the basis of having lived with Oregon Old Believers for a period a year before the election took place when I discussed some of the issues that their campaign raised. The interpretation that I supply, moreover, is supported by wider historical and ethnographic studies of Old Believers, including my own fieldwork and textual research conducted over the past ten years. This substantial archive of previous work, complemented by some vignettes of everyday life that I witnessed first hand, sheds light on the Old Believers’ motives and purposes to which a secular political audience during the campaign would have been largely oblivious.

The untranslatability of these ‘thick’ religious ideas was not taken by the Old Believers as an obstacle to their political work; it rather provided an opportunity for them to articulate an explicitly political argument for their platform. This ‘reasonableness’ was all the more striking since their agenda itself, though not obviously religious, had much of the aura of danger, alterity, and alienness that is characteristic of perceived religious invasions into a normatively secular public sphere. This contribution as such examines a new variant of what Susan Harding (1991) called, writing of evangelical fundamentalists three decades ago, a ‘repugnant cultural other’. These new ‘others’ are antivaccinationists, vaccine refuseniks and ‘anti-vaxxers’.

In order to dilute the potential toxicity that might inhere in such a controversial topic, I propose a counter-intuitive theoretical juxtaposition. Deriving key concepts from America’s most influential political theorist of the twentieth century, John Rawls, I argue that Old Believer political activism composes an ‘overlapping consensus’ of liberal constitutionalism. The Old Believers in the political arena scrupulously abide by Rawls’ ‘proviso of public reason’ by translating their views into reasonable language. The argument is counter-intuitive because it goes against the grain of current assumptions about the public encounter between religion and politics that have become embedded in social analysis over thirty years, through the influence of both its most exemplary descriptive form in José Casanova’s writing on public religion and through its most ideally normative version advanced by Jürgen Habermas.³ To challenge this hegemony the contribution will focus not on a case where religious language and concepts enter (or are thwarted from entering) the public sphere; rather it will concentrate on an event – an election – during which religious actors endeavoured to use political language. Notwithstanding the framing of their intervention in secular terms, the Old Believer activists are both clearly religious actors in their primary identity and motivation and clearly political subjects. Their appearance and practices set them apart from the secular mainstream of contemporary Oregon. Their religion and their religiosity are a badge externally displayed.

The first section of the contribution will describe Oregon Old Believers’ mobilisation against a bill to end philosophical and religious exemptions to compulsory vaccination; it will also relate the historical background to their coming of age as full US citizens. The contribution’s second part will detail Anna Kasachev’s campaign itself, including her and her supporters’ public statements. The central section will outline some aspects of the Old Believer world view explaining their stance vis-à-vis mandatory vaccination and their history of resistance and flight, and providing an anthropological glimpse behind the veil of the political reasonableness over which the Old Believers sedulously bedecked their public political statements; it describes some untranslatably non-political ends and goods that Old Believers pursue, and it reflects upon issues of purity, kinship, and gender relations. In the fourth section the concepts of John Rawls relevant to understanding Old Believer political praxis and American antivaccinationism more broadly are contrasted with the more influential but less applicable interpretations of Casanova and Habermas. Finally, I conclude with a short discussion about the broader implications of such a campaign for a rights-based society like the USA. The case under study raises fundamental questions about whether there are limits to tolerating cultural and religious difference and minorities in America; whether laws that appear to most citizens as simple assertions of right can be experienced by others as insufferable encroachments upon the good; and whether, ultimately, some exercises of freedom can be treated as more ‘essential’ than others.

The ‘Vaccine Bill’ and the ‘sturdy pilgrims’

The story of the Old Believers’ political mobilisation started 18 months before the 2020 election. In February 2019, half a year before I visited Woodburn, a group of mothers from the Russian Old Believer community started attending hearings at the Oregon Capitol, the seat of government in Salem, to protest a controversial bill. House Bill 3036B would eliminate all non-medical (religious and philosophical) exemptions for school children from compulsory vaccinations. The Oregon legislature moved to introduce what became known simply as the ‘Vaccine Bill’ after a bad outbreak of measles had erupted in schools in the southwest of the neighbouring State of Washington. To have one’s child exempted from immunisations such as MMR had hitherto been a relatively easy process for parents in Oregon: it was only necessary to pass a 45 minute online test (available in English or Russian) and complete a form. If passed, however, the Vaccine Bill would give Oregon some of the most stringent immunisation requirements in the USA.

The Old Believers were not alone in protesting the Vaccine Bill. Observers estimated that 2000 people from different backgrounds and from various parts of Oregon protested on the day it was due to pass, 23 April 2019. During legislative sessions the protesters, with the Old Believers dressed in traditional Russian clothes visible at the front, assembled in the public gallery, where they beseeched representatives to reject the bill. Yet because the ruling Democratic party possessed a supermajority in the House, on paper it was almost inevitable that the bill would pass. Protesters had meanwhile petitioned the lawmakers with 3000 letters and emails. While their appeals were directed mainly to the opposition Republican party, the diversity and originality of the coalition suggested that the issue went beyond ordinary partisan political coordinates: ‘I have seen groups that are of one-party affiliation, but the melting pot of people there, politically I haven’t seen’, said Representative Cedrick Hayden on witnessing the heterogeneous composition of the protesters.⁴ Brittany Ruiz, a lobbyist, was similarly surprised by the diverse coalition: ‘I seriously believe people showed out of the woodwork’.⁵ Others were less complementary, unable to discern an obvious identity or interest group behind the protesters, calling them a ‘ragtag bunch’; some even insinuated there was a more sinister funding source underlying the seemingly spontaneous organisation.⁶

Feelings were so fraught that the protesters prevailed on opposition Republicans to take radical action. While the Republicans could not vote down HB3036B, they could ensnare its passage through a procedural démarche by which they deny the quorum needed for a bill’s passage by refusing to take their seats during that bill’s hearing. The Republicans made this so-called legislative ‘walk-out’, which in turn would halt the passage of all other legislation until quorum was returned. Oregon’s Governor Brown, whose billion dollar budget for the state sat in limbo as a result, agreed to temporarily shelf the Vaccine Bill in exchange for an end of the legislative walk-out.

Having achieved at least a temporary victory over the Vaccine Bill, members of the Russian Old Believer community asked their religious elders for permission to deepen their involvement in politics. With the elders’ blessing the activist Old Believers founded the ‘Freedom Believers’, a 501(c) 4 tax-exempt civic organisation that was allowed to participate in elections and campaigns. The Freedom Believers organisation also allied with a ‘Freedom PAC’: a Political Action Committee that would be more exclusively dedicated to funding political campaigns.⁷ Freedom Believers declared itself a ‘family and faith-focused organization dedicated to educate, empower, and activate communities in the democratic process’. Freedom Believers described its political birth thus: ‘For the first time ever, members of the community were proactively standing up for their rights and religious freedoms. They stood up for a minority group who had never before stepped foot in the Capitol. It started off with one bill. Soon, it expanded into community outreach events. Freedom Believers is now dedicated to standing up for the rights of those who can’t, defending our God-given rights, and offering political education to those in need’.⁸

Before exploring how the Freedom Believers took up this political mission in the electoral campaign of Anna Kasachev, it is worth pausing on the centrality of liberty and rights, arguably the master load-bearers of value – along with equality – in American political discourse. How did a closed Russian religious group with its origins in mid-seventeenth century Russia come to espouse the major values of American democracy? As a precondition to answering this question it is necessary to be familiar with certain details of how the Old Believers ended up in Oregon in the first place.

The Oregon community belongs historically to the Chapel (Chasovennye) denomination, so-called because of their small picturesque church buildings, a strict and devout group of Old Believers that had adapted to living without priests after the priesthood had fallen into heresy in the Great Schism (Raskol) of the Russian Orthodox Church in the 1660s (Crummey 1970). In April 1962 the US Department of Justice conditionally approved the application of several hundred Old Believers for asylum from Turkey: they would be admitted under the administrative discretionary parole authority of the Immigration and Nationality Act (section 212 (d) 5) (US House of Representatives 1964, 103) as executed by the Attorney General. The then Attorney General, Robert F. Kennedy, said in the press release ‘Secretary Rusk and I are extremely pleased that this additional group of sturdy pilgrims will come to our shore’ (US House of Representatives 1964, 103). The moral cause for the USA was, according to a Judiciary Subcommittee discussion on 22 May 1963, to intervene in ‘a quarrel between the USSR and people who desire to practice religious freedom’ (US House of Representatives 1964, 121). Abba Schwartz, an administrator at the State Department who lobbied for the Old Believers’ entry had been charged by the new president, John F. Kennedy, with advocating for the ‘Open Society’, a new Cold War liberalism in which the USA was a beacon of pluralism and in which religious freedom would be a signature feature (Schlesinger 2012, 437).⁹ The master trope of this politics was ‘the free world’ or simply ‘freedom’. The legacy of this Cold War conception of freedom is evidenced in the political activism of today’s Oregon Old Believers by their choice of favourite slogan. They repeat the mantra of President Ronald Reagan that ‘freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction’.¹⁰

Meanwhile, several families of Old Believers that had fled Manchuria in the 1950s had already acquired land in the Williamette Valley in Oregon. The Turkish Old Believers joined their Manchurian brethren in Oregon and, through family chain migration, Woodburn became by the 1970s the world centre of the Chapel Old Believers, which maintained and fructified links with communities in South America, Alaska, and even the hidden hermitages of Siberia.

Asad (2003, 183–184) has cogently argued that the public sphere is necessarily articulated by power, and, qua Habermas, it has from the beginning excluded religious minorities, along with women and those without property. He goes on to assert that religious groups face a choice to remain private and silent on political matters, or confine their interventions to areas that ‘ … make […] no demand on life’. However, in the context of the modern secular state, viz. USA in 2019, facing a political diktat that threatened to infringe the core principles of their religious identity, i.e. bodily integrity and purity, and the inviolable right to exercise control of their children’s upbringing and wellbeing, the ‘religious’ Chapel Old Believers had no option but to acknowledge and enter into their de facto ‘political’ subjecthood. The tactics they deployed to exercise their subjecthood may have been secular in character, but as subjects they remained both religious and political. As Asad emphasises ‘what many would anachronistically call “religion” was always involved in the world of power [… .] because the categories of “politics” and “religion” turn out to implicate each other more profoundly than we thought’ (Asad 2003, 200).

However, the emigrants were not yet American citizens. They were rather temporary ‘parolees’, most of whom would be granted the status of ‘permanent resident aliens’. Only in the 1970s thanks to a local bilingual school teacher and then Woodburn’s director of Human Services, John Hudanish, were the Old Believers encouraged to pursue full American citizenship. Since Alexis de Tocqueville the conformist and flattening force of the ‘American way of life’ has been well documented; Hudanish tapped into a counter tradition of American liberalism for which pluralism and diversity were valued as ends in themselves. Against the calls of the ‘apostles of conformity’, Hudanish wrote, ‘the Russian OB’s are resisting, […] believing that they have a duty before God to preserve and pass on their faith, customs and traditions to their heirs and descendants as they themselves received from their forefathers […] the American legal tradition, with its guarantees of religious freedom and self-determination, supports the OB position’ (quoted in Antley 2016, 215–216). For Hudanish the preservation of Old Believers’ cultural pluralism did not require exceptional cultural rights nor affirmative action; it could be achieved sufficiently through the exercise of the individual rights of US citizenship as enshrined in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Hudanish’s stress on individual liberal citizenship is a theme that we see taken up and amplified 50 years later when the Old Believers entered active politics over one issue that had for them an existential significance: vaccination of children.

Handmaids go to the Capitol

There are deep reasons within Old Believers’ history and theology that have made them averse to the compulsory vaccination of their children, to which I will return below. I want to emphasise first, however, this important point: that their objections were publicly articulated always in a political language about civil rights and choices. When the Old Believer mothers concerned over HB3036 turned to their local Representative, Teresa Alonso Leon, they felt disenfranchised. Anna Kasachev described in her campaign literature how this indignity brought about her political awakening:

Last year, I rallied my dormant Russian Old Believer Community. Many of us never voted, but we realized that politicians were threatening our rights to make decisions for our children. We went to the State Capitol but Representative Teresa Alonso Leon ignored us

. Kasachev further recalled in a speech to her supporters an episode of ‘discrimination’ that she had experienced when she had told a local government official that she had chosen not to vaccinate her child. The official gestured Kasachev to the side: ‘Oh, you’re one of those – over there’. After such an undignified dismissal, the official switched to a more conciliatory tone: ‘Well, you still have the home schooling option!’ For Kasachev fobbing off her community’s concerns with the erosion of the right to education was a pure example of ‘segregation’ and it stimulated her move into political activism.

Kasachev campaigned on a broadly conservative and community-focused platform against high taxation and the alleged profligacy and hypocrisy of elite liberal politicians in Portland. She denounced her Latina opponent, Alonso Leon, as a ‘career politician’. It is worthy of note that more than 50% of the population of Woodburn is Hispanic. Kasachev came out strongly in favour of the rule of law and, with the Old Believer community, organised a picnic for Marion County’s police officers ‘Heroes in Blue we thank you!’. In autumn of 2020 this public support for the police was not uncontroversial. It clashed with loud calls to ‘defund the police’ that had resounded in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing riots. Oregon’s largest city, Portland – an hour’s drive from Woodburn – was a nationwide stronghold of the Black Lives Matter movement whose supporters had continuously occupied the city’s centre for 150 days with a large faction of the radical anarchists, so-called ‘Antifa’ (Anti-Fascist Action).

Old Believers summed up their impression of the political breakdown and of a world turned upside down that reigned in 2020 in one word: ‘craziness’. The belief that it was suddenly now bad to drink milk or to fly on planes and other ‘progressive’ policies showed that, one Old Believer told me, ‘American people are going crazy!’; so did the matter of ‘making illegal drugs legal’, he said. In the 2020 election Oregonians also had on their ballots Measure 109, a proposal to decriminalise psilocybin mushrooms (aka Magic Mushrooms). Kasachev billed her campaign as an antidote to such ‘craziness’, as a return to the sane and sober values held by average working Americans, especially that class of independent small business owners to which the majority of Oregon’s Old Believers belonged. Kasachev’s ‘small c’ conservative and libertarian coalition was underlined by her biggest endorsements: National Federation of Independent Business; Oregon Small Business Association; Taxpayer Defence PAC; Oregon Coalition of Police and Sheriffs; Oregonians for Medical Freedom PAC.

One of the most zealous Kasachev campaigners and Freedom Believers was Raisa Piatkoff. Younger than Kasachev, Piatkoff was more confident in her use of media, starting a podcast in which she interviewed local politicians and prospective supporters. Becoming adept in communicating the Old Believer viewpoint to American political publics, she did not hide that she came from a Russian background, but downplayed her exclusive origins; instead she tried to connect her community’s story with a general American narrative of ‘sacrifice of our fathers’. Piatkoff juxtaposed her pious ancestors’ sacrifices for the faith with America’s Founding Fathers’ struggle to secure citizens’ inalienable rights. Both strands combined into a universal story of freedom: ‘My ancestors sacrificed their lives, their comfort, and their homes in order to make sure that I have the privileges and rights I have today’, declared Piatkoff. ‘If we ever sit back and think it is not our responsibility to maintain the rights our founding fathers fought so hard for, it would be like spitting in the face of those who lost their lives to the sacrifices that built America’.¹¹

Piatkoff’s politics also hinged on what scholars of American public culture have called the rhetoric of ‘reproductive futurism’, the idea that participation in politics is motivated by a desire to create futures for yet unborn children (Edelman 2004, 2–3; Berlant 1997). Piatkoff’s speech against the Vaccine Bill wove together the language of sacrifice with the rhetoric of reproductive futurism into a chronotope where past sacrifices of invisible ancestors were entwined with a future for ‘our children’: ‘We know the weight of our ancestors sacrifice. Ancestors that not so long ago fought and died to protect their children’s future. A future filled with freedom. Freedom from religious persecution. Freedom from government tyrannical rule. This was a future that we are here to protect. Our children’s future. So please oppose HB3036. Protect our future. Protect an Oregon that our ancestors fought and died for’.¹²

One could read into the last sentence an elision and splicing of American and Russian histories: a substitution in the subject and object of sacrifice (‘an Oregon our ancestors fought and died for’) by which a third generation immigrant sees her ancestors’ sacrifices (presumably made in China, Turkey, or Russia) as having been made for the future freedom of Oregon. Yet this native identification could be interpreted as an expression of authentic patriotism: the Old Believers died for the idea of religious freedom that America represents and now they – heirs to persecuted immigrants – are propagandising that idea back to complacent Americans themselves who have become spellbound with ‘socialism’. On a radio discussion an interviewer who clearly wanted to segue into talking about the exotic differences of Old Believers, indicated to Piatkoff, ‘Do I detect a little bit of accent when you talk to me?’ Rather than expatiate on Old Believers alterity, Piatkoff evaded the interviewer’s identitarian summons and moved her cultural and religious difference onto more universal ground: ‘That’s the beauty of America: what makes us so unique is also what makes us so strong’. ¹³

Anna Kasachev’s campaign had hired a lobbyist to promote their viewpoint. It paid tens of thousands of dollars to Intisar Strategies, a political consulting firm dedicated to advancing centre-right candidates and issues, which worked on communication and social media strategy.¹⁴ Whether it was on the advice of the lobbyist or on account of their own political instincts, it was clear that the Old Believers didn’t want to be drawn into giving ethno-religious reasons for adopting their political positions. Instead they proselytised for the trinity of freedom, choice, and rights. In spite of the Old Believers’ diplomatic reticence, however, journalists and political opponents would try to root out an underlying and incomprehensible religious subtext behind that thorniest of issues, their vaccine refusal. Rather than foreground the substantive political issues that Kasachev and the Freedom Believers’ campaign had raised, some news stories shoehorned the Old Believers into the broader phenomenon of the ‘anti-vaxx movement’. One particularly impolitic quote in which Kasachev was alleged to have commented that ‘in a free society we have the right to get sick if we want’ was recycled on news outlets to give substance to this negative labelling.¹⁵

On Oregon Public Broadcasting an interviewer tried to trip up Kasachev into admitting she had attended Easter liturgy (and so by inference, had disregarded COVID public health regulations).¹⁶ Next he interrogated her persistently about what exactly it was that Old Believers’ objected to about (or in) vaccines. Rather than be drawn into furnishing an Orthodox-specific theological rationale – an inherently discrediting form of discourse in such a public forum – Kasachev switched to an argument by analogy:

I’ll speak to an area that might be easier to understand. There may be a vaccine that has a piece of pork. We know with the Jewish population that they don’t accept pork. Can they take vaccine with pork… Does that defile their body? That’s the way I can explain it

. When pushed – and perhaps caught off guard – by this insistent interviewer, Kasachev cleaved to a socially acceptable explanation for medical refusal in contemporary American society; she made recourse to a reason that has broad acceptance in American society: Jewish dietary rules (kashrut – colloquially known as ‘kosher’ in daily American speech).

The misrepresentation of the Old Believers could reach more confrontational proportions in the increasingly shrill political climate of 2020. One prominent Freedom Believer and real estate manager spoke at a meeting about how her community had been slandered regularly by opponents as ‘Russian trolls’, an allegation that carried particular purchase in 2020 following the so-called ‘Russia-gate’ scandal when the US authorities had concluded that Russia had interfered in the 2016 US election. While in an online forum with a thread headed ‘American Taliban’, unidentified ‘trolls’ called the politically active female Old Believer women ‘Handmaid’s Tale girls’; a reference to their putative resemblance to the protagonists of the popular Hulu series, The Handmaid’s Tale, based on Margaret Atwood’s eponymous novels about women enslaved to reproductive servitude in a neo-medieval future after a Second American Civil War. In an attempt to reframe the odd mix of Russophobia, Islamophobia, and amorphous antipathy towards religious difference that characterised these online outpourings, a more circumspect but no less hostile forum participant wrote that although ‘I hope the worst for them … it’s not because of their religious garb. It’s the racism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, fascism’.¹⁷

A cold-eyed appraisal of the Oregon Old Believers’ political platform, however, with its stress on individual rights and liberties, would suggest an ideology quite contrary to ‘fascism’. But the misrecognition of a monolithic and homogenous conservative block, whether that be of the ‘anti-vaxxers’ in the eyes of journalists or, through the optic of progressive forum users, the spectre of ‘American Taliban’, had some, albeit a different, ground in reality. For the Freedom Believers were indeed making political alliances and coalitions with diverse interests and constituencies across the West Coast on strategic political questions. They formed, for instance, a relationship with a burgeoning ‘Slavic caucus’, which consisted of Russian, Ukrainian, Polish and other Slavic immigrant groups across Oregon, Washington, and California. This alliance cut across vast differences in faith and history: Soviet-reared Baptists and evangelicals siding with Polish Catholics and Old Believers on behalf of the political goal of protecting minority rights. But it was the increasingly leading role that the Freedom Believers played in the broad-based movement against mandatory vaccination that was most striking in respect of forging alliances across differences to which I will turn in due course.

Bowling together in the shadow of the Apocalypse

In late eighteenth-century Russia religious dissenters, primarily Old Believers, warned that smallpox vaccination inscribed the ‘Mark of the Beast’. W. F. Ryan recounts how in the reign of Catherine the Great, the smallpox vaccination scar ‘became the Seal of the Antichrist’ (Ryan 1999, 318). Catherine II (1762–1796) as the monarch of Enlightenment herself submitted to the procedure, an occasion which was later popularised in a court spectacle ‘Prejudice Overcome’. The Old Believers instead interpreted the event through Revelation 13.16: ‘And he causeth all […] to receive a mark on the right hand’ (Ryan 1999, 318). In Transbaikalia where Catherine had exiled thousands of Old Believers, the flight from the ‘seal of the Antichrist’ made smallpox the scourge of these new settlements where, if a child was inoculated, adults at home would try to suck the inoculated material out of incisions with a straw (Batoev 2016, 129).

Many Old Believer groups, including the Chapel Old Believers, have lived for centuries and still do subsist within this apocalyptic horizon. The flight from the Antichrist as first embodied by the tsarist census takers of the eighteenth century (Crummey 1970) has been updated by today’s Oregonian Old Believers to include contemporary ‘demonic’ technologies. John Wigowsky, a Woodburn school teacher, reported a dialogue with an Old Believer in the 1980s: ‘“there’s been talk that a mark is already circulating through the international computer system”, said Ivan. “I’ve seen pamphlets which show that an invisible laser-tattooed mark will be on the right hand or on the forehead and some even say that the mark will be the number 666… And no man will be able to buy or sell anything without that mark”, added Ivan. “Some claim that the mark will replace all credit cards which are forerunners of the Antichrist”.’ (Wigowsky [1982] 2010, 245). In 2019 an Oregon Old Believer described to me a geopolitical apocalyptic scenario, a nuclear war involving Russia, China, and India, from which the survivors would migrate from seven cities to one where the Antichrist would feed them, whilst the remnants of Old Believers would hide in the Krasnoyarsk tundra.

Rather than treat this apocalyptic horizon as exotica in isolation it is necessary to consider how it fits into the Old Believers’ way of life. Chapel Old Believers hold that with the schism of the Russian church and the consequent disappearance of the priesthood they have lost their intermediary with God and, with it, the fons et origo of purification and benefaction. One anthropologist has cited Jacob Neusner’s ‘sacramental deprivation thesis’ to explain the Chapel Old Believers’ stringent concern for purity by analogy to post-temple Judaism (Scheffel 1991, 205). Chapel Old Believers cannot share tableware with those used by the mirskie (worldly/impure/pagan others) (Rygovskiy 2020). This boundary between the pure and the impure, the this-worldly realm and other-worldly space, Christians and pagans, and svoi and chuzhoi (‘one’s own’ versus alien alters) does not prevent Old Believers from engaging in the world of commerce, or now, even from involvement in politics. It does mean, however, that these binary opposed levels are ranked in terms of value with the pure other-worldly sphere of Christians superior and superordinate to the this-worldly impure realm of pagans (see Dumont 1980).

Within this cosmological ordering Old Believers have their own internal religious ‘politics’ in which a council of elders meets to legislate on theological issues. The canon ulozheniia (laws) decided at sobor (synod) have the force of holy writ, the non-fulfilment of which can result in penance, excommunication, and so possibly damnation. The Chasovennye had several sobory in the 1950s in China where they forbade pharmaceutical medicine. A sobor of 31 March 1953, for example, contained an edict ‘On all medicine, excluding the unclean beast’, which stated: ‘Those who take pharmaceutical healing and medicines in powder must read the forgiveness. Those drink it in the liquid form will do penance and forgiveness’ (Pokrovskii and Baydin 1999, 382). Within ritual space there is a rigid division of gender: the elders who compose the sobor are all men (Scheffel 1991, 184; Colfer 1985, 52).

Old Believers’ liturgical order (Rappaport 1992) enacts a holistic cosmos in which each celebrant, from the humblest infant candlelighter to the most august and austere elder, is conceived to belong to a single body. This organic totality is not an ethereal thing: for although the Chapel Old Believers have lost the priesthood, they retain the sacrament of marriage with which to sanctify the carnal realm. For Oregon Old Believers the family through marriage is made sacred. In Woodburn virtually every weekend in summer is spent in rambunctious marriage feasting. Since most chasovennye nuclear families consist of parents plus copious children, often reaching into double digits, you will see proudly displayed in their houses group photos. In the centre of the picture will be a greying couple, usually born in China or Brazil or Turkey; sat beside them will be their children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren in colour-coded sarafans and rubashki (traditional Russian shirts), the frame encompassing dozen-long rows of faces, each reflecting a permutation of the aged mater and pater familias prototypes in the centre. These portraits of big holy families iconise and index one of the highest forms of the good that Old Believers pursue.

Yet as a community with a cognatic, bilateral, and optative system of kin (Colfer 1985, 84, 113) whose only restriction in marriage is a general canonical incest taboo rather than a restriction on a certain class of relatives, Old Believers do not form unilineal clan structures. The extended family is instead the extended corporate self, the primary unit of work and of economic provisioning. Chasovennye Old Believers are economic autarkic individualists just as much in Woodburn as they are in their smaller sister enclave in Alberta, where, according to Scheffel (1991, 95),

their settlement does not constitute a colony in an economic sense… [They] consider the idea of communalism irreconcilable with their strong felt need for individual freedom, and they have no sympathy whatsoever for regimes that stifle private initiative and free enterprise.

There is a high degree of intra-communal economic trust and cooperation such that Oregon Old Believers expect to be able to receive from brethren large interest free-loans – large enough, for instance, to purchase a house (Colfer 1985, 26). Oregon Old Believers likewise are generously philanthropic and, should a catastrophe befall one of their own, they will raise the money rapidly for the afflicted: tens of thousands of dollars have been donated to unfortunate people whose houses burnt down, while more recently, the medical expenses of Old Believers in Brazil struck down with COVID have been reimbursed.

There is therefore an intra-Old Believer dynamic of the collective and individual whereby rugged self-provisioning contributes to common goods of Christian communal flourishing. These interwoven strands of kinship, ritual, and economy establish Chapel Old Believers as a society characterised by what Durkheim called mechanical solidarity, the cohesion of a relatively undifferentiated society. This unswerving solidarity was brought home to me one evening when I accompanied some Old Believers to that bell-weather of American civil society, the bowling alley. The Old Believers in their traditional colourful clothes stood out, animated and jolly, as a united block from the scattered and rather sombre-looking Woodburnians. If the latter were in Robert Putnam’s sense probably ‘bowling alone’ and instantiating the decline in generalised reciprocity and social trust that such anomie represents (Putnam 2000, 20), then the Old Believers, kith and kin arm-in-arm, were ‘bowling together’ in an even more all-embracing sense than that self-imagined for the ‘happy days’ of Eisenhower’s America.

An ethnographic vignette may help to illustrate some of the underlying agreements and tensions that characterise the encounter between the dominant secular rationalism of the mainstream and the apparent all-Americanism of the Old Believers. I would argue that the encounter which follows is a ‘social drama’ (Turner [1957] 2020) that brings into relief the shared ground and the potential lines of fracture that are co-produced in the meeting between secular America and Old Believers. This effect, demonstrated here at a micro-level, is magnified in the mediatised cauldron of the political process. One day in November 2019, Gus,¹⁸ my main Old Believer guide in Woodburn – a bold real-estate developer and magnanimously generous Christian – drove me and my colleague to Oregon’s Pacific Coast to kill two birds with one stone: he would first visit a plot where he planned to build a condo, whereupon he would drop us off at my ‘long-lost aunt’ (actually, father’s elder cousin), Peggy, who lived in a log cabin on an estuary nearby. For a man immersed in an enormous family kinship network that spanned the globe, Gus couldn’t fathom either how I’d never met this aunt of mine, nor how a retired woman could live all alone in the woods with only two dogs for company. The scepticism was mutual: Peggy, a doctor, had treated Old Believers in her 30 years of practice in the area and remembered with disapproval how they wouldn’t let her hold consultations with women patients without men present.

Yet on their meeting this mutual incomprehension melted away as two immigrants (a British doctor and a Russian Old Believer) reverted to the lingua franca of friendly bonhomie that lubricates social interaction in America. When Gus learned that Peggy was a specialist in gastro-intestinal medicine, he was even more keen to make her acquaintance; his liver and pancreas had been giving him trouble after drinking too much braga (Old Believers’ homebrew fruit wine) at weddings. He’d received conflicting opinions from two doctors, neither of whom he trusted. But here in Peggy was an ‘aunt’ of his guest, therefore a kin-link by proxy, and so a connection that followed the logic of relations through which Old Believers produce reliably trustworthy knowledge. Gus soon domesticated the puzzle of Peggy’s non-relational life (‘a lady all alone in the woods’) with an analogy: ‘Oh, she has great energy like my sister-in law. Independent widow, very strong lady!’.

Yet despite her good impression of Gus, Peggy, a rationalist atheist by persuasion, still could not forgive the Old Believers for what she perceived as their obscurantist distrust of medicine and subordination of women. Peggy was not unlike the radio journalist who could not accept Anna Kasachev’s veneer of reasonableness but wanted instead to smoke out the sinister irrationality that he suspected lay behind Old Believers’ stance. Yet there is bias in such a secular hermeneutics of suspicion that tends to misrecognise the reasons that motivate religious people and, because those reasons are embedded in a complex form of life to which secular audiences have little access, will likely remain opaque and untranslatable. For the sceptical rationalist outlook often occludes the levels of value that interpose actions, such that what subordinates in one sphere (ritual) elevates in another sphere (worldly engagement).

The aforementioned sobor decisions in China prescribed penance to all Chasovennye (both men and women) for taking pharmaceutical medicine irrespective of gender. Therefore from the point of view of Old Believers’ paramount ritual values a visit to a doctor’s surgery is an inherently and equivalently polluting procedure for both genders, not one that especially evidences, manifests, or produces the more sinful nature of women and justifies their subordination. Yet in Chasovennye ritual practice it is true that women play a subordinate role; that they are segregated in the physical organisation of worship and, when menstruating, are forbidden to enter the church proper but must remain in the antechamber (Colfer 1985, 52; Scheffel 1991, 184). Religious communities whose every aspect of daily life is structured by ritual do not necessarily differentiate between the sexes in quite such a power-driven or patriarchal way as contemporary social mores might assume. There is a long tradition of Old Believer women playing prominent roles, from the seventeenth-century martyr Boyarynia Morozova onwards, in the public or profane life of the faith community (Paert 2003). Ayla Fader (2009) has chronicled the spiritual division of labour among the Hassidic Jews of New York whereby women engage in worldly matters, and thereby free up men to concentrate on ritual duties; a division of value spheres marked by code-switching between English, Yiddish, and the holy language Loshn-koydesh. But, as with the Hassidic women of New York, it might be possible that what makes Old Believer women less pure on a ritual level might explain why Old Believers involved in political activism in contemporary Oregon are women. Not only women, but rather marginal women at that, according to significant criteria.¹⁹ Anna Kasachev was a divorced widow, a self-declared ‘domestic violence survivor’ who worked for the Department of Human Services, a rather non-standard profession for Old Believers who prefer to work in the private sector as small business people in real estate or agriculture.

An ‘overlapping consensus’: beyond the proviso to the pursuit of the good

As the question of compulsory vaccination has between early 2019 and summer 2021 turned from a niche issue into one of the most politicised problems of the present, and as governments across the world and billions of people weigh up the relative merits of individual liberty and public health, such movements for ‘medical freedom’ cannot be dismissed as anti-scientific quackery but must be treated seriously as a significant and indicative mode of the political. A significant corpus of literature on the anthropology of vaccine refusal within groups has been developed in recent years. Some of this has highlighted its internally focused political character (Ortner 1995; Sobo 2014, 2016), linking this impetus theoretically with a revised ‘anthropology of becoming’ (Biehl and Locke 2010) and reflecting an agentive kick-back against Foucauldian and neo-Marxist views of people as simply ‘done to’ (Sobo 2016, 343). Some writers have stressed the prevalence of ‘vaccine hesitancy’ amongst minority religious groups (Kasstan 2020, 2021), although Lakoff (2015) emphasises the discontinuity between the antivaccinationism of a century ago, in which religious dissenters were prominent protesters against state incursions, to today’s postmodern doubters of the trustworthiness of scientific authority, characterised ‘not by a hostility to medical knowledge and government intervention but by a different relationship to biomedical authority. It presumes that one should not necessarily trust the authoritative experts’ (Lakoff 2015, 424). Some have located this reticence in a broader collective response to presumed biomedical conspiracy (Singler 2015). An overriding feature has been the consolidation of resistance and refusal in the face of a state mandate (Bazylevych 2011) which unites both recipients and healthcare deliverers in a hermeneutics of suspicion. Larson (2020) has particularly highlighted the power of rumour and its resilience to scientific and even ethical challenge, enhanced greatly in the age of internet. Silverman (2012) details both the tenacity and vulnerability of parents of autistic children, on the front line of contested science and biomedical care.

At self-described ‘medical freedom’ vigils and rallies, Oregon Old Believers stood shoulder-to-shoulder with citizens that by any measure would compose a seemingly incommensurate grouping, which scrambled any conventional mapping of party political coordinates: home-schooling moms, radicals quoting Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, parents of ‘Indigo Children’ – a New Age astral philosophy according to which children with telepathic and synaesthetic gifts are misdiagnosed with ADHD or Asperger Syndrome (Singler 2015), Chomsky-reading critics of ‘big pharma’, Silicon Valley libertarians, retired military veterans, recovering drug addicts who advocate natural detox, members of Robert Kennedy Jnr’s Children’s Health Alliance. The sociologist Jennifer Reich is clearly right when she says that ‘vaccine questions are located at the place where left meets right’ (Reich 2016, 260).

All of the various niche groupings, partial associations, sects and factions, cliques and coteries that constitute Oregon’s movement for ‘medical freedom’ (called by its opponents ‘the anti-vaccine’ or ‘anti-vaxx’ movement) have widely divergent conceptions and doctrines, goals, and ways of pursuing the good life. The questions immediately aroused by such a heterogeneous coalition are: how is it possible that all of these vast differences can be held in abeyance to allow the medical freedom movement to form, and what does its irreconcilably diverse membership all agree upon?

Here I want to introduce a theorisation of politics and its relation to ‘comprehensive conceptions’ such as religion, which I think elucidates Old Believers’ activism and their place within the ‘medical freedom’ caucus. John Rawls in his later political philosophy abandoned the attempt that he had pioneered in a Theory of Justice ([1971] 1999) to specify a conception of justice to which all rational agents could agree under certain ideal conditions. Abandoning this search for rational certitude, he sought instead a more humble and therefore robust ground for liberal democratic politics. In Political Liberalism (1996) Rawls starts from the ‘fact of pluralism’, the irreducible differences in foundational values and moral conceptions that no one rational political doctrine can reconcile. This fact leads to his central problematic: ‘How is it possible that there may exist over time a stable and just society of free and equal citizens, profoundly divided by reasonable though incompatible religious, philosophical and moral doctrines?’ (Rawls 1996, xviii).

Rawls coined a simple motto that oriented his proposed solution of this problem: ‘political not metaphysical’ (Rawls 1991). Rather than scan deeply into diverse metaphysical doctrines (religious, scientific, moral) for a common core on which to base a liberal political regime, Rawls proposed instead that we leave undetermined the underlying reasons why a constitutional system might be affirmed. The important point for Rawls was rather that political liberalism (a regime of free and equal citizens) be in fact supported politically by its citizens as citizens, on the basis of whichever reasons they as holders of various doctrines can find to justify it, be they reasonable religious beliefs or reasonable nonreligious notions. By abstracting ourselves from clashing foundational beliefs and values we leave the way open to create an ‘overlapping consensus’ (Rawls 1996, 15). In an ‘overlapping consensus’ of all the reasonable opposing religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines we would, according to Charles Taylor’s rendition, agree on the norms while disagreeing on why they were right norms, and we would be content to live in the consensus undisturbed by profound differences of underlying belief (Taylor 1999, 124).

The notion of a Rawlsian overlapping consensus seems to capture an important dimension of Old Believer activism. Anna Kasachev or Raisa Piatkoff might not agree with a New Age mom or a tech-libertarian as to why compulsory vaccination is wrong, but they can agree that they are against it and, within the abstract language of what Rawls calls ‘public reason’, they can formulate the principles that underlie that political-not-metaphysical agreement. Such hypothetically agreed upon principles tend to resemble the standard contours that political liberalism has assumed since the Reformation: bodily autonomy and informed consent; liberty of conscience and freedom of thought.²⁰ But the liberal overlapping consensus is not a mere modus vivendi, a marriage of political expediency or a balance of forces maintained for the sake of maintaining social stability. Instead, for Rawls, ‘the thought is to formulate a liberal political conception that these non-liberal doctrines might be able to endorse’ (Rawls 1996, xiv). That is, religious believers should be able join an overlapping consensus because it is reasonable for them, and because there might be sources within their tradition to support it as a reasonable thing to do.

This latter point about religions themselves having reasonable internal causes to affirm an overlapping consensus leads to the final Rawlsian theoretical term that will clarify Old Believers’ activism. For religious groups that engage in public forums, especially in political campaigns and when they vote, are subject to what Rawls (1996, 462) calls a ‘proviso’, by which

reasonable comprehensive doctrines may be introduced in public political discussion at any time provided that in due course proper political reasons – and not reasons solely given by comprehensive doctrines – are presented that are sufficient to support whatever the comprehensive doctrines are said to support.

What the proviso means in practice is that when entering into those domains governed by public reason, the Old Believers must give political reasons for their stances that any non-believing citizen might find reasonable, even if the latter were ultimately to disagree.

Abiding by the Rawlsian proviso of public reason is exactly what the Old Believers maintained during their campaign. When Kasachev stated her objections to vaccines she did not resort to conspiracy theories; she made recourse to solid principles of personal autonomy and liberty of conscience; she talked of civil rights and the dangers of ‘segregation’ should vaccine refusal be made grounds for exclusion from public services, including education. Raisa Piatkoff, whether by virtue of political nous or lobbyists’ guidance, learned to translate the Old Believers’ tale of sacrifice into a modern American morality tale that lauded the benefits of liberty and the dangers of the slippery slope into socialism. These Old Believers spoke in public as constitutional fundamentalists defending the limited government of a democratic republic; not in itself an extreme or unwarranted position within the American political orbit, but a stance long advocated by the influential Federalist Society whose members and alumni include six of the nine currently sitting Supreme Court Justices.

By carefully sticking to political reasonableness during their campaign, the Freedom Believers went against the expectations of much recent social science research into the influence that religion has in the public sphere. Ever since José Casanova’s ([1994] 2011) Public Religions in the Modern World, virtually the empirical null hypothesis for social scientists has been that increasingly de-privatising religions will bring religious discourse and values into the public sphere in order to contest its taken for granted secularity. As Charles Taylor (2007, 532) writes of Casanova’s thesis:

Democracy requires that each citizen or groups of citizens speak the language in public debate that is most meaningful to them. Prudence may urge us to put things in terms which others relate to, but to require this would be an intolerable imposition on citizen speech.

If Casanova is the empirical version of this argument, its normative philosophical variant is supplied by Jürgen Habermas. Habermas criticised Rawls’ proviso for forcing religious citizens to give disingenuous reasons in public that they do not truly endorse (Habermas 2008). We would be deprived of the vast normative resources, Habermas insists, that religious citizens could add to public deliberation if we debarred them a priori from proffering those religious normative conceptions. Instead of placing the onus on religious citizens to speak in the language of public reason, governments and institutions should rather be obliged to provide the necessary secular translation of religiously expressed reasons (Gordon Finlayson 2021, 10).

The Habermas-Casanova thesis struggles to deal with a phenomenon like the Oregon Old Believers who precisely do not want to assert their values and religious ideas in the public sphere; on the contrary, they very much want to keep those to themselves. They see the prevailing society not as a neutral space that they should try to influence with their religious speech for political ends; they rather see the hegemonic ‘progressive’ governments in Salem and (to a lesser extent) in Washington D.C. as themselves increasingly expressing the lineaments of a ‘comprehensive doctrine’. Insofar as these regimes are becoming so encompassing that they prescribe forms of the good, then they depart from ‘the fact of pluralism’ that provides political liberalism with its foundation. To the extent that these governments assert these crypto-moral dimensions, the more they are felt to be ‘religious’ by subjects such as Old Believers, the more they demand forms of fealty that might approximate to what pre-Reformation and authoritarian states command of their charges. Old Believers with their defence of individual rights and liberties arguably are seeking protection from governmental dogma that suborns or flattens legitimate pluralism with insidious pro-forma prescriptions of the good.

For religious communities which are not oriented only towards this-worldly ends, for whom sheer life is not an end in itself, and whose members in fact relate to their own end (death) in a profoundly different way than do nonreligious people, medical compulsion could represent an intolerable incursion across the political-not-metaphysical ledger into the metaphysical substance of their ways of life.²¹ As we saw with the insistent radio interviewer’s relentless questioning of why Old Believers refuse vaccines, attempts to provide political and rational justifications seem not to satisfy even sworn liberal democrats, whose curiosity or desire to debunk makes them eager to jump over the abyss into others’ ‘weird and wonderful’ metaphysical conceptions. Old Believers have resisted indulging that impulse in public discourse.

By crossing the gulf of the proviso and seeing what lies beyond the overlapping consensus into Old Believers’ metaphysical ‘whys’ and ‘wherefores’, we are able to bring into relief those values that can only remain values insofar as they are not translated and are not inscribed into the public sphere – for either the latter’s normative benefit or its detriment – and no matter how labile or rigid it is and can be on either Casanova and Habermas’ reckoning.²²

Conclusion: Old Believers’ modular liberalism and political futures

So we have here a goal of secular modern American society – women standing for elected office – achieved incidentally by way of a religious rationale that is all but hidden behind the veil of outsider’s ignorance. This orthogonal relation between the religious and the political return us to Rawls’ argument about the overlapping consensus: all of the reasons that people find to partake in the overlapping consensus need not be strictly speaking reasonable (religious concepts of purity for instance); only some of them must be. Rawls imagines a modular relation between politics (‘political liberalism’) and religion (various ‘comprehensive doctrines’).²³

The first social researchers to contact the Old Believers after their arrival in Oregon surmised that the incomers appeared to be somehow pre-adapted to American capitalist society: ‘It seems evident that the cultural bases for accepting American life-ways were already existing in RC [Russian Community] culture before their entrance to the U.S.’ (quoted in Antley 2016, 140). The immigrants were hardworking and good with money; paid on time and were credit-worthy; desired the standard markers of material success, yet avoided the blights of modern American life in the 1970s. The Old Believers’ economic individualism and their inner-worldly ‘rationalism’, in the Weberian sense of the word, has in the last half century rewarded them with great material success even by American standards.

However, the promise of freedom that was held out in 1962 by Robert Kennedy to the Chapel Old Believers of Turkey, ‘sturdy pilgrims’ as he called them, was religious freedom, the same religious freedom that underpinned the political ethic and essence of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and of the United States of America. Their individualism and rationalism have no doubt also provided a support and an interface for the Rawlsian ‘module’ of political liberalism and explains their affirmation of constitutional rights and ‘freedom’ (not forgetting their induction into the Cold War liberalism through the solicitude of the Kennedy Administration). But Old Believers’ economic individualism and Protestant Ethic rationalism in one sphere are oriented towards achievement of collective goods in another. It is held together by ritualised solidarity and trust. The hermetic seal that Old Believers police between Christian and Pagan worlds has had unintended side effect: it has made them rather well suited to operating according to the Rawlsian ‘proviso’ of public reason. The Old Believers provide exclusive political reasons in public forums; there is no seepage of their religious ideas into the political discourse as Casanova or Habermas would have had us expect. Old Believers are quite happy with the constitutional settlement by which religion is a private matter.

The quietly flourishing Old Believers of Oregon have had a question mark placed beside their way of life by the attempt to eliminate religious exemptions from vaccination. Are the Old Believers exaggerating when they treat this public health measure as an existential threat? Why do they think that they can exempt themselves from the norms that most American citizens accept readily? I have shown in this contribution that the fear of defilement and its apocalyptic corollaries saturates Old Believers’ existence. Ritual purity is not incidental to their form of life: it has been the sine qua non of the community’s continuity for four centuries. Without ritual purity and the trusting solidarity enjoined thereby there is no Orthodoxy; without Orthodoxy, Old Believers face social extinction. According to one anthropologist, chasovennye puritanism has an ‘inherent value, which makes [it] indispensable for… survival’ since it constitutes ‘a prerequisite for the maintenance of Orthodoxy under the conditions of the schism’ (Scheffel 1991, 203). This point raises fundamental questions about the extent and the limits of the toleration of value pluralism within American society. In the eyes of the US majority such putatively narrow assertions of liberty as vaccine exemption made by non-conforming conservative minorities can appear irrational, or even ‘deplorable’.²⁴ But as we have seen with the Old Believers, their objection to vaccines is far from a ‘narcissism of small differences’ (Freud 1985, 131, 305): it is metonym for a way of life under threat and the casus belli for an unprecedented political mobilisation.

Why would a resilient, resourceful religious community such as the Oregon Old Believers not find a tactical route to progress this grievance by way of a mobilisation that could navigate the hazards placed in the way of religious expression of political subjecthood as outlined above by Asad (2003)? Take the example of the New York Hassidim as observed by Fader (2009, 116), who pointedly

do not want to be modern – that is, more like the Gentiles – and yet they adapt and redeem cultural forms from contemporary North America […] They participate in many of the institutions and processes most associated with modernity. They are voting citizens […] by subtly changing the national vernacular they challenge the very idea that the positive features associated with modernity need to be secular.

The Old Believers grasp the opportunity afforded them within the freedom-oriented polity of the United States: the religious freedom proffered by Robert Kennedy in 1962. By mobilising in a strictly secular manner, the Freedom Believers, led in a ritually sanctioned arrangement, by women, take forward a religious political activism consistent with the canon and tradition of their community.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 865976)

Notes on contributors

Dominic Armour Martin

Dominic Armour Martin is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford on ERC-funded project Emptiness: living capitalism and democracy after (post) socialism.

Notes

1. Although the history of Old Belief is characterised mainly by refusal and flight from state power, scholars have identified rare but important periods of collaboration, notably Shakhnazarov (2002) and more recently Kuziner (2021) on the Old Believer interventions in the first years of Soviet power.

2. This research passed through Yale University’s Human Research Protection Program Training, which involved ethical clearance for conducting it.

3. By using Rawlsian concepts I am not making an assessment or positing an alignment to the normative commitments of his theory. Rather I want to turn Rawls into an ‘ethnographic theory’ to illuminate contemporary American and Old Believer anti-vaccine activism.

4. ‘Committee’s vaccine bill approval provokes backlash’, Portland Tribune, 24 April 2021. https://www.portlandtribune.com/pt/9-news/426478–333324-committees-vaccine-bill-approval-provokes-backlash- (Accessed 21 September 2021).

5. ‘Ill-fated vaccine fight stoked grassroots anger’, Portland Tribune, 19 May 2019. https://www.portlandtribune.com/pt/9-news/428728–336395-ill-fated-vaccine-fight-stoked-grassroots-anger-/(Accessed 21 September 2021).

6. ‘Ill-fated vaccine fight stoked grassroots anger’, Portland Tribune, 19 May 2019. https://www.portlandtribune.com/pt/9-news/428728–336395-ill-fated-vaccine-fight-stoked-grassroots-anger-/.

(Accessed 21 September 2021).

7. PAC: an acronym that became infamous after the decision by the US Supreme Court finding Citizens United vs Federal Election (2010) that permitted unlimited corporate spending on political campaigns by so called ‘Super PACs’. The donors to the Kasachev campaign, by contrast, were mostly private individuals or small businesses.

8. https://freedombelievers.us/about/, accessed 21 September 2021.

9. Saba Mahmood (2012) and Mahmood Mamdani (2002) have shown how the politics of Christian minorities’ religious freedom was a central front in the Cold War during the Carter and Reagan administrations, especially when evangelicals supported Christian minorities against communist regimes in the Third World. Yet the admission of the Turkish Old Believers was perhaps the first instance when geopolitics and the rights of religious minorities were crystallised within the framework of a new Cold War liberalism.

10. The centrality of the Old Believers to Cold War ‘freedom’ was reinforced by the visit of Alexander Solzhenitsyn in 1977. Upon admittance to America the Nobel Prize winning author bee-lined straight to the Old Believers in search of authentic Russia. Cold Warriors such as Henry Kissinger and Senator Henry Jackson had to wait their turn (Solzhenitsyn 2018, 176–77). An older first generation settler in Woodburn in 2019 still recalled to me Solzhenitsyn’s kindness in searching for her missing husband whom they feared at the time had perhaps disappeared into the Gulag.

11. Public testimony submitted to Oregon State Senate Committee on Judiciary and Ballot Measure 110 implementation May 2019, see https://olis.oregonlegislature.gov/liz/2021R1/Downloads/PublicTestimonyDocument/6106, accessed 21 September 2021.

12. Public testimony submitted to Oregon State Senate Committee on Judiciary and Ballot Measure 110 implementation, see https://olis.oregonlegislature.gov/liz/2021R1/Downloads/PublicTestimonyDocument/6106, accessed 21 September 2021.

13. https://www.kslm.news/2021/02/12/good-morning-salem-02-12-2021/, accessed 21 September 2021.

14. Oregon Secretary of State, List of campaign contributions to Anna Kasachev, Elections Division • 255 Capitol St NE, Ste 501 • Salem OR 97,310. See https://secure.sos.state.or.us/orestar/cneSearch.do?cneSearchButtonName=search&cneSearchFilerCommitteeId=20370, accessed September 2021.

15. Kyra Young ‘Several candidates on the Oregon ballot support anti-vaccine agendas’, Corvallis Advocate, 31 Oct 2020 https://www.corvallisadvocate.com/2020/several-candidates-on-the-oregon-ballot-support-anti-vaccine-agendas/, accessed 21 September 2021.

16. ‘Think out loud: Russian Old Believers hit by coronavirus’, New York Public Radio, 26 May 2020. https://www.wnyc.org/story/russian-old-believers-hit-by-coronavirus/, accessed 21 September 2021.

17. https://www.reddit.com/r/oregon/comments/jmoe8a/yall_qaeda_rolled_through_our_tiny_town_yesterday/, accessed 21 September 2021.

18. Both Gus and Peggy are pseudonyms to protect the identities of the actual interlocutors.

19. There is, however, a tradition of unmarried women within Old Believer congregations as detailed by Bushnell (2017).

20. Political liberalism is therefore a very different beast from the ‘comprehensive liberalism’ which the early Rawls had advocated, with its presupposition of Kantian view of the rational agent (or, alternatively Hume’s model of self) (Rawls 1996, xxvii).

21. Scepticism is bound to be raised further when Oregon’s authorities surrender appealing to citizens’ enlightened self-interest to be vaccinated (for COVID 19); by-passing public reason, they instead have resorted to incentives, such as free entry in a one million dollar lottery (an only slightly more dignified appeal to its citizenry than neighbouring Washington’s ‘joints for jabs’ campaign).

22. As Talal Asad puts it succinctly, contra Habermas: believers ‘may be reluctant to concede that religious discourse is essentially a means of securing political interest’ (Asad 2018, 47).

23. ‘the political conception is a module, an essential constituent part, that in different ways fits into and can be supported by various reasonable comprehensive doctrines’ (Rawls 1996, 144).

24. Hillary Clinton, campaign speech, New York City, 09 September 2016.