In 2025, the young American Orthodox convert and podcast host Conrad Franz visited Donbas in occupied Ukraine on a media tour sponsored by the Russian Orthodox Church. On social media, Franz posted photos with Russian soldiers holding a flag with an icon of Christ and boasted of receiving a badge from the Tsar Nicholas II Rocket Brigade. For Franz, experiencing a war-torn region was invigorating. Recounting the trip, he recalled that “life feels way more real down there.”

Like the Moscow-based Russian Orthodox church, which has strongly supported Russia’s invasion, Franz views the war in moral terms, even referring to Ukrainian soldiers as “satanists.” After returning to Moscow, he praised the reconstruction of Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow — a symbol of Vladimir Putin’s reintegration of the Russian church and state — as an example of “what a Christian government is capable of.”

Franz’s celebration of Christian authoritarianism and far-right politics is common in a small but growing movement of male Orthodox converts in the United States. Primarily based in the South and Southwest, these new converts seek an older, more hard-line version of Christianity shorn of technological frills or contemporary aesthetics. Unlike both mainline Protestantism and modern Evangelicalism, Russian Orthodoxy’s unquestioned hierarchical authority, strict patriarchy, and aesthetic beauty offer an alternate vision of Christianity for those dissatisfied with the American religious mainstream. Seeking a connection with the past absent in warehouse-like megachurches, converts are drawn to the onion domes, icons, and long-bearded priests of Russian churches. Orthodoxy’s rightward turn, including condemnation of LGBTQ rights and the social conservatism of Putin’s Russia, is equally attractive to Protestant converts who dissent from the progressive wings of their former denominations.