Digital Dissidents
This monograph offers a window onto the politics of digital information networks from the ground up, looking at how users transform cybernetic communities and social media platforms through their ideological positionalities. Employing qualitative research methods and textual analysis, this book looks expressly at the digital intersection of religious belief and political ideology among self-professed radicalized Orthodox Christian converts, who believe they have found ontological truth through their digital social communities of likeminded believers. Through tweets, memes, hashtags, e-books, and podcasts converts create circuits of content that provide ready, yet often conspiratorial, answers for their social and spiritual issues.
Reactionary Refuge
Redpilled. Groyper. Radicalized. All of these terms and more can be found in many of the biographies of far/alt-right Orthodox Christians on Twitter. These self-defining terms are indicative of the transforming social worlds of Orthodoxy in the U.S., where an immigrant faith has been taken up by former evangelical and traditionalist converts who use the internet to connect to those around the globe who adhere to the same ideological convictions.
Thus, the technological affordances of globalization have allowed for more flexibility in selecting not only their faith, but also their political alignment.
The Globalized Far Right
I aim to bring together theories of digitized religious practices and online political transformation to understand why self-identified Red-pilled, based, radicalized Groyper Orthodox converts on Twitter hold up Russia as an ideal image of a conservative country with a strong moral president. I do so by highlighting how their use of globally circulated meme-ifed conspiracies regarding the deep state, globalism, and liberalism that are rooted in anti-Semitic, anti-American, anti-democratic ideas that are not only part of their political radicalization but also their religious conversion