Month: July 2025

A Visit with the Doukhobors Part II

/ Jason M. Brown / 2 Comments

In Part I, I wrote about my visit to a small religious community called the Doukhobors. Those who remain of this fascinating religious movement live mostly in the Kootenays region of British Columbia. I enjoyed visiting the Doukhobor service and getting to know a few of them. But I left feeling a mix of peace, sadness and a familiar longing. In this short piece, I want to put words to these emotions, even if just to work through them for myself.

I have always felt that there is something beautiful about group religious worship and identity. There is such a strong sense that those in the room know who they are, where they are, and why they are. I still appreciate this when I attend a religious service, visit temples, monasteries, or gurdwaras. I even appreciate this when I return to a Mormon meetinghouse with my family during the holidays. Though I have long since stopped identifying and practicing the religion of my upbringing, the familiar hymns, the inflection of prayer, the smell of a church, and everyone dressed in their Sunday best, tap into my longing for be-longing.

The sadness is harder to articulate. I think is has to do with a mixture of spiritual and existential loneliness. Though the Mormon / LDS tradition never espoused as radical an approach to Christianity as the Doukhobors, like many restorationist movements in the 19th century, they were certainly committed to living out Christianity in what they saw as an authentic and radical way. And I would even say that Mormonism’s roots were what led me to my exploration of radical politics.

At the Mormon university I attended, I really struggled with how overwhelmingly partisan Mormon culture can be, especially in the so-called Book of Mormon belt. By that I mean intentionally aligning itself with the US Republican Party. As if Jesus or Joseph Smith were teaching modern conservative talking points. I had always seen religion differently, and I soon found a community of more left-learning and radical Mormons, many soon to be ex-Mormons, and I felt very seen and understood in my leanings and struggles.

As I wrestled and read, I sympathized with more radical formulations of Christianity by authors like Leo Tolstoy, and non-religious writers Peter Kropotkin and Murray Bookchin. I even wrote an article about the first convert to Mormonism in Mexico, the Greek radical Plotino Constantino Rhodakanaty (1828-1890). Like him I saw something powerful at the heart of the early Mormon relationship to land, place and social organization. The Mormons attempted to create The United Order as a cooperative social-economic system. It was never fully realized. Like Rhodakanaty, I was eventually disillusioned with Mormonism’s assimilation of the American capitalist religion, though I tried for years to find my own sort of Mormon radicalism. I wrote several articles for a Catholic Worker inspired newspaper called The Mormon Worker. That was a long time ago.

I also felt sad because the Doukhobors are dwindling, and their tradition cannot live as they envisioned. As I chatted with my new Doukhobor friends, they related to me how the community gets along today, and how it has had to adapt with the times, and how from their peak in the early 20th century, only about 1,675 identify Doukhobor as their religion, according to the 2021 Canadian census. The Doukhobors work through a legal nonprofit structure, they do not own land communally, and many don’t bother observing vegetarianism anymore. I understand, but in addition to the existential loneliness of longing for belonging, seeing a tradition with such a beautiful way of live dwindling is a bit tragic.

And it’s not as though I would want to be Mormon again or become a Doukhobor, even if they were more radical. But there is a nameless love that is hidden inside the feeling I got sitting with the Doukhobors and listening to them sing together. After the visit, back on the road, I was marketed to by countless fruit stands, new distilleries, luxury retreats and resorts and excursions. The warm summer world seemed to be buckling under the weight of us ravenous experience-seeking tourists. This is a landscape of leisure, of make believe, of Air BnB rentals, cabins and resorts for the religion of consumerism. It feels like the opposite of that nameless longing. It feels like the contours of a spiritual wasteland of sorts. Always seeking, never finding, we wander around hungry for meaning and experiences. Why is this “religion” flourishing while the Doukhobors languish? I don’t know. But I want to keep finding places where I feel that feeling and keep trying to name that nameless love that is hiding within it.

A Visit with the Doukhobors

/ Jason M. Brown / Leave a comment
Doukhobors in Grand Fork, BC

I am driving to Calgary to pick up my parents from the airport so we can tour Banff and Jasper National Parks. It is going to be Disneyland-dense with fellow tourists, each of us seeking to feel something like awe, to connect with the rawest aspects of nature. Still, I am very excited to go and see the beauty of the Canadian Rockies!

From Vancouver I decided to take the southern route along the US border which passes through the Kootenays on Highway 3. It was a stunning drive, even with the pangs of climate anxiety I occasionally nursed from seeing massive clear cuts, fire scarred mountainsides, aspen groves drying out too soon, and browned-over fir forests dying from some unknown pathogen (Spruce bud worm?).  

While I was planning my trip, I realized that the route would take me right through the traditional heartland of the Doukhobors, an ethno-religious community originally from Russia. I learned about the Doukhobors shortly after moving to BC, when I was chatting with the barber cutting my hair (I had more then). I told her I was studying religion and ecology at UBC, and she told me she grew up in a Doukhobor village in the Kootenays.

As I came to learn, the Doukhobors emerged in the late 1600 and early 1700s. The word means “Spirit Wrestlers”, and as a sect of radical Christianity, they were known for their communalism and simplicity. Some of their beliefs are similar to branches of Radical Reformation groups such as the Amish and the Mennonites. The Doukhobors however also resemble the Quakers in that they believed that God dwells in every person, and that this meant clergy and even scriptures were not necessary. Instead, they speak of the “Book of Life”, wisdom embodied in sayings, hymns, psalms and prayers.

If this was not controversial enough, they got into more hot water in 1734 when they were declared iconoclasts for preaching against the use of icons, a cherished piety in the Russian Orthodox Church. Eventually they came to espouse a vegetarian diet for ethical rather than ascetical reasons and as pacifists, they refused to swear oaths or join the military.

They were persecuted by Russian Orthodox clergy and a string of Tzars. Many were forced to migrate to various places in the Transcaucasia region and their leaders were often exiled to Siberia. In 1895, a group of Doukhobors burned their weapons in protest, causing another wave of persecution. One community attempted to settle in British controlled Cyprus, but soon many died of disease in route.

In 1899, around 6,000 Doukhobors emigrated to Saskatchewan with the help of local Quakers and Russian pacifist author Leo Tolstoy. Others such as Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin and professor of economics James Mavor at the University of Toronto donated to the cause. By 1930 there were over 8,000.

They worked on communal farms and ran a grain mill and a brick factory among other things. They built communal dormitories, but unlike the Shakers of New England, they were not celibate. Their communal land and pacifism eventually got them in trouble with the Canadian government as well. In 1906, they refused to surrender their communal title to land and lost much of it to the Crown when a law was passed requiring landownership to be under a single person’s name. During the world wars, they were also resented by Canadians for not supporting the war effort. In the 1920s, a breakaway group calling themselves the Sons of Freedom staged naked protests and engaged in arson attacks against more law-abiding Doukhobor families causing tensions within the community.

Today, the majority of practicing Doukhobors live in Grand Forks and other areas of British Columbia. Many moved here in 1908 after the Canadian law against communal landholding. Tensions also grew within the community, and it seems likely that a Doukhobor bombed the train that community leader Peter V. Verigin (1859-1924) was on as he headed to British Columbia in 1924. So much for pacifism (though we still don’t know who planted the bomb). Some of the Doukhobor children were forcibly interned into boarding school much like Indigenous residential schools.

I pulled up to the Doukhobor meeting house, now officially called The Union of Spiritual Communities of Christ (USCC) and noticed several veiled women making their way to the door accompanied by men and some younger folks. A large stylized dove adorned the doorway, symbolizing the Holy Spirit, and their persistent commitment to peace.

I had planned to just snap a picture and be on my way, but when I realized that they were gathering for service, it was Sunday after all, and I happened to arrive at the top of the hour, it seemed providential that I attend the meeting. I guess I half expected them to speak only Russian, but when I wandered over and asked a young man if the public were allowed to attend, he spoke to me in unaccented English and said, “of course!” I was greeted warmly by all and began chatting with one of the men, who immediately inquired as to my own religious convictions. I told him it was a long, meandering story, but that I had been raised in the Mormon tradition. I mentioned that in my view, Mormons shared a few similarities—a health code (The Word of Wisdom), early experiments with communalism (The United Order), friendly people, and a love for the land they settled in Utah.

There were about a dozen and a half people attending the service, with men and women sitting on opposite sides facing each other. There was a small table at the front that held a loaf of bread, a pitcher of water and a small wooden bowl of salt. These symbols, which we never partook of during the service, were symbolic of “hospitality, sharing, and our basic principle—Toil and Peaceful Life.” (from the Doukhobor hymn book).

The service was simple, the singing beautiful. They did a sort of ritual greeting call and response as people entered. The women were veiled and the elder women dressed in what seemed like more traditional dress, though I saw one carrying her things in a Lululemon bag. They sang and prayed in Russian and bowed after each hymn. There was also a sort of passing of the peace ritual during the beginning which involved three handshakes and a kiss. But only a few folks in the first rows did it. Toward the end they asked me to come to the front and say a few words, and I introduced myself and thanked them for their hospitality, kindness and way of life. After the service I perused some of the historic wall photos, chatted a bit more and was given a stack of literature to take with me.

The experience left me feeling a mix of familiar longing and a bit of sadness. And I am not quite sure how to articulate it… perhaps a part two of this essay is in order, or perhaps not.