Russian Orthodox jurisdictions in the US
Russian Orthodox jurisdictions in the US belongs to the Eastern Orthodox family of churches.
Governance: hierarchical.
Russian Orthodox jurisdictions in the US reports 229 congregations in the United States (RCMS 2020 (sum of 2 rows — our arithmetic, not an RCMS-published total), 2020).
ROCOR and the Moscow Patriarchal parishes are separate jurisdictions; "russian_orthodox" cannot separate them, and many Russian-heritage parishes are in the OCA.
ROCOR 199 + Patriarchal Parishes of the Russian Orthodox Church in the USA 30. The OCA (560) is historically Russian but is a separate autocephalous church and is NOT included here.
Not one body but a data heading: the Russian Orthodox parishes in America our source cannot split between ROCOR and the Moscow Patriarchal parishes — two jurisdictions with one language and a divided history.
Heritage
Russian Orthodoxy in America began as one mission — Kodiak, 1794 — and broke into parallel jurisdictions after the Bolshevik revolution: the Metropolia (now the autocephalous Orthodox Church in America), the exile synod (ROCOR), and parishes that remained directly under Moscow, today the Patriarchal Parishes in the USA. This record is a grouping: the "Russian Orthodox" string in consumer data cannot distinguish ROCOR from Patriarchal parishes, and many Russian-heritage parishes are in the OCA besides. RCMS 2020 counts 199 ROCOR parishes and 30 Patriarchal parishes — 229 by our arithmetic, not an RCMS-published total; the OCA's 560 parishes are not included here.
Theological family
Chalcedonian Eastern Orthodox throughout; the divisions under this heading were never doctrinal — they were about the Soviet state, and about who could speak for a captive church.
Who decides what
Two jurisdictions: ROCOR, self-governing within the Moscow Patriarchate since 2007, and the Patriarchal Parishes, a small deanery directly under Moscow — the parishes that never left.
What a first-time visitor would find
Church Slavonic services in the Russian choral tradition, on the Old Calendar in ROCOR parishes; see the ROCOR record for the fuller picture of the larger jurisdiction.
What it has always cared about
The Patriarchal Parishes' distinct history is simply that they stayed — holding direct communion with Moscow through the decades when that was the harder road to explain; ROCOR's history is treated in its own record.
Its gift to the wider church
The Russian tradition's American gifts — choral music, monastic publishing, the memory of the New Martyrs — flow through all three Russian-heritage jurisdictions, which is exactly why one data string cannot contain them.
Commonly confused with
With each other, by construction — and with the OCA, which is historically Russian, autocephalous, and excluded from this grouping's count.
Range of views inside it
This heading spans two jurisdictions with different calendars, temperaments and relationships to Moscow; any parish-level inference from the aggregate is unreliable.
A note from the mapmakers: This is a grouping record, not a body. Our data cannot say which jurisdiction a given "Russian Orthodox" parish belongs to, and the 229 figure is our own sum of two RCMS 2020 rows. Nothing here may be asserted of a specific parish; sentences drawn from this record must state that two distinct jurisdictions are in view.
Sources: 2020 U.S. Religion Census (ASARB) · Orthodox Christians in America (John H. Erickson, Oxford University Press)
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