To Josh Duggar, from a secular academic, on staying Christian

Instead, I would like to suggest that your Protestantism is your greatest liability at the moment. I have nothing against Protestants; in fact, I am one myself. However, as I am sure you are well aware, Protestants also have some habits that make relating to someone like you rather inconvenient. In particular, I would argue that the Protestants in your immediate family, the Protestants who have defended you, and the Protestants who are calling you a scumbag have one thing in common: they are all obsessed about your intentions. For example, when Megyn Kelly interviewed your parents, they kept talking about your heart, their hearts, the hearts of the sisters you molested, the hearts of the kids in your family whom you didn’t molest, etc. – which earned said Fox News journalist a bit of scorn for being too easy in the interview. Particularly offended were members of the viewing public claiming to be in solidarity with your victims. The dominant discourse in the public sphere at the time was about how your messed-up intentions have eternally messed up your sisters and their friend (who apparently is taking interesting legal action against you), so when two of your sisters then talked themselves to Megyn Kelly about how they weren’t as messed up as those who acted on their intentions to release your police record to the public, it admittedly screwed up the whole public discourse about intentions (more later on why the American public sphere is basically Protestant and going strong!). Indeed, for some very good historical reasons, intentionality has become the guiding principle in Protestantism, not least because of the way that most Protestants understand Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith alone – where the intentions of your heart toward confessing Jesus as Lord is what applies to yourself his substitutionary atonement for your sin. Since Luther (and Melanchthon, Calvin, Beza, Bullinger, Müntzer, Zwingli, Bucer, Petri, Hoffman, Simons, van Leiden, Niclaes, Traske, Tyndale, Cranmer, Ridley, Knox, etc.), Protestants have argued, squabbled, and reconciled over what in particular such intentional faith means – is it intellectual assent to a doctrinal statement? interior groping toward the ineffable? relational grasping of the Creator and Redeemer? – but at the end of the day, it’s your intentions, however defined, by which you are saved.

It’s that salvific obsession with your intentions that’s getting you into trouble. In some ways, you should probably be grateful: those who care about your intentions are probably trying to save you. In fact, you might actually find through this process of soul-searching that the secular culture that you decried at the Family Research Council for moving away from the hallowed Protestant origins of white America is actually still quite robustly Protestant because even those who attack you and your family are doing so at the level of intentions. Indeed, you should take heart that on the opposite end of the political spectrum from you, the #BlackLivesMatter protesters who shut down the Bernie Sanders speech in Seattle were subsequently outed as devout evangelicals, which isn’t very surprising because their objective is to change everyone’s intentions toward black bodies in America. However, while it might cause you great joy that even your political opponents and the secular culture you’ve been denouncing are more aligned with your faith than you might have expected, I’ll bet it’s also stressful to have your intentions and their qualifications for your social and spiritual salvation analyzed by people who don’t know you, which is why I’m saying that Protestantism is probably your biggest liability right now. Everyone who’s coming after you is not only attacking you for being a Protestant, but more importantly, they are using Protestant tactics to get you for your intentions.
Attacking your intentions, of course, is part of another big Protestant game, which is to get you to confess your intentions, especially your sinful ones, to the public. After all, Protestants – at least the really good ones – reject the idea that you should be confessing your sins to a priest under what Roman Catholic canon law calls the ‘seal of confession.’ Most Protestants, as you well know, believe in the ‘priesthood of all believers,’ which – by virtue of insisting that all Christians have equal access to God – also leads to a rejection of precisely that kind of sealed confession in favor of either a) confessing your sins directly to God in private or b) confessing your sins to another Protestant Christian, sometimes in the context of ‘accountability groups’ precisely for problems like yours — what some evangelicals call ‘every man’s battle,’ i.e. pornography, masturbation, affairs (but molestation is usually a bridge too far). In this way, you manage your own sinful intentions with the help of other believers around you, so you get to pick and choose trusted people in your life to whom you can confess. The only trouble about this is that the priesthood of all believers can also be interpreted by the viewing and reading public as meaning that we are all equally entitled to knowing about your intentions as well. However you might protest and however others might insist that this is unwise, this is also not entirely off the mark if you’re reasoning like a Protestant. After all, you are a public figure who holds himself up as a role model and culture warrior of sorts, and we are entitled to keep you accountable at the level of your intentions because we are your equals before God. Indeed, this is the reasoning of The Impact Group, the hackers who eviscerated Avid Life Media’s Ashley Madison website on which your information was found. God only knows if the hackers were Protestants, but those cybervigilantes have certainly imbibed the spirit better than anyone else.