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

Moreover, as social theorist Michel Foucault and critical anthropologist Talal Asad have argued, the secular state in many ways has adopted the practice of confession with the ‘priesthood of all believers’ model to manage the intentions of its citizens precisely by having us keep each other accountable for the upkeep of our civilization – which in some ways is what you’ve been advocating on your reality television show and at the Family Research Council. This too is a very Protestant thing to do; after all, historians John Bossy and Brad Gregory, as well as sociologist José Casanova and theologian William Cavanaugh, have argued that the Protestant Reformation brought about a transfer of the care of the holy from the church to the state, and even though some of the ‘radical reformers’ might contend that their Anabaptist and free church communities are totally disconnected from the state establishment, the evolution of their practices – including communities like your own – have led to the emergence of patriotism as a generally good spiritual attitude to have, complete with the whole mythology about America being founded as a Christian (read: white Anglo-Saxon Protestant) nation. Indeed, your parents believe this. For all the accusations that everybody raised about them not going first to the civil authorities, your father said very clearly to Megyn Kelly that after you had been accountable to everyone in your family and church, it was time for you to be ‘accountable to the law’ – which led to the filing of the police report that we have now all read. In actually approaching the police, you and your parents did much better than, say, Anabaptist theologian John Howard Yoder who sexually assaulted a ton of women under the pretense of having non-sexual sexual contact with them, as well as the Jesus People in whose communes many were sexually abused. However, as a Protestant in America, you are stuck: you have an obligation to confess to everybody, because we’re all Protestants who operate as priests for each other to manage and police each other’s intentions.

Your problem, then, is confession. At this point, I am supposed to tell you to convert to Roman Catholicism. After all, unlike the Protestants who split from Rome, Catholics believe two things about the Church simultaneously: the baptized laity are the people of God who make up the Body of Christ in solidarity with the modern world, and there is a sacramental order of ordained clergy – bishops, priests, and deacons – the first two of which can hear confessions and pronounce absolution. Unlike the Protestant public sphere, the Catholic confessional is sealed, which means that under no circumstances can a confessor (the guy who hears your confession) disclose what was said during that sacred time. Like the Protestants with whom you grew up, intentions still matter; after all, Protestants have always been borrowing wholesale from the Latin Rite, by which I do not mean that all Catholics still do their worship in Latin (although some do, and a good few can), but those who derive their tradition and authority from the See of Rome, the Latin Church. In Latin Catholic theology, St Thomas Aquinas distinguished ‘mortal sins’ from ‘venial sins’ because the former combines intention with action whereas the latter does not, and technically, you only have to confess the mortal ones (all of yours are mortal, I’m afraid). With all of these confessional perks, I personally know some people who grew up like you in the Christian (read: Protestant fundamentalist) homeschooling culture who later converted to Roman Catholicism and are beginning very exciting graduate studies in theology and philosophy; of course, I also know others who have joined the LGBTQ+ activist community as well as those who became academics who are more secular than me. However, I would advise you that it may be neither to your advantage nor optimal for the Roman Catholic Church’s optics for you to reunite with the Latin Rite. After all, the Latins have their own sex abuse crisis of epic proportions, and it would simply not look good for you – someone who molested your sisters and their friend and is having trouble with chastity as an adult – to join a church that the media and sex abuse victims accuse of engaging in systemic cover-up at the highest levels for clergy who are pedophiles, philanderers, and otherwise perverts.

If you should neither stay Protestant nor be received into the Roman Catholic Church, then it follows that you should not be a Western Christian, period. Instead, you should look into becoming an Eastern Christian, especially because they also have a robust practice of confession.