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

Here you have several options. It goes without saying that all the churches I’m about to describe have rigorous practices of confession – in fact, you don’t confess blind in these churches, which means that your confessor gets to know you through your sins. If after all I’ve said about the Latins you still want to be in communion with the Patriarch of the West (otherwise known as the ‘pope’), there are twenty-three other autonomous churches from which to choose that have different liturgical, dogmatic, and devotional traditions but who still acknowledge the Bishop of Rome as the first among equals among the ecumenical patriarchs of the Christian world. You could, for example, become Ukrainian Greek Catholic, Ruthenian Catholic, Melkite Catholic, Chaldean Catholic, Maronite Catholic, Armenian Catholic, Ethiopian Catholic, Syro-Malabar Catholic, and so on, all of which fall under the umbrella of ‘Eastern Catholic’ because they’re not Latin Rite. Or you can be received into one of the Eastern Orthodox or Oriental Orthodox churches, or – as I’ll highly recommend – the Assyrian Church of the East. A word on the word ‘Oriental’ at this point: the ‘Eastern Orthodox’ and ‘Oriental Orthodox’ unfortunately have to use the word ‘Oriental’ to distinguish from ‘Eastern’ because of a theological dispute that I’ll get into in a little bit. ‘Oriental’ here doesn’t carry the meaning of the entirety of Asia from Turkey to Japan, so it’s not the same as that time Suey Park wanted to #CancelColbert for joking about starting the ‘Ching-Chong Ding-Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals or Whatever.’

This is where it’s especially convenient that I am a secular academic. Without a magisterium to tell me which communion I should be recommending to you, I can tell you a little bit about all of them, and then you can pick and choose the one that suits your tastes the best. Of course, books have been written on this, and since there isn’t enough space to get into all the details and politics among all of them – and astute readers who have made it thus far will have their own texts to pitch – I’ll just recommend one of the Latin guys’ English-language books for you to read – Aidan Nichols OP’s Rome and the Eastern Churches. In addition to being a prolific scholar who has a great ear for phrasing in his prose, I’m told by his Dominican brothers that he’s generally a good guy too. Another one is Eugene Webb’s In Search of the Triune God: The Christian Paths of East and West. I can personally vouch for Webb. Not only is he a great guy, but he founded the secular comparative religion program where I work, which means that people at my public university really know what we mean when we describe ourselves as ‘secular.’

I’ll admit that I’m very biased about where you should end up, which is why this is my unprofessional opinion. While I might make different unprofessional recommendations for others in circumstances that differ from yours – and while I might have my own personal preferences for my own spiritual practice – I think you should especially consider joining an Oriental Orthodox Church or the Assyrian Church of the East. At some level, those who only consider Eastern Orthodoxy the only viable option apart from Roman Catholicism do so because at least the Eastern Orthodox churches agree with their Western counterparts on the first four Ecumenical Councils (Nicaea in 325, Constantinople in 381, Ephesus in 431, and Chalcedon in 451). These Ecumenical Councils defined the doctrines of the Trinity, Mary the God-bearer, and Christ’s two natures (hypostases) as God and human. The Oriental Orthodox (the Coptic Orthodox Church, the Armenian Apostolic Church, the Syriac Orthodox Church, etc.) reject that last definition of the hypostatic union (the unity of Christ’s two hypostases) from the Council of Chalcedon. Instead, they think that Christ had only one nature when God became human, and those who didn’t like them used to call them ‘Monophysites’ (one-nature). The Oriental Orthodox’s preferred term is ‘Miaphysite’ – Christ’s divinity and humanity are united in one nature but aren’t confused with each other either. For some, this is close enough to the hypostatic union for it to be a non-issue, but suffice it to say that the split hasn’t been fixed yet.