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

We’ll let the Chalcedonians (Eastern Orthodox, Eastern Catholics, Roman Catholics, Protestants) and the non-Chalcedonians (the Oriental Orthodox) fix their own problems, but let’s get back to you. Because you’ve been living what you’ve confessed to be a ‘double life,’ talk of a hypostatic union probably isn’t terribly helpful for your own spiritual journey. I’m only being semi-facetious here. While Western Christians are usually miffed at why all this speculative debate about Christ’s natures is enough to split a church, Eastern Christians are fairly clear that the point of theology is to talk about the Christ in whose life the Christian is participating – which is why they talk about the process of theosis, that humans participating in God’s life in Christ are actually turned into God. In this way, as it goes for Christ, so it also goes for you. If Christ has two natures, you’ve got two natures too; if Christ has one nature, so do you. And because I’m a secular academic and not beholden to the debates of the Eastern Christians in any way, I’ll just say that for me, the Chalcedonians and the Miaphysites sound close enough to hope for full communion eventually, but you’re probably better off without any double-nature thing going on.

There’s another dimension of the Oriental Orthodox that I think might go well for you too. As a Western Christian myself, I’m a fairly practical man, which means that I also have your well-being in mind. Obviously, your career as a family values activist is in tatters, and you probably shouldn’t be doing anything that will put you in the jeopardy of having a double life again. However, if only as penance for the rest of your life for treating your wife, children, sisters, and their friend so badly, you do have to pay the bills, put food on the table, and keep a roof over your family’s head, unless of course they can’t stand you anymore and walk out on you (which, in my opinion, they are more than entitled to do) – in which case you’d still need to feed and shelter yourself. We all know that you can do manual labor because that’s what you did for counseling when you got caught molesting your sisters. However, we also know that you are a lobbyist by trade, and I think a conversion to Oriental Orthodoxy might also be able to set you up to think about human rights and religious freedom in these churches’ areas of origin. Of course, you could join an Eastern Catholic or Eastern Orthodox church from these same geographical areas; for example, the Chalcedonian patriarchs in Syria on both the Catholic and Orthodox sides have insisted that Christians belong in the Middle East, that the Islamic State is the real foreign influence, and that the liberal dogma that Christians are a ‘religious minority’ spread by the international community and spurred by the United States actually contributes to the problem by making everyone forgetful that Christians are from the Middle East. Chalcedonian or non-Chalcedonian, I think joining one of these Eastern churches would go a long way in creating deep, real, and meaningful solidarity between yourself and people suffering from political violence (say, in the Middle East, but not exclusively), but I think the Monophysite/Miaphysite thing would be particularly helpful in helping you get rid of your own hypostatic union.