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

However, there is still one more recommendation that I’ll put before you: the Holy Apostolic Catholic Assyrian Church of the East, which incidentally seems to have more adherents in the United States than in Iraq (increasing your chances of joining). As a Protestant, you’re probably nervous about one of the key items that keeps most Protestants from entering these churches: the question of the Blessed Virgin Mary. With the Roman Catholics, the Eastern Catholics, the Eastern Orthodox, and the Oriental Orthodox, you’d still have to accept the Council of Ephesus’s formulation of Mary as the God-bearer – she literally bore God in her womb – which simultaneously would make her the Mother of God and you trembling with nervousness. But you’re in luck with the Assyrians. They actually have a lower view of Mary because they rejected the Council of Ephesus (or as they’ll tell you, Ephesus rejected them), arguing that Mary is the Christ-bearer, which is a position with which I’d imagine most Protestants could also live. Full disclosure: I have a particular thing for the Assyrians because apparently they’re supposed to have been the first Christians to reach China in the fifth century, which as one Eastern Catholic priest always reminds me, means that Christianity in China is supposed to be an Eastern religion. The only problem in my own personal life, I guess, is that I still like Ephesus and Chalcedon a lot.

I’m sure you don’t care as much as I do about whether the Assyrian Christians reached China before the Latins did in their Roman Catholic and Protestant (colonial) manifestations (I’m Chinese North American), but this has some career implications for you as well. If you were to join the Assyrian Church of the East, you’d definitely have to reject every ounce of neoconservative foreign policy doctrine in your very being. To be in solidarity with Assyrians is literally to be in solidarity with Christians in Iraq, where the patriarch used to be in Baghdad, which means that you would have to admit that the Iraq War in 2003 paved the way for the persecution of Assyrian Christians, Chaldean Catholics, and all the other Christians whose houses were marked with ‘N’ by the self-proclaimed Islamic State. If you were to become a lobbyist, you’d have an ecclesial obligation to ask the United States not to send weapons, but food. In short, you’d need to get rid of your American exceptionalism in order to consider your brothers and sisters before yourself.