“Issa is a Christian Arab American”
I read one bio that listed his religion as “Eastern Orthodox”, though I’m not sure what that means.
He’s definitely not Muslim, and that’s what really matters.
“Eastern Orthodox” is the common name for the original Christian Church. We Orthodox call ourselves “the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church”, but since the Patriarchate of Rome set up on its own in the 11th century and loudly calls itself “the Catholic Church” (we’ve always called them “the Latins” since they split off) we’ve needed a way of distinguishing us Catholics from “Catholics” and hit on Orthodox, which means “right believing” or more properly “right praising” in Greek (just like “Catholic” means “according to the whole” in Greek, indicating that each local church is equally The Church with every other local church.)
If you look in your New Testament, every local church mentioned, the local churches in the Acts of the Apostles, the addressees of St. Paul’s letters (including the church in Crete, where Timothy was going to be bishop), and the addressees of the Apocalypse of St. John, with the exception of Rome, is still in communion with each other, and part of the Orthodox Church.
I believe Congressman Issa is actually a member of the same Archdiocese as I am (the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America) — don’t ask about the sorry canonical state of the Orthodox Church in North America: every local church in the old world, except the Patriarchate of Alexandria, has “colonies” in America, rather than there being one local church like the canons require (hence “Greek Orthodox”, “Russian Orthodox”, . . . which Americans mistake for different denominations, even though we’re all in communion with each other). We’re trying to fix this, well some of the bishops are, including my own bishop, whose ancestors hail from a region in Syria, the Arabic name of which means “The Valley of the Christians” because the people there have been holding out against the jihad and maintaining their ancestral Christian faith since the 7th century.
As a curiosity for you, back in the ancestral lands of both Congressman Issa and my bishop, where folks speak Arabic, we Orthodox are called “Rum” meaning “Roman”, while everyone calls “Roman Catholics”, “Latin” (pronounced “Lateen” in Arabic).