I'm Not Jewish Anymore!!!

Thanks Belief-o-Matic!

This test was all the rage when I was in seminary; at least for a couple of months. I remember taking it and thinking meticulously through each question and what it really meant to respond to answers about the nature of god, divinity, humanity, and creation. Painstaking consideration went into every answer. The result: 100% Reform Judaism.

WHAT!?!? Uhm- I'm clergy. I don't think you get any more Christian than that belief-o-matic! But, at the same time I felt some strange sense of pride in my results. Who knows why? But, something about having realized that you could fully remove Jesus from the equation and my faith wouldn't be impacted just a few weeks prior to taking the quiz may have had something to do with it.

I woke up in bed with some woman, and I was uncomfortable, so we talked theology. (Seminarians are quirky...) So, at some point the conversation turned to our personal theologies, and why we still maintained our Christianity. It was a long chat, but I remember telling her that I could be fully convinced that this whole Jesus thing was a hoax, we could find definitive evidence that some guys got drunk a few centuries ago and decided to pull a prank that just got out of hand. The Jesus thing, big joke. My faith would remain unchanged.

Admittedly, by that point I had spent so many class hours discovering historical-critical redaction tools, ensuring that whatever I read I did my best to read it in context, that the Jesus I came in with had been so thoroughly demystified and recontextualized that it would be fair to say that Jesus had already been removed from my Christianity. So, that may be why I felt a sense of pride in my results. What's Christianity when you remove Jesus? Judaism. (kinda) I mean, we are just an overgrown sect of Judaism.

In any case, I retook the test a few times to get different results, kept coming up Jew. I laughed about it, asked some friends to come with me to the gay synagogue, and went on with my life.

A few years out of seminary, I retook the test, and came up as a mainline Protestant. OMG!! NOOOOoooooooo!!!!!!! Retook it a couple of times, and kept the same result. I felt so, I don't know... reabsorbed? And went on with my life. I don't think my religious views are mainline Protestant, but whatever.

So, today as I sat on my couch procrastinating I decided to check in with belief-o-matic. Where do I land these days, o magic 8-ball of faith interpretation. UU. Huh. You know, I think I am. Not the crunchy granola new agey, hippy-dippy, UU. Uhm, I'm a bit too pretentious for THAT bullshit! But, the "everyone must find their own path, whether that be straight, winding, organized, or clearly self-directed" kind of UU that has respect for a wide range of religious/spiritual experiences. Yeah, I think I'm a UU. I like how diverse UU is, and people with so many faith backgrounds, past and present, sit next to each other in a community of faith.

It's always been really important to me that my children were exposed to a wide range of faith experiences so that they could understand how to construct what they needed from religion. I guess if I went to a UU church, they could learn and do that while developing bonds and meaningful relationships.

UU huh? Yeah, for the first time, I think that's me. (Plus they're good with the queers.)


1. Unitarian Universalism (100%)
2. Neo-Pagan (94%)
3. Reform Judaism (89%)
4. Liberal Quakers (85%)
5. New Age (83%)
6. Mahayana Buddhism (81%)
7. Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (81%)
8. Scientology (79%)
9. New Thought (77%)
10. Theravada Buddhism (76%)