What Religion Would Jesus Belong To?

The title of this post is taken from Nicholas Kristof's New York Times editorial from last weekend. It may sound like a stupid question, but his editorial has a valid point:

ONE puzzle of the world is that religions often don’t resemble their founders. 

Jesus never mentioned gays or abortion but focused on the sick and the poor, yet some Christian leaders have prospered by demonizing gays. Muhammad raised the status of women in his time, yet today some Islamic clerics bar women from driving, or cite religion as a reason to hack off the genitals of young girls. Buddha presumably would be aghast at the apartheid imposed on the Rohingya minority by Buddhists in Myanmar. 

“Our religions often stand for the very opposite of what their founders stood for,” notes Brian D. McLaren, a former pastor, in a provocative and powerful new book, “The Great Spiritual Migration.”

While I cannot offer much in the way of explanation or excuse form the other religions, I can speak for my own religion, Christianity. Note that I don't say Catholic or Protestant or even Methodist (in which I was raised). To me, Christianity is about Christ's message, and not the rest of the New Testament.

To be blunt, I believe Christianity was originally ruined by St. Paul. Admittedly, he did most of the marketing for the early Christian church. Unfortunately, he also turned the message into his own, and he was a textbook definition of "Freudian neurotic". In turn, Paul's sexual hang-ups have led to centuries of puritanical nonsense from Christianity.

On the other hand, Thomas Jefferson got Christianity right. He made his own bible:

The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, commonly referred to as the Jefferson Bible, was a book constructed by Thomas Jefferson in the later years of his life by cutting and pasting with a razor and glue numerous sections from the New Testament as extractions of the doctrine of Jesus. Jefferson's condensed composition is especially notable for its exclusion of all miracles by Jesus and most mentions of the supernatural, including sections of the four gospels which contain the Resurrection and most other miracles, and passages indicating Jesus was divine.

Jefferson explained it this way:

In extracting the pure principles which he taught, we should have to strip off the artificial vestments in which they have been muffled by priests, who have travestied them into various forms, as instruments of riches and power to themselves. We must dismiss the Platonists and Plotinists, the Stagyrites and Gamalielites, the Eclectics, the Gnostics and Scholastics, their essences and emanations, their logos and demiurges, aeons and daemons, male and female, with a long train of … or, shall I say at once, of nonsense. We must reduce our volume to the simple evangelists, select, even from them, the very words only of Jesus, paring off the amphibologisms into which they have been led, by forgetting often, or not understanding, what had fallen from him, by giving their own misconceptions as his dicta, and expressing unintelligibly for others what they had not understood themselves. There will be found remaining the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man. I have performed this operation for my own use, by cutting verse by verse out of the printed book, and arranging the matter which is evidently his, and which is as easily distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill. 

Like Jefferson, I am a bit more of a deist. Also like him, I believe truth can usually be believed without divine intervention.

Which brings us back to the original question: What Religion Would Jesus Belong To? He would be a non-denominational Christian.