Joaquin Phoenix Is a Secular Jew, but He Has a Pretty Complicated Religious History

Although he's been famous for decades, Joaquin Phoenix has always carefully avoided offering too many details about his personal life. In an full-page ad in The New York Times, though, Joaquin was one of more than 350 prominent Jewish people who signed their name to an ad condemning Donald Trump's plan to remove the Palestinian people from Gaza.

"Jewish people say no to ethnic cleansing," the ad reads, accompanied by Joaquin's name among hundreds of others. Following the news that Joaquin had signed his name, many wanted to know more about his religious beliefs. Here's what we know.

Joaquin may identify as Jewish, but he doesn't practice any sort of religious tradition. In 2018, he told The Christian Post that he considers himself a secular Jew.

"My parents believed in God. I'm Jewish, my mom's Jewish, but she believes in Jesus, she felt a connection to that," he said at the time. "But they were never religious. I don't remember going to church, maybe a couple of times."

He added, though, that one of his core values is forgiveness. "I always thought forgiving somebody was like you were absolving them of their sins or their transgressions or whatever it is they did, and I started thinking it has more to do with the person forgiving than it is for the other person, it's such a difficult task," he explained at the time.

Although it seems that Joaquin's family mostly allowed him to choose his own path when it came to spirituality, his family was briefly a part of the Children of God, a cult that was prominent in the 1970s and 1980s and went on to become famous in part because the Phoenix family was a part of it.

The parents traveled with their children around the Caribbean at that time as missionaries but eventually became disillusioned with the cult.

The reasons for that disillusionment appear to have been connected to the practice of "flirty fishing," which involved women luring men into the religion through their sexuality and then soliciting donations.

Although Joaquin was quite young at the time, he does have some perspective on his time inside the cult.

"My parents had a religious experience and felt strongly about it. They wanted to share that with other people who wanted to talk about their experience with religion. These friends were like, 'Oh, we believe in Jesus as well,'" he told Playboy magazine. "I think my parents thought they’d found a community that shared their ideals."

"Cults rarely advertise themselves as such. It’s usually someone saying, 'We’re like-minded people. This is a community,' but I think the moment my parents realized there was something more to it, they got out," he continued.

Ultimately, it seems Joaquin decided that there was no religion that worked for him, although he has remained a spiritual person with a real moral compass.