For the longest time, the question just sat there on his screen. Cursor blinking. Waiting quietly, like a patient priest in a confessor’s box.

Religious Views: ——–.

Creating a Facebook profile for the first time, Eric Heim hadn’t expected something so serious. He had whipped through the social network Web site’s questionnaire about his interests, favorite movies and relationship status, typing witty replies wherever possible. But when he reached the little blank box asking for his core beliefs, it stopped him short.

“It’s Facebook. The whole point is to keep it light and playful, you know?” says Heim, 27, a college student from Dumfries, Va. “But a question like that kind of makes you think.”

Such public proclamations of beliefs used to require a baptism in water, or a circumcision, or learning the five pillars of Islam. Now Facebook users announce their spiritual identity with the stroke of a few keys. And what they are typing into the open-ended box offers a revealing peek into modern faith and what happens to that faith as it migrates online.

Of its 250 million users worldwide, Facebook says, more than 150 million people choose to write something in the religious views box.

Trivial to truthful

Amid the endless trivialities of social networking sites — the quotes from Monty Python, the Stephen Colbert for Prez groups, the goofy-but-calculatingly-attractive profile pics — the tiny box has become a surprisingly meaningful pit stop for philosophical inquiry.

Millions have plumbed their innermost thoughts, struggling to sum up their beliefs in roughly 10 words or less. For many, it has led to age-old questions about purpose, the existence of the divine and the meaning of life itself.

Some emerge from the experience with serious answers. George Mason University student Travis Hammill, 19, spent several days distilling his beliefs into this sentence: “Love God, Love Others, Change the World.”

Others try to deflect the question with humor.

“Pastafarian,” types Maddy Gillis, 20, of Kensington, Md., invoking a popular pseudo-religion that venerates a “Flying Spaghetti Monster.”

A good many, however, tread the fine line between wit and truth: “Agnostic, but accepting offers.” “I barely believe I exist.”

One faith, many nuances

For Heim, the space limited to 100 characters left him no room to go into his childhood experiences growing up with an agnostic father, an evangelical mother and a fundamentalist grandmother. There was no space to describe the terror he felt after learning of heaven and hell. Or how the hell part weighed especially heavily after he was caught breaking into a neighbor’s home at age 7.

He couldn’t convey the profound faith and forgiveness he found in junior high after hearing the tear-filled sermons of a charismatic Baptist minister. Or the eventual dulling of that faith in college by alcohol. And he couldn’t fully explain the slow reformation of that faith, now that he has abandoned the hollowness of his old party life.

“How the heck do you fit all of that into a box?” asks Heim, who sometimes attends a Lutheran church.

So rather than type in a specific denomination or a pithy, amusing answer, Heim entered this non-sequitur: “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.”

Linguistic philosopher Noam Chomsky wrote the phrase to demonstrate how a sentence can be grammatically logical and yet have no meaning — how things that seem so right at first can crumble under scrutiny.

“It represents my faith,” Heim says, “how it sometimes makes sense to me and sometimes doesn’t.”

The religious views box debuted in 2006, two years after Facebook’s launch. Before that, users who talked about faith did so mostly in the “About Me” area.

Since then, Facebook’s beliefs box has generated a staggering number of entries. So exactly how many users put down “beer” as their religion? How many “Catholic”? What correlations exist between religion and number of friends?

Company spokeswoman Meredith Chin declined to answer, citing user privacy, but agreed to compile a list of the most popular religious identities.

Most popular answers

The most popular faith professed is “Christian” and the various denominations associated with it. The category is so dominant that for this list, Facebook’s statisticians insisted on combining such other designations as “Protestant,” “Catholic” and “Mormon” under the “Christian” label. The second most popular entry on the list is “Islam,” followed by “Atheist.”

“Jedi,” interestingly enough, makes an appearance at No. 10.

The complete catalogue of entries easily numbers in the thousands, Chin says. But even offbeat answers like “Seguidor del Wiccanismo” and “Heavy Metal” garner more than 2,000 users each. There is also, Chin noted with a laugh, a surprising number of people online who identify themselves as Amish.

All this is more than the company has ever revealed on the matter. Yet it still doesn’t explain why the box elicits such an intriguing range of answers.

For that, turn to Katharine Gordon, 29, a Catholic from Washington, who agonized over what to say about her beliefs on Facebook. She couldn’t just type “Catholic” and leave it at that.

“The term comes with a huge asterisk,” explains Gordon, a civil-rights advocate for a nonprofit group. She found herself wanting to add parenthetical clauses to explain her nuanced stances on homosexuality and abortion.

“I’m not exactly looking to discuss the intricacies of the latest papal encyclical with work buddies,” she says. “I couldn’t help thinking how others would judge me.”

She had to consider her strongly secular friends from Bryn Mawr College — people who might be shocked to hear her talk of God now — as well as her current friends from the local parish. She could just imagine the reaction at church (“Wait, she doesn’t list ANYTHING under religious views?”).

So after several days, she finally settled on this answer: “Matthew 25,” the Bible chapter in which Jesus urges his followers to feed the hungry, clothe the poor and help the imprisoned. His words represent the part of Gordon’s faith that she holds most dear.

“It’s a bit of code,” she says, “so people can make of it what they want.”