Does Jesus Really Love Me?: A Gay Christian's Pilgrimage in Search of God in America

by Jeff Chu

doubt. “Trust and Obey,” one of the hymns regularly in my grandmother’s mix, seemed always to be a warning to us: “Trust and obey, for there’s no other way, to be happy in Jesus, but to trust and obey.”

Of all the songs we sang when I was five, ten, fifteen, “Jesus Loves Me” is the one that has stuck with me. For a long time, its reasoning, so neatly encapsulated in the line “For the Bible tells me so,” worked for me. I accepted it with a childlike faith. How could it not be true? Why should it be more complicated? But as I got older, the Bible felt more and more like reading someone else’s mail—interesting, no doubt, but ultimately secondhand and indirect. The truth I had grown up with, the teaching that had been fed to me, it wasn’t necessarily that I thought it was false, but I longed to hear it for myself. I wanted to know faith for myself. Occasionally, fragments of the song still pop into my mind—sometimes in the Cantonese words I grew up with, sometimes in the English words I learned later. Often it’s the chorus: “Yes, Jesus loves me! Yes, Jesus loves me! Yes, Jesus loves me! The Bible tells me so.” And I think about how nice it would be if I were sure of that fact. What would it feel like if I believed that Jesus really loved me?

The United States is the most demonstrably, demonstratively Christian nation in the developed world. About three-quarters of Americans identify as Christian, according to a wide range of recent surveys, and more than a third say they’re regular churchgoers. A study done in the early 1990s by Kirk Hadaway of the United Church of Christ and Penny Marler of Samford University estimates, though, that the number of churchgoers is actually about half that, and the fact that so many Americans feel the need to tell pollsters they go to church even if they don’t says a lot about how we see ourselves and how we want to be seen. Such sentiments may in fact matter more than the statistics, because they illuminate why and how we talk about our faith in the context of our politics, our courts, our communities, our relationships with neighbors.

I wish that I could go off into my own little corner of the world and figure it out on my own and with my God, but theology and church practice, public policy and civil liberties, are in play. Even if you do not care about Jesus and how he feels about the gays, how others feel about this issue has had inordinate influence on our modern, American lives. And the ramifications of the debate ripple far beyond our borders. To note just one example, the teachings of American preachers have helped inspire Uganda’s ongoing infatuation with legislation to impose the death penalty on practicing homosexuals.

I doubt. A lot. And yet I can’t not believe in God.

As I told friends and loved ones about my homosexuality, I was repeatedly told what I should believe and how I should live my life. On the conservative side, I got plenty of Bible verses, including those delightful ones from the Old Testament about gay “abomination”—complete with the “they must be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads” part. On the liberal end, friends expressed not just occasional fury and disbelief but also head-shaking pity. I felt them judging me, too: What a shame that I insisted on trying to hang on to my archaic faith. How pathetic that I had so little self-worth that I insisted on maintaining relationships even with those who called me an “abomination.” Yet few people ever asked me what I wanted, what I was hoping for, why I was making the choices I was making.

I’ll never forget the only conversation about my homosexuality I’ve ever had with my taciturn father. Here is the full transcript: ME: Why is me being gay so hard for Mommy? MY FATHER: We’re not just Christian. We’re Baptist. He seemed surprised that I had to ask.

“People may say, ‘You are condoning this couple’s sinful behavior.’ I don’t think so. They know exactly how I feel about what the Bible teaches. If there’s something to be convicted of, the Holy Spirit will do that work. I always try to be clear: I could be wrong. Let’s be honest! Christians have been wrong about many things over the years, and they’ve used the Bible to back up their wrongness. So I tell people what I think Scripture says, but I also tell them I could be wrong. And I do believe that it’s possible to have a grace-filled, intelligent conversation about it,” Wilson says. He shakes his head. “When did the church become a place where we had to believe the exact same thing on everything or else we couldn’t be in community together?”

When it comes to belief in God, is one ever “fully informed”? My understanding of faith is that it is sedimentary—layer upon layer of belief and experience, one atop another, the accumulating weight reinforcing what has piled up below.

No guilt, no fear. What does that even feel like? I don’t think I or John or Andrae or Michael could truly say we know. Any glimmer of guiltlessness, any sign of fearlessness, has been outside the walls of the church, not within it.

Few things irk Westboro’s members more than the widespread belief, even beyond the church, that Christ was a sweet, all-loving man. God does not actually love everyone, they say, only those whom He chose for heaven. “God foreordained some people to go to heaven and some to go to hell. But people can’t stand that they got put in the wrong category. That’s a buzzkill!” says Steve Drain, who came to Topeka in 2001 to make a film debunking Westboro’s beliefs and ended up converting and moving his family up from Florida. “But Jesus did not die for everyone.” This kind of thinking isn’t unique in the American church. Mark Driscoll, a prominent pastor who leads Seattle’s Mars Hill Church, which regularly draws more ten thousand worshippers, gave a sermon in the fall of 2011 in which he said: “Some of you, God hates you. . . . He doesn’t think you’re cute. . . . He doesn’t care if you compare yourself to someone worse than you. He hates them, too. God hates—right now, personally, objectively hates some of you.”

to the right of his merit badges is a plaque from the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Before Westboro launched its quest against homosexuality, Phelps, a lawyer, was respected for his ardent advocacy of racial equality.

Steve explains the language choices as pragmatic: They’re just trying to speak to people in the current vernacular. “How all this lands on a person’s heart is God’s business,” he says. But this multipart defense of the use of fag is like me telling my mother that it is okay to say “fuck” instead of “sex,” because it has a long and rich history (which it does), lots of people say it, and the responsibility for interpretation is ultimately God’s. That’s not only disingenuous but also dishonest. They know precisely how that word will be received—as a marker of their hate. They also know that it will provoke strong, equally colorful responses, which help them amplify their message that the world revels in its sin.

Drawing a firm line between “us” and “them,” the sheep and the goats, the chosen and the un-, allows church members to rationalize the shunning of those who have left the congregation. Not that they are entirely able to eliminate the pain of seeing their children, brothers, sisters, cousins depart.

“He delivers and rescues.” These words are encouraging. But here’s the thing about Scripture. You can play that game of biblical roulette. You can tell yourself that this is your word from the Lord and imagine yourself as a Daniel. You can believe that God is on your side. But your adversary can do the same thing. I know Fred Phelps feels like a Daniel, too, clinging to his God at a time when others tell him and his people that they are wrong.

This bothers me, less because they no longer believe in the god of their childhoods—I’m not sure I believe in that god, either—than because they didn’t lose their faith so much as have it taken from them. In a denomination that believes in free will, they were stripped of it. They were taught that homosexuality was their key choice, a sinful and eternity-changing choice that put God off-limits to them. The most remarkable thing is that, despite how Harding has insistently preached this anti-gospel to them, they’ve been so forgiving of it. They’ve ended up more easily accepting this institution, which teaches a vision of the world that’s all blacks, whites, and dogma, than they have the faith that undergirds it, a faith that, to me, is so much more diverse, able to deal with complexity, and open to addressing the grays of life.

Call us fools, but our faith, our belief in something mysterious and invisible, which very well could be the figment of our hopeful imaginations, is real enough to help us through. Suddenly, the auditorium swells with several thousand glorious voices, rising up in a stirring a cappella rendition of “The Solid Rock”: “On Christ the solid rock I stand,” they sing, “all other ground is sinking sand.” It’s a beautiful old hymn, belted out with such seeming certitude. And I can’t help but wonder how it is that so many people who purport to represent that solid rock actually become the sinking sand, their dogmatism and lovelessness completely swallowing other people’s faith.

There are two key truths in Michael’s assessment of Exodus. First, the organization has changed with the times—to a degree. Second, it will always be difficult to have a real dialogue when there’s a fundamental disagreement with what homosexuality is. Does it rise to the level of immutable identity—or at least an aspect of identity? Or is it just a bad habit, a behavior that can be mitigated or conquered? Is it an expression of what God has made—and therefore an element of human diversity that Christ calls us to embrace? Or is it a manifestation of the world’s brokenness—the very thing that Christ came to heal?

Nouwen added some more insights, noting that “much church discussion today focuses on the morality of human behavior: premarital sex, divorce, homosexuality, birth control, abortion, and so on. Many people here become disillusioned with the church because of these issues.” But, he continues, this focus on morality diverts attention from “the life of the heart,” a term he uses for one’s relationship with God. “The heart is much wider and deeper than our affections,” he writes. “It is before and beyond the distinctions between sorrow and joy, anger and lust, fear and love. It is the place where all is one in God, the place where we truly belong.”

So while the anger among those who have suffered because of organizations such as Exodus makes sense, to channel it as they do—through online tirades, vehement criticisms of anyone who doesn’t adequately condemn the ex-gay movement, and haughty statements identifying the alleged foolishness of anyone who sees even vague merits in anything that comes out of Alan Chambers’s mouth—helps nothing, heals nothing, and draws nobody closer to God. As Nouwen so eloquently writes, “God’s unlimited love allows us to be deeply involved with the suffering of the world without being swallowed up by it.”

“It’s really hard for Christians to think in grays,” she says. “Black and white makes God small and manageable. It squeezes the mystery out of God. It makes him easy to follow. But Christian maturity is partly about living in the tension of not knowing, and it’s okay not to be sure.”

“I’m tearing up because you’re getting to the crux of the mystery of God, and I guess I can’t answer that question. It’s messy. I can’t say that if someone ends up in a different place, they’re not honestly wrestling,” she replies as she wipes her eyes. “All I can say is that God knows the heart.”

Toward the end of our conversation, I ask Bryan what he wants. He sits up a little straighter in his chair and goes into Good Chinese Christian Boy mode, which I know well. “At the highest level, I want to live a life that pleases God. I want to finish this life and be called ‘good and faithful servant,’ ” he says. Then he relaxes a little and for the first time, I hear a softness, a new candor, in his voice. “That’s the good Christian mental goal—the one I know is right. At the heart level, I honestly just want to be happy. And I know that’s not necessarily guaranteed for the Christian life. It’s not. But I still want it. To me, that means feeling free and being able to enjoy my sexuality, whatever it is or becomes. It means not having to struggle as I currently do.”

The core of my being is deeper than the symptoms of whom I am attracted to. The core of my identity is that I’m a sinner redeemed by Christ. I know my most important identity is Child of God. But I would like to be able to resolve this because I appreciate having an identity. I’d like to be able to say, ‘This is my sexuality,’ just like I say I am Christian, an engineer, and a Chinese-American. It does feel innate. This isn’t something I can just switch off. So I have to preach the Gospel to myself: God sees me as so much more than my sexuality,”

I’m reminded of an anecdote Lupe shared: “Let’s say there’s a woman and she’s a prostitute. At night, she falls into bed exhausted. As she goes to sleep, she cries, ‘God, help me!’ She wants to be helped. But then she gets up the next morning, she prays, she gets ready for work, and she goes to turn tricks. At the end of the day, she says again, ‘God, help me!’ What is that? Is that a woman who loves God and is crying out? Is that a woman who God is not going to reach out to until she stops sinning?” In a soft maternal voice she answered her own question. “After years of listening to people’s stories, I tend to think God knows she’s trapped. He loves her,” she said. “He’s glad to hear from her. Whenever.” Lupe then questioned the premise of her question. So which woman is it—the desperate one who is truly seeking God’s aid, or the forsaken one who needs to turn to face God before He’ll face her? Maybe it’s not one or the other. Maybe it’s both. Maybe God will meet a prostitute—or a gay man or anyone—wherever he or she is, just as Jesus met the adulterous Samaritan woman at the well before she stopped sinning. Is there even a word to describe that magnanimity? Do we have a way to conceive of that expansive love, that gesture of meeting? For Lupe, the lesson is that we’re called to cast our minds. “We need to think outside of ourselves,” she concluded. “There’s always a danger of pigeonholing; humans are masters at it. But we can’t let patterns get set in our heads or ask qu...

I eventually did think of the word to describe what Bryan sought and what Lupe described. It’s grace.

The great Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard wrote extensively about how, in the realm of faith, absurdity has a central, even essential place. Faith is not about reason—in fact, reason obstructs faith, and it’s not until we set aside the former that the latter’s possibility becomes clear. In his book Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard writes about the mind-twisting challenge that such divine trust presents: “For who would not easily understand that it was absurd,” he says, “but who would understand that one could then believe it?”

I do know I didn’t choose this. I certainly didn’t. I don’t have a choice as to who I feel attracted to. But I do have a choice as to how to respond.

chosen this path because it’s what I believe is pleasing to my God. Pleasing him is more satisfying to me than pleasing myself or being happy. It’s about contentment, which doesn’t mean being fine. It means peace about who you are. Sometimes, I do feel cheated because I haven’t been able to experience certain things in life, but then I remember that it’s not about me. As a believer in Christ, you accept that this isn’t all there is to life. There’s a life to come. That will be a happy time. So a little suffering here isn’t agonizing. It’s just a minor inconvenience.

One time, I was talking to an angry pastor, and he was saying to me, “You are the scum of the earth.” I patted him on the shoulder and I said, “Tell you what, pastor. I’ll take all the blood of Jesus you don’t need.” He just smiled. Lovelessness is a huge sin in the church. The four primary personalities in the New Testament—Jesus, Paul, Peter, and John—all four of them say that love is the most important thing. But the only time love really counts is when something unlovely happens.

As Christians, all of us are entitled to a private life, but not a secret life.

can we turn away from the Table those who Christ has already made welcome?’ ” he wrote in his first post. “If Christ has already made room for us at his Table, must there not, then, be a place for us in his Church?

he commented that he had begun “to feel that sitting around and talking about whether God actually loves gay people is quite uninteresting. There are far more interesting things in our faith to discuss, and far more important work that our faith requires of us.”

The history of Christianity is a history of rifts and rivalry.

The church’s honeymoon period did not last long. Within a few years, Paul was publicly admonishing Christians to quit fighting and sort things out. In his letter to the Church of the Philippians, he calls out two women in particular, Euodia and Syntyche, pleading with them “to be of the same mind in the Lord.” Unfortunately, we never find out if they listened. Instead, we’re left with the impression that, while those who call themselves followers of Christ may invoke the name of the same Lord, from nearly the beginning they’ve followed him in all different directions and fought over how to read the road maps. At least in this way, America has always been a Christian nation. From the earliest days of European immigration to the New World, people have bickered about God, Jesus, and the Scriptures—and the Pilgrims settled what became New England because of the fight. In popular myth, they crossed the ocean for religious freedom. This is true inasmuch as they wanted their own religious freedom, but they never intended it for anyone else.

Despite repeated pleas from Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, head of the Communion during most of this fracturing period, to remain together in grace, unity has proved impossible, given that the conservatives see the liberals’ position as heresy and the liberals see the conservatives’ as hate. “I don’t see unity as a great virtue if you’re unified in allowing something that’s evil,” says retired Episcopal bishop John Spong, a liberal-church hero and, to conservatives, a theological goat. “You don’t unify the church around unity. You unify it around what’s right. The Episcopal Church has done what’s right. The problem is, people don’t understand that prejudice isn’t something you debate—it’s something you counter.”

There’s the core of the problem: In our millennia-old game of religious telephone, we have come to hear that Word spoken in possibly irreconcilable ways, such that people of good faith are really people of different faiths.

“I stopped praying, ‘God make me straight,’ and I started praying, ‘God, show me what you want me to do.’ ”

I have to lie sometimes so that I am allowed to answer my calling.

“There are so many misconceptions in the LGBT community about Christians, and so many misconceptions in the Christian community about LGBTs. It’s important that the groups understand each other a little better. That’s a good starting point.”

And as the room buzzes with questions and answers and more questions, it occurs to me that such conversation—open and candid and mostly not defensive—happens too rarely, whether on college campuses or in our churches or at our kitchen tables.

“these days, insecure in our relationships and anxious about intimacy, we look to technology for ways to be in relationships and protect ourselves from them at the same time. . . . We fear the risks and disappointments of relationships with our fellow humans. We expect more from technology and less from each other.”

If GCN were a church and something like Dave and Shane’s wedding happened within the congregation, it might be enough to cause a schism. It says something about the online network that disagreement on such an issue is seen not as a sign of the community’s weakness but as a mark of its strength.

“A lot of people assume that the primary reason I do this is because I want to see gay people more accepted in society,” he says. “But I’d say my primary motivation is that, if the church doesn’t get this right, it’s not going to stop gay people from being accepted in society. What it’s really going to do is turn people off Christianity.”

“If the church doesn’t learn how to be loving to gay people soon, the damage will have been done. We’ll see a generation of young people who want nothing to do with the church. And that would be a great tragedy.”

At the time, and I would include myself in this, we were becoming adults in a faith experience that we’d either inherited or chosen in a rather youthful fashion. You don’t really know what Christianity is when you first get into it. The rubber is starting to hit the road, and you start trying to figure out what it means in reality, rather than the fantasy of it.

There’s a lovely passage about the pain of spiritual doubt in a letter that Flannery O’Connor sent in 1959 to her friend Louise Abbot. “I think there is no suffering greater than what is caused by the doubts of those who want to believe,” O’Connor writes. But I’d add this to that: I think there is no suffering greater than what is caused by the doubts of those who want to believe and are told by others that they cannot.

Some people say to me, “How can we get more people into the church?” I say, “That’s not your job. The job is, How do you meet the needs of the community?

We all desire these things, but how much more so among a population of the traditionally excluded? How much more meaningful is the appeal not just of acceptance but also of embrace?

While the denomination has clear roots in Christianity and most MCC congregations are more overtly Christian than the San Francisco one, faith does not seem to be its unifying element—sexuality does. Perhaps it has become more a network of community centers, where gays and lesbians can gather and talk about the things of the spirit and the soul, whatever religious system they may subscribe to. Which is nice, but for me, it’s not church. And while I don’t want alienation or exclusion when I’m in the pews, I’m also not there to celebrate other people. I thought the whole point was to celebrate God.