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

by Jeff Chu

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.