Jeff Chu is well-positioned to explore the intersection of
homosexuality and Christianity. As a gay man and the grandson of a Chinese
Baptist minister, he understands each world from the inside. “Does Jesus Really
Love Me?” is a sensitive and intelligent exploration of the many ways that American
Christians have dealt with homosexuality. Chu himself lives the contradiction.
In spite of having lost church relationships over his homosexuality (his mother
cries for him every night) he has maintained a faith in God in spite of the
wounds he carries.
Chu’s search runs the gamut of Christian reactions. He
spends time with members of the Westboro Baptist Church, the most publicly and
virulently anti-gay church. Amazingly, he comes to like them as people, even
while rejecting their radical stance. He interviews the leadership of Exodus,
the group best-known for trying to get gay Christians to stop being gay. At the
other end of the spectrum, he speaks with Christians who have resolved the tensions
between their faith life and their sex life by rejecting faith altogether. Chu
is unique, I thinks, in allowing each of these groups and individuals to speak
for themselves, even when what they say conflicts with his own experience.
Aside from homosexuality, there are few topics that pit a
fundamentalist understanding of the Scriptures against present-day lived
reality. The variety of responses that Chu chronicles are both amazingly
creative as well as heartbreaking. There is the couple (the husband is gay and
knows it) who go on trying to have a married relationship even though the wife
knows her husband is not physically attracted to her. They love and respect
each other, even though something fundamentally important is missing from their
lives. There is the gay man who has decided that he will lead a celibate life,
even though that leaves him lonely and isolated. And many more. You have to
admire how hard these folks want to love God, and who have contorted their
lives drastically to allow them to feel worthy of that love. Chu has done a
wonderful service by exposing the difficulty and stress that many deal with
over the issue of their homosexuality. That he has done so without polemics and
without judgment is an achievement in itself.
“Does Jesus Really Love Me?” is wonderfully-written and heartfelt
look at an issues that will be with us for a long, long time.
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