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

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

"A fascinating, thoughtful, and important book. [Chu] captures the fractures and conflict at a moment when the issue of what to do with L.G.B.T. people is tearing Christian denominations apart. Does Jesus Really Love Me? deserves to be widely read." --Dan Savage, New York Times Book Review

Funny and heartbreaking, perplexing and wise, Does Jesus Really Love Me? is an intellectual, emotional, and spiritual pilgrimage that reveals a portrait of a faith and a nation at odds.

When Jeff Chu came out to his parents as a gay man, his devout Christian mother cried for months. As a journalist and a believer, Chu knew that he had to get to the heart of a question that had been haunting him for years: Does Jesus really love me? The quest to find an answer propels Chu on a remarkable cross-country journey to discover the God "forbidden to him" because of his sexuality. From Brooklyn to Nashville to California, from Westboro Baptist Church and their god hates fags protest signs to the pioneering Episcopal bishop Mary Glasspool, who proclaims a message of liberation and divine love, Chu captures spiritual snapshots of Christian America at a remarkable moment, when tensions between both sides in the culture wars have rarely been higher.

Jeff Chu grew up in Berkeley, California, and Miami, Florida. He graduated magna cum laude from Princeton, earned a master's degree from the London School of Economics, and received French-American Foundation and Harvard Divinity School fellowships. He has written for Time, Conde Nast Portfolio, the Wall Street Journal, and Fast Company, winning Deadline Club and German Marshall Fund awards for his work. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.