Reading
God’s Mind
By
FRANK BRUNI Published: March 4, 2013
Jeff
Chu was married last September, on the lawn of a house on Cape Cod, against the
backdrop of an ivy-covered fence. About 80 people came.
His
mother and father weren’t among them.
His
mother sent an e-mail just beforehand, to let him know that she was thinking of
him. But to be a part of the ceremony? To celebrate the day? That much she
couldn’t do, because Jeff was pledging his devotion to another man. And his
parents, strict Southern Baptists, have always deemed such a love sinful, and
against God’s wishes.
Against
God’s wishes. That notion — that argument — is probably the most
stubborn barrier to the full acceptance of gay and lesbian Americans, a last
bastion and engine of bigotry. It’s what many preachers still thunder. It’s
what some politicians still maintain.
It’s
what Jeff himself once feared.
“How
many nights have I spent sweaty and panicked and drained of tears, because I
thought I would go to hell — for being gay, for being me?” he asks.
And
how often, he adds, did he pray “that God would take these feelings from me?”
Those
words come from a book that he wrote, its title yet another question: “Does
Jesus Really Love Me?” It will be published this month, and is largely a
travelogue.
For
the span of a year, Jeff, who has written for Time magazine and many other
publications, roamed the country, visiting Christian churches and groups of
diverse theological stripes to explore their attitudes toward homosexuality. He
also talked with devout Christians who’d dealt with homosexual feelings in
different ways: by repressing them, by embracing them, by trying to divert
them.
One
man had elected celibacy. Another had married a woman and resolved to
appreciate sex with her. He told Jeff: “It’s not like pizza or French fries —
it’s more an acquired taste that I’ve come to like even better. It’s like
olives.”
In
the book Jeff, now 35, also shares his own story, which we discussed further in
his Brooklyn town house recently.
His
parents came to America from Hong Kong with the conservative beliefs that
Baptist missionaries had spread through that area of the world. They reared
Jeff in their religion, sending him to a Christian high school in Miami. One of
his vivid memories from those years was the sudden banishment of a favorite
teacher after the school discovered that he was involved with another man.
Jeff
knew even then that he had feelings like the teacher’s, and writes: “This was
the lesson that I learned: Nobody could ever, ever find out, because if they
did, I would be damned and cast out, just like he was.”
At
Princeton, he dated women. But in London for graduate school, he began to date
men, and to wonder how that orientation could be wrong, when God had
presumably made him the way he was.
Although
his book doesn’t focus on the scattered references in the Bible to
homosexuality, Jeff knows them well. And, yes, a few seem to condemn same-sex
intimacy.
But
have they been translated correctly? Interpreted the right way? Are they
timeless verities or — more logically — reflections of an outmoded culture and
obsolete mind-set? And if all of the Bible is to be taken literally,
shouldn’t Christians refrain from planting multiple kinds of seed in one field
or letting women speak in church or charging interest to the poor?
“You can twist the Bible any way you want,”
Jeff told me, adding, “We overemphasize sexual morality, as if God
puts a premium on what we do in the bedroom over what we do at the bank.”
He’s
right. He’s also humble. He doesn’t claim, in his book or in conversation, to
have definitive answers. He hasn’t determined beyond any doubt that his life
and love are in concert with God’s wishes, because he thinks it arrogant to insist, as the zealots who condemn
gay people do, that God’s will is so
easily known.
And
in light of that, he thinks it wrong for anyone to try to consign gays to the
shame that so many of them have endured.
The
stories in Jeff’s book made me sad, and they made me angry. How much needless
pain have people like him been put through, and in God’s name no less?
But
Jeff’s own story makes me hopeful. It’s one of grace. He still attends church,
though not a Southern Baptist one. He’s patient with his parents; they’re
struggling, too.
His
mother actually plans to visit, and stay with, him and his husband this summer.
“I
pull her along and she pulls me along, and we grow,” Jeff said, describing a
dynamic and a tension not unlike America’s. “It’s uncomfortable for both of us.
But it’s the path we have to take.”
