>> you are watching c-span2 with politics and public affairs be weak gauge fishing live coverage of the u.s. senate to a weeknights watch key public policy events under the weekend the latest nonfiction authors and books on booktv. you can see past programs and get our schedules at our website and you can join in the conversation on social media sites. the c-span bus which is parked on the mall is jeff chu is written this book called "does jesus really love me?: a gay christian's pilgrimage in search of god in america." if yo you would, start by givins a little bit of your upbringing and your religious history. >> guest: sure. i am the grandson of a baptist preacher. i'm the nephew of two other baptist preachers and my family has always been devoutly

evangelical. we didn't ask other baptist churches but i grew up deep in evangelical culture. first in california and then when i went to high school at a christian school in miami, florida,. >> host: what was your families reaction when you came out as gay? >> guest: i think it's safe to say they weren't excited about it. my mother cried and cried and cried but it was anything difficult period in a relationship. i don't think all of my relatives know yet. if anything in a chinese family the way information is passed around. you have these layers of culture. you have a chinese lawyer, you have the christian meier and b-22 i think there's a sufficient chain that my parents have it exactly broadcasted to everyone. postmen you've written a book about whether or not jesus really loves you. first of all, what is your christianity today? >> guest: i attended reformed church, an american church in

brooklyn, new york, called old first and i'm an elder there. i think my faith, like that of many people goes through the peaks and valleys. the ups and downs, good days and bad days. i think i'll be lying if i said that faith for me was a consistent -- it's a struggle, something you work on. you look for god wherever you can find evidence of god. you try to hang on to faith in those hard times and then you rejoice when you find high points, the moment for me which tend to be in nature but still feel triumphant and feel like it pulls me closer to something that binds. >> host: are you a christian today transferred i think sometimes i'm troubled by the basics of the language. like ms. evangelical what do we mean? was a conservative, what do we mean? it's hard but yes, christian is the right term. i follow jesus as best i can. >> host: on your travels and in your search what did you find

across america when it comes to establish religions, established christian religion and gay and whether or not that is acceptable transferred if you look at american christianity today you find a reaction across the entire spectrum. defined open hostility. you find great silent discomfort. you find embrace. it would depends on where you look. the thing about all of this is about, most of these people are trying their best to do what they think is right. i think the motive does matter when looking at the. most people are trying to be loving, even if it doesn't always feel like love or look like love to some of the rest of us. >> host: can you give an example? >> guest: , so, the hardest exam for people to accept would be westboro baptist church which is the god hates church in kansas the when i went there i very much wanted to dislike the

church. they are so angry. seems like they are so hateful. and yet they tried to explain to me that what they're doing is out of love because they believe that they've been instructed to love thy neighbor, and how can you love your neighbor more than tell them that they're going to hell if they have a chance to turn around. so they put what they're doing is a loving thing. that's really hard for the rest of us to accept. i don't expect everybody to accept that without skepticism but i think we have to least take a moment to consider what they say they're coming from. >> host: jeff chu, did you interview members of the phelps family, and were you out of the? >> guest: i spent four days in topeka having dinner with the phelps, talking to them, worshiping with them in church, going on protest within because of the wanted to understand what life was like in that congregation. they were very open with me and

i was open with them as much as they wanted to know. it's pretty obvious on social media that i'm gay. i didn't tell them straight out. they never asked. i assumed that a new but it was never an issue. it never really came up. i realized that it didn't matter because they believe everybody was not a part of the church is going to hell anyway. so what does it matter if i'm gay? i'm going to hell for some reason. >> host: what you get find some of the mainstream christian religions? >> guest: i found a lot of diversity. i think much of mainline christianity is not in a more progressive direction and more inclusive direction. but as you can see from the presbyterians bickering over what to do about the denomination and other denominations really struggling with this issue, there is no one set of opinion. i think the general trend of course as with broader society is the church's money in a more liberal direction.

that's not going to happen without flight and fight within the family, fight within the congregation, fight within the denomination. >> host: the -- did you visit with the catholic church as well? >> guest: i did not spend a lot of time focusing on the catholic church, and here's what happened. as a reporter i can only write about the stories of people willing to talk to me. i spent a lot of time trying to find a gay priest who is willing to open a. i think the price of that because i never was able to find one was that catholics are underrepresented in my book to the really funny thing about this is my husband is catholic and i never thought to ask him for his story until after the book went to press the so that was kind of a failed on my part post back jeff chu, there's a denomination called mcc, our metropolitan community church, which is a so called gay church. if you visit with him and what did you find? >> guest: i visited one in san

francisco and one in las vegas. but beautiful thing about the mcc is that it is a spiritual home for a lot of people who want still to hang on to church. but don't feel comfortable in regular churches. it was founded by a guy who grew up pentecostal, became a preacher and needed some kind of environment like that himself. so it's been a gift for an immense number of christians. it wasn't really the community that i felt was for me. i personally don't want to go to church that's just gay people. i want a church that reflects my team unity and my church in brooklyn is old and young, gay and straight, black, white, asian, hispanic. we really are a cross-section of brooklyn, in my neighborhood of brooklyn specifically, probably wasn't overrepresented population. but that's the kind of church i was looking for.

i found strong christians in the mcc are really warm welcome. there's something beautiful in the way they serve communion where they embrace the person to whom they are serving communion. so i really enjoyed it. i was critical of some elements of it, but i tried to be honest as a reporter and asset as i could be with what i've got. >> host: what is your day job? >> guest: i'm an editor at a religion writer for beacon which is a new startup that seeks to draw a new model in journalism. beacon reader.com. >> host: so the answer to the question that you asked on the cover of your book, does jesus really love me, what's the answer? >> guest: the answer is it depends on the u.s. i take every person you talk to is a slightly different image of jesus, cobbled together from things you learn as a kid, things you read in the newspaper, debt instinct, and no person has the same view -- debt

instinct. of sexuality, so it's so diverse and so fun to explore but also very difficult because the issue is so emotionally charged. >> host: what is your answer ionally charged. for yourself? >> host: what is your answer to that question for yourself? >> guest: the answer most days is that my jesus does love me and my god's grace is big enough to handle the mistakes that i've made. >> host: and on those other days directly on those other days i try to look forward to the day after. >> host: jeff chu is the author of "does jesus really love me?: a gay christian's pilgrimage in search of god in america." thank you for being on the c-span bus and spending a little time with us. >> guest: thank you. >> visit booktv.org to watch any of the programs easier online. type the author a book title in the search bar in the upper left side of the page and click search. you can get anything you see on

booktv.org easily by clicking sure on the upper left side of the page and selecting format. booktv streams live online for 40 hours every weekend with the top nonfiction books and authors. booktv.org. >> here's a look at some books that are being published this week.

look for these dozen books with this we can watch for the authors in a near future on booktv and booktv.org. >> chief corpsmen of the "washington post" has a new book out on the 2012 election, "collision 2012". dan balz, why did you use the word collision. >> guest: i thought this election was a collision between a lot of things but a collision between two americas, the america that elected president obama in 2008, america that elected the republicans to take control of the house in 2010. it was a collision of philosophy, of ideology come and

really also a collision between two quite different personalities and people in president obama and governor romney. you think about where each of them came from. they couldn't have been more different. house of representatives was a point when the winner of the question could have been mitt romney? >> guest: you could argue that a year out the president was very vulnerable. in large part because it was not clear what was going to happen with the economy. as we played out the election, two things. one, i think the president's campaign was more skillful and more effective, both in the consistency and the shaping of its message, and also just in sort of its organization in get out the vote operation and many other things they did with technology. having said that, i think that by the end of the campaign the deck was fairly well stacked against romney. it would've been a very heavy

lift for him to be able to defeat the president in the end host mac was a significant that barack obama didn't get as many votes in 2012 as he got in 2008? >> guest: for a significant. you have to go back to the 19th century to find a president who was reelected with a smaller percentage of the vote than when he was first elected. i think what it said was that, you know, my notion was 2008 was a historic campaign for all the reasons we know. and that was i think a feeling that the country might be able to move past a period of very divisive politics. and we saw in the subsequent four years that that was not the case, in many ways we were more divided. and by 2012, you know, i think those divisions were so clear that it was going to be much more difficult for the president to achieve kind of the high water mark that he'd gotten in 2008. >> host: didn't romney participate or we able to interview mitt romney for

"collision 2012" treachery i was. in a sense, surprisingly so. i said other people that it's not often that a losing candidate wants to sit down with reporter or a book author who basically wants to ask a lot of questions about why didn't you do this and why did you do this damn thing and why didn't you think about? he was quite gracious. we spent 90 minutes together just the two of us. he answered all my questions in that amount of time. he was i've got quite forthcoming in most areas. there was still a couple things that he was still i guess i would say processing after the election. the one in particular, peter,, was the 47% comment that surfaced in september of 2012. i think he still was coming to terms with what exactly what he had said. >> host: was one other thing people will learn by reading "collision 2012"? >> guest: i think they will learn, one thing you learn is some of the doubts that governor romney had at the very early

stage before he formally announced about whether he was the right candidate. i think they will learn how competitive president obama is, and how he was prepared to run in essence a totally different kind of campaign in 2012 and he ran in 2008. and i think the other thing that people will take away from this is the degree to which 2012 if us a window into the politics of the future. ..