By Bryce Johnson

Regina Cates published her latest book, The Real Conversation Jesus Wants Us to Have: A Call to Bravery, Peace, and Love, in March 2025. Throughout the novel, Cates dissects Christianity and seeks to explain the true meaning behind the religion.

Cates published her first novel, Lead With Your Heart: Creating a Life of Love, Compassion, and Purpose, in 2014. Cates is also the founder of Romancing Your Soul, an organization that is designed to help people connect with their spiritual sides.

Question: In your own words, what is The Real Conversation Jesus Wants Us to Have: A Call to Bravery, Peace, and Love about?

Answer: It has been reviewed as a blueprint to repair humanity. And I do not consider myself Christian, but what I have done is taken this historical figure that was used as the basis to create the religion of Christianity, and used him as a benchmark to ask questions. Why do we still have misogyny? Why do we have racism, bigotry and prejudice? There’s a chapter in my book, and I think it’s the most powerful, called Racism, It’s Time for Our Come-to-Jesus Moment. I have perspectives of four of my friends of color because as a white woman, I do not know what it is like to be a person with dark skin. I also talk about how Jesus did not have a white skin. He was not blue-eyed, blonde or Christian. So it is a social commentary. It is a call to action and it is scathing about the religion that has been bastardized.

Question: How did your upbringing influence your writing in this book?

Answer: This is my second book, and I have known that I’m queer, gay, lesbian, whatever you want to call it, from the age of about 4 and a half. Being raised in the southern part of the United States in the 1960s, I had to sit in this particular institutionalized religious box and was told that I was horrible and going to hell. There’s stories in the book about how these people describe forever and how I was going to burn in there forever. I think that as a person who is not in the ministry, as a layperson and as a storyteller, I am able to capture the story of millions and millions and millions of us. And I just do it through my own lens. I put it on paper as a cathartic exercise for me, but also as a blueprint to help repair humanity and also to strengthen the hearts of all of those people that have been marginalized. All of those people that have been thrown out of this particular religion. And it’s happening more and more today. Look what’s happening with this government. It’s been taken over by crazy folks.

Question: Were those like factors that made you decide that now is the right time to publish the book?

Answer: I do believe in a power greater than myself, and that power greater than myself made this the right time, because I wanted it long before the election. I wanted it long before any of this. It takes a long time to get a book published and Erdmans is a very well known publisher. I think that now is the right time because you’re starting to hear about the things that I have been talking about for a long time through my work with Romancing Your Soul, through my first book. Now is the perfect time, because we’re starting to really want to hear about this and how far these people have gone into crazy land, because they’ve gone way off the deep end in the name of Jesus.

Question: What was the most memorable part of writing The Real Conversation Jesus Wants Us to Have?

Answer: I think the most moving part for me is when I can write a story that continues to make me cry, because it touches me, and I’m the author and it happened to me. When I get feedback from readers who say, this whole book made me cry because I relate to it, that’s the exciting part to me, is that my heart touches other people’s hearts. That’s the reason I do this.

The Real Conversation Jesus Wants Us to Have is available for purchase on Amazon. For more information, visit Cates’s website at www.reginavcates.com.