There’s a really interesting quasi-theological question at the heart of this book, and I’m rereading it for the first time in over a decade because I think it will be useful for a sermon I’m scheduled to give in a couple of months. What “imaginary versions” of Jesus do we create for ourselves and how do they get in the way of our connecting with the heart of Christianity.

There’s also a goofiness to the book that almost works. I don’t think it quite lands, coming off as what I imagine a trying-too-hard youth pastor might deliver, but if it did land, it would be right up my alley.

I’ve got bigger complaints than that, though, and one of them is the book’s treatment of Mormonism. When I first read this, as a trye-believing BYU student, I probably took real offense at the book. These days, I think some of the shots the book takes at the Book of Mormon are pretty good, actually, but I’m disappointed by the lazy and unnecessary critique of Mormonism that is usually there.

The emotional climax of the book, where the self-insert narrator works out a genuinely moving family tragedy with “the real Jesus,” is almost immediately undercut with an “lol, isn’t the Book of Mormon dumb?” punchline. Likewise, the only time the narrator doesn’t come off as a hapless goof is when he’s talking to two Latter-day Saint missionaries literally named Elders Laurel and Hardy.

More pressingly, the author clearly has some familiarity with Mormonism but also gets things wrong enough that it feels like he’s attacking an evangelical caricature rather than actual Mormonism. There’s room for an exploration of how weird the Mormon Jesus can be (see John Turner’s excellent book of the same name), but this doesn’t rise above lazy sectarianism.

What’s more, this betrays a more fundamental issue in the book besides my complaints as a cultural Mormon; one that will keep me from recommending it during my sermon. For all the book wants to be open-minded and thought-provoking, it remains anchored to a certain kind of fundamentalism: One that ignores the different Jesuses present in the Bible to argue for a single Jesus who’s not only the “real” one but is so self-evident that an atheist reading the Bible can recognize him.

• Imaginary Jesus
• Matt Mikalatos
• fundamentalism
• The Mormon Jesus: A Biography
• John Turner