True Religion: Taking Pieces of Heaven to Places of Hell on Earth
By Palmer Chinchen
David C. Cook Publishers, 2010, 208 pp., $14.99
True Religion is a difficult book to not recommend. Though Chinchen’s soapbox seems to be a routine stop in modern Christian literature, it remains engaging, and his premise is prescient and necessary. However, Chinchen’s intent with the book is to convince readers to give their lives away to change so God will change them for the best. This sounds perfectly fine at first glance, but upon further inspection isn’t actually consistent with what Chinchen wants.
He asks that we live as expatriates—those who enjoy the simple pleasures, people and places of this world, while at the same time giving us paltry tips for doing so, such as eating at ethnic restaurants and watching more movies that are not filmed in English. What do either of these things have to do with living a true religion? I’m not sure either. Chinchen routinely offers sound insights into living a religious and globally focused life, then completely cheapens them with banal suggestions that seem to come out of left field.
This complaint is only demonstrative of the glaring weaknesses that serve to drown the true strengths of this work. Chinchen routinely admonishes us to live a true religion that is globally and socially focused so God might work through us and in us, yet his interesting narrative cannot overcome the benign anecdotes, poor biblical integration and paltry examples meant to bring an emotional and practical core to the work, but only end up making it superficial and silly. True Religion’s message is hard not to want to recommend, but it can be better articulated elsewhere.
