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 | | | | | Holy Rollers | | | Does God hate sport utility vehicles? | |
| | | Nov. 23 — Okay, so if high fuel costs, unpatriotic wastefulness, increased rollover risk, more air pollution or the boxy ugliness of Sport Utility Vehicles couldn’t get Americans to stop buying those behemoths, maybe God will. | |
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THAT’S THE HOPE of an eye-catching new environmental campaign launched last week by a group of evangelical Christians which asks the simple question, “What would Jesus drive?”
One thing is certain: he (or, if you prefer, He) wouldn’t drive an SUV. “It’s very clear in the Bible,” said the Rev. Jim Ball of the Pennsylvania-based Evangelical Environmental Network. “Jesus said that we should be good stewards of the earth and we should love our neighbor. So we think Jesus wants you to choose the most fuel-efficient, least-polluting vehicle to suit your needs.”
The group has started running television ads in six states. The commercial opens with shots of beautiful clouds and a sunny sky that quickly dissolve to footage of choked highways and polluted air. “Jesus said, ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself,’” the narrator intones. “Yet too many of the cars trucks and SUVs that are made—that we choose to drive—are polluting our air, increasing global warming, changing the weather, and endangering our health. Especially the health of our children. So, if we love our neighbor and we cherish God’s creation, maybe we should ask, ‘What would Jesus drive?’”
Home run, baby! You don’t need to be an evangelical Christian (in case you hadn’t noticed, I ain’t one) to appreciate the ad’s perfection. In one fell swoop, it reminds us of our moral imperative to our neighbors. It identifies the Satanic figure of our age—the SUV. And it links that Satan to the destruction of our planet. Environmentalists will love it. Automakers will be forced to respect it. President Bush—no slouch when it comes to Bible study—will have to think about it (or ask Dick Cheney to think about it for him). Fans of left-leaning singer Janis Joplin, who once famously prayed, “Oh, Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes-Benz?” will have to reconsider a request for a gas-guzzling luxury car. And even SUV-driving Christians will have to agree that their Lord makes a pretty damn good argument for better stewardship of the planet.
It is the automotive equivalent of the crying Indian ad from the 1970s. This campaign could even challenge many Americans’ belief in their God-given freedom to drive whatever the hell vehicle they want. The Lord giveth, after all, and now the Lord taketh away.
“Transportation is a moral issue because of the impact it has on the health of our planet and ourselves,” Ball said. “And SUVs contribute more to global warming and to our dependency on foreign oil from unstable, repressive regimes in the Middle East. It’s all connected.”
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“Transportation is a moral issue because of the impact it has on the health of our planet and ourselves. And SUVs contribute more to global warming and to our dependency on foreign oil from unstable, repressive regimes in the Middle East. It’s all connected.”
— REV. JIM BALL
Pennsylvania-based Evangelical Environmental Network
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The auto industry talks about improving fuel economy, but in the 2003 model year, fuel economy for cars and trucks dropped to 20.8 miles per gallon—mostly because less-efficient SUVs swelled to 50 percent of all new vehicles sold.
The continued popularity of SUVs has given automakers the fig leaf they need. If the public wants these bigger, more powerful cars and trucks, the automakers argue, who are we to stand in the way?
“That’s what we heard from Bill Ford,” said Ball, who met with the Ford CEO on Wednesday. “In our meeting, he stressed that the consumers are demanding the bigger cars.”
That explains why government action is so critical—and why the Bush administration has been such a joke on this issue. A perfect example came last week, when the Wall Street Journal broke the story that White House was considering raising fuel-economy standards on SUVs and other light trucks from the mandated 20.7 mile-per-gallon average to 22.2 mpg by the 2007 model year.
Some environmentalists were pleased to see the numbers going in the right direction until they read the fine print: According to the hardly liberal Associated Press, the 1.5-mile-per-gallon increase “was based on information provided by automakers about their ability to increase fuel economy.”
Automakers have already said that existing technologies will enable them to increase fuel economy by several miles per gallon without any loss in their cars’ comfort or power or any increase in vehicle costs. So instead of pushing the automakers further and asking them to make the kind of sacrifices everyone makes during tough times, the White House called up its favorite campaign contributors in Detroit—you know them as Ford, GM and Chrysler—and said, “We want to look as though we’re doing something. So how many miles per gallon were you planning to do anyway?”
What would Jesus think of that? If ever there was a man who could make the hard choices, it was Him. But Jesus isn’t running the Big Three.
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Ball is quickly finding out—as this columnist has repeatedly found—that Americans do not like to have their automotive judgment challenged. Regardless of Jesus’s thinking on the issue, Americans bristle against any suggestion that they are driving the “wrong” car. Despite the lessons we supposedly learned during the fuel crisis of the 1970s, in this country, driving an efficient automobile is still a symbol of weakness, not a badge of honor.
As such, within minutes of the “What Would Jesus Drive?” press conference on Wednesday, the group’s website (www.whatwouldjesusdrive.org) was flooded with some pretty hostile answers to the campaign’s question.
“Jesus was a carpenter,” one man wrote. “A quick survey of the local Carpenters Hall parking lot reveals [that] Jesus’s vehicle would most likely be a Ford F150 or F250 with a ladder rack and toolbox.”
Another writer mocked, “If Jesus was around now, he’d be driving a Hummer. This way he could haul around his posse (apostles). Not to mention that Jesus was well known for giving sermons on mountains and hill tops. Only an SUV could get you to those places. Name one ‘environmentally sound’ car that could rip across a few fields in a hurry carrying 13 people in the rain. A Honda Civic?!?! A Nissan Sentra? I use to own one of these cars and it was uncomfortable driving around with a carload of groceries with my wife, let alone 13 people.”
And those were just the people poking fun. Most people who posted on the WWJD discussion group were enlightened, intelligent souls—you know, the kind of people who throw things at the television when they get upset.
“Don’t be sick and bring Jesus into your immature discussion,” wrote one person.
“I cannot believe with all the issues going on in the world today, that this is the thing you decide to spend your time on,” wrote another woman. “I mean really! What about the crisis with the Islamic extremists?”
I wonder which Islamic extremists she meant. Perhaps the ones who are getting rich from all the money we spend on oil, money which is then funneled to terrorists.
As a religious man, Ball has turned the other cheek, but he is disappointed that people are missing the point and get defensive when challenged on their driving habits.
“We’re not telling people ‘You’re a terrible person if you have an SUV,’” said Ball (who drives a 50-mpg Toyota Prius, by the way). “Most people in our country need a car because public transportation is not an option. I know that. But all we’re saying is think about your transportation choices. Try to reduce pollution. Try to increase your efficiency. That’s what Jesus would want.”
In the end, Ball dodged the very question that is the centerpiece of his campaign. When I asked him point blank, “Hey, Jim, what would Jesus drive?” he resorted to the kind of Biblical subterfuge that would’ve made a Talmudic scholar proud.
“As evangelical Christians, we believe that Jesus is in our hearts and helping us make the right decisions,” he said. “He is not a man walking among us, buying cars. But we do think that he would want us to make the right choices for ourselves, our neighbors and our planet.”
The Bible itself is not much help answering the question. In fact, the only form of transportation that Jesus uses in the Bible is a donkey. But there is one passage-in the book of Matthew—where Jesus becomes so angry to find the temple overrun with money changers that he “drives them out in his fury.”
There you have it folks, the Lord drove a Plymouth.
Gersh Kuntzman is also a columnist for The New York Post and a Mazda driver. His website is at http://www.gersh.tv
© 2002 Newsweek, Inc.
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