“We take seriously the question What Would Jesus Do?” the Rev.
Jim Ball told Britain’s Guardian newspaper. “What
Would Jesus Drive? is just a more specific version. What would
he want me to do as a Christian? Would he want me to use public
transportation?”
The Rev. Ball’s provocative question will be the slogan for a
multi-state TV advertising campaign that his group, the Evangelical
Environmental Network, is about to launch against SUVs and other
gas guzzlers.
Such anachronisms are always preposterous at first, but think
for a moment and it’s easy to imagine that if Jesus were alive
today, he would use public transportation, if only to be
among the poor. He might also rephrase his words in Matthew 19: “It
is easier to park a Range Rover on a European street, than for a
rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.”
The environmentalist part is dicier, though. Jesus certainly
encouraged an appreciation of nature (“Behold the fowls of the air
… Consider the lilies of the field …”), but can we
really believe that out of all the manifest consequences of
21st-century human wickedness, he would choose to stress air
pollution? The Rev. Ball has a point; he’s just bearing down a
little too hard on it.
When I was 14, I asked the chain-smoking chaplain of my school
if it was a sin to smoke, given that the commandment “Thou shalt
not kill” was supposed to prohibit suicide. The question was not
sincere, since I suffered no sense of guilt for lighting up with my
friends after classes. I just wanted to hear what he would say.
I’m afraid (and, okay, still a bit proud) that the priest failed
my little pharasaical test. He said that there was “no proof” that
smoking even a pack a day would do any harm to one’s health. Which
raised the obvious question of why students weren’t allowed to do
it (though if I managed to ask him that, I can’t recall the
answer).
So what might he have said, had he chosen to be honest? That it
was an adult’s privilege to make himself sick? In that case he
would have denied his duty to set an example. How about admitting
that he was a sinner, with a willing spirit but flesh as weak as
the next man’s? I would have been disarmed, but in that case too he
would have undercut himself as a role model.
The chaplain was no doubt lying to himself as well as to me,
which certainly mitigates his guilt. In any case, one instance of
hypocrisy doesn’t damn one as a mere hypocrite. At least, for my
own sake, I hope it doesn’t.
By the way, I gave up cigarettes 15 years ago, and now drive a
compact Citroën that would meet the Rev. Ball’s most stringent
standards. But I did the first to court a girl who couldn’t stand
smoking, and I do the second because I couldn’t otherwise survive
the traffic in the city where I live. So where’s the virtue in
that?
