Automobile

Along with the clock, the automobile has had a more profound effect on modern life than any other invention. Its impact is arguably greater than that of any idea or movement during the last century. Most people are aware of its benefits; that is why the automobile remains so popular. Increasing concern has been expressed about its social costs through road deaths, pollution and urban sprawl. Studies have also been undertaken of its, sometimes deleterious, psychological effects on drivers. But little attention has been paid, especially in Christian circles, to its impact on individual attitudes and behavior, our sense of time and place, our significant relationships and our contact with the poor and needy.

Spread of the Automobile

The first gasoline-powered horseless carriage was sold in France in 1887. Sales followed in other countries, including the United States in 1896, soon thereafter. By 1910 almost half a million cars were on the road in America. In Europe cars tended to remain a sign of social status. North America became the leading automobile culture. Registration had already begun in 1901, and by 1902 the American Automobile Association (AAA) was launched. The decisive factor in the democratization of the car was the introduction from 1908 onward of the Ford Model T. Other giant car manufacturers, such as General Motors, rapidly emerged. Within two decades over half the families in America owned cars. In other countries this took longer, and everywhere the process was slowed by the Great Depression.

But during the thirties the automobile remained the major unifying force in America. By the end of the decade public preference for it was resulting in the attrition of public transportation, which was a harbinger of the future. Though World War II curtailed the use of the automobile, at its end the car-propelled exodus to the suburbs, modestly begun twenty years before, received a massive impetus. Spurred by the example of the autobahns in Germany, in 1956 Congress passed the ambitious Interstate Highway Act. By the late seventies interstate highways were largely in place. By then two-car, and then three-car or more, families became the norm. Traffic density increased despite more roads, insurance costs soared, and road deaths continued to mount. During this whole period in turn the home, job, shopping, leisure and church all became automobilized. Increasingly these revolved around the automobile as it played a key role in determining where suburbs, workplaces, malls, entertainment centers and churches were located. People also based their decisions on where to reside, earn a living, shop, play and meet for worship on the basis of the automobile.

Advantages of the Automobile

In the early days the car was seen to have many advantages. It was cleaner than the horse, eliminating the problem of great quantities of manure and urine that were daily deposited on streets (2.5 million and 65,000 tons respectively in New York City). Despite all the initial concerns about speed, automobiles were also considered safer. They were not only more reliable but more convenient than horses and horse-drawn public transportation. As well they opened up the benefits of the countryside and seashore to harried city dwellers. In particular they offered greater flexibility and choice, were held to keep the family together and could cover increasingly larger distances in shorter time.

Automobiles are still largely valued for the same reasons, even if there is now more realism attached to their ownership. There are other reasons people appreciate them so much. They enable many to live away from suburbs and city in more pleasant surroundings. They open up new opportunities for study or work. Indeed, as the idea of the mobile office complete with telephone, fax machine, word processor and printer catches on, a growing number of people now work out of their cars. The automobile turns the whole city into a huge mall and enables people to call on a large number of services and enjoy a diverse range of leisure opportunities.

Significance of the Automobile

People have always valued the automobile apart from these practical advantages. Many of the reasons touch on deep chords in the human psyche. The car is often a symbol of status and wealth, a way of informing others of our place on the social and economic scale. It is a symbol of individual freedom and independence, one of the reasons car pools are so difficult to get off the ground. The car is a symbol of identity; for men of masculinity, an expression of our actual or fanciful self-image. It is a symbol of adulthood and citizenship, since it is in having a car rather than gaining the vote that a young person becomes a full participant in modern society. It is also a symbol of reward and punishment, for being grounded is the ultimate punishment for a teenager, and having your car repossessed is the ultimate deprivation for an adult.

The automobile is also an embodiment of personal priorities and dreams, as advertisements and movies constantly remind us. It is a place where we can play out many of our fantasies about exercising power, confronting danger and overcoming fear. The car ushers us into a private, climate-controlled, technological world that increases our withdrawal from the environment as well as from neighborliness and community: children especially become conditioned to this from an early age. At the national level the automobile is a barometer of economic well-being and progress—as the saying goes, “When Detroit sneezes, the country catches a cold.” With the spread and merger of the largest automobile manufacturers and the advent of the “world car,” the automobile has become a key indicator of the globalization of business. Keeping supply lines of fuel open can be a major—in the case of the Gulf War perhaps the major—cause of war.

Disadvantages of the Automobile

In view of the ambiguous role of the car, it is not surprising that already by the late 1920s some people were beginning to have second thoughts about it. The automobile seemed to be dividing the family more than uniting it, congesting cities as much as decentralizing them, generating regulations as well as increasing freedom and downgrading public transportation instead of complementing it. The American humorist Will Rogers once remarked, “Good luck, Mr. Ford. It will take us a hundred years to tell whether you helped or hurt us. But one thing is certain: you didn’t leave us where you found us.” Serious criticism of the car surfaced again through Ralph Nader and others during the fifties. Increasingly psychologists and others noticed the strange effect upon people of getting behind the wheel. Drivers tend to become one with their machine, an extension of it. As David Engwicht says, “Metamorphosis takes place as the driver is transformed from homo-sapiens to homo-machine; both hearts of steel united in their drive for efficiency, speed, and power. The driver becomes the driven” (p. 118). How else do we explain the greater than usual competitiveness, rudeness and carelessness so many otherwise equable people exhibit (see Commuting)?

During the last decades of the twentieth century, the emergence of the Green movement has resulted in other protests. A photographic exhibition from West Germany entitled Automobile Nightmare visually documented the century-old impact of the car on many aspects of modern life. The evocative captions and text accompanying various collections of photographs told the story: “from life in the streets to danger to life,” “cutting up the land and killing off the forests,” “the escape from weekday traffic jams to weekend traffic jams,” “from pretty roads to superhighways,” “smelling the gas instead of the flowers,” “animal slaughter and human sacrifice,” “paving over the city,” “the new forest of concrete posts and traffic signs,” “the long commute to distant suburbs,” “where have all the front gardens gone?” “pedestrians last,” “give us our daily car.” One of the key victims of the automobile is the experience of local neighborhood. Since people drive to and from their homes, they do not see, greet or talk with each other much anymore; since they go greater distances to shop and relax, the corner store disappears, and the neighborhood park empties, so removing the chief hubs of local neighborhood life; since residents are somewhere else during the day, crime increases as houses become easy pickings for burglars. Even where people stay at home, as traffic density on streets increases, the number and quality of relationships people have with others on the block dramatically decline.

The high social cost of the automobile has now begun to register on middle-class citizens. (1) The automobile is the largest cause of smog. In most places the average car puts into the air each year the equivalent of its weight in pollutants. Automobile emissions are wasting the forests of Europe, are degrading marine life in the Atlantic coastal areas and are the major contributor to the overall greenhouse effect. An estimated loss of between $2 billion and $4 billion affects four of the main cash crops in the United States. (2) Automobiles kill and maim forty times as many people per miles traveled as do planes and buses and eighty times as many as travel on trains. The number of people killed by the automobile worldwide per year is somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000, and in Europe and North America alone there are more than 3,000,000 injuries annually. It is estimated that 30,000 people die in the United States each year from the carcinogenic gases that rise from the automobile excreta. (3) Through the building of roads, parking lots, garages, median strips and gas stations, at least one-third of the land area in major cities is now given over to the car. In some places, for example Los Angeles, this rises to over one-half. (4) Freeways, once so full of promise, now move during rush hours at the pace of a bicycle or, in some cities, at little more than walking pace. The car discriminates against the old, the infirm, the handicapped, the poor—all those who cannot afford to buy one or who are frightened to cross busy roads. Automobiles and roadside vans are increasing congestion in major national parks to urban proportions and threatening their delicate ecological balance.

Sanctification of the Automobile

Most serious thinking about the automobile assumes that it is a morally neutral object that is sometimes used by individuals or manufacturers in adverse or destructive ways. The basic task is to reduce its moral ill effects. On an individual basis, this involves educating drivers to have different attitudes and improved skills and punishing intentional or drink-driven abuse of the car. At the institutional level, it involves compelling manufacturers to produce safer and cleaner cars and pressuring urban planners and federal agencies to provide better and ecofriendly roads. Very little thinking has focused on the morally ambiguous character of the automobile itself, on its inherent shadow side. All significant technological inventions have this two-sided character and possess an inbuilt capacity to do both good and harm. An example is this: given their speed, it was inevitable that cars would kill animals crossing roads. There may be ways in which this can be lessened, but there is no way it can be prevented.

We must seek to make the automobile more a servant than a master, more an instrument than an idol. Rather than our allowing it to captivate us, we need to bring our attitudes and use of it fully captive to Christ (2 Cor. 10:5). Instead of conforming to its demands and possibilities, we need to be “transformed by the renewing” of our attitudes toward it (Romans 12:2). We need to work out ways of loving our neighbor and caring for the creation in and through our automobiles. What does this mean in practice? It involves more than driving safely in a way that conserves energy, more than using our cars to get people to and from church, to visit the old or needy and to service worthy causes. For most people, it involves less than giving up the car altogether. There are times—as for over ten years in our own family—when it is right to go without a car. For some people this may even be a kind of prophetic calling.

Our basic starting point is this. We are not the owners of our automobiles but stewards of them. They are one of several ways of getting around granted us by God. As such, they are a gift from God for our own benefit and for the benefit of others. From this we may extract some practical guidelines: (1) Since we are able to walk, use bicycles (the most energy-efficient form of transportation) and take public transportation, we should use the car only when it is more appropriate to do so. Speed and convenience are not the only issues here. Other considerations are fitness, tension levels, enjoying company and opportunity to reflect or pray. (2) We should buy cars that will be more economical in use of gas and other basic materials, most appropriate for the number of people traveling and least damaging to the human and created environment. (3) Given that cars absorb approximately a quarter of people’s weekly or annual budget (it now costs around fifty cents a mile to travel by car, which is more expensive than by taxi or airplane), we should purchase and use cars that will result in as little drain on our financial resources as possible. (4) Combine journeys to different locations in the same or adjacent areas so that one longer trip takes the place of several shorter ones, and choose places to live, work, shop, relax and worship that require the minimum of car use.

Here are some more radical ways of understanding and utilizing the automobile. (5) Where possible we should lessen rush hour frustrations and increase community by car-pooling to work, as well as explore ways of car-pooling to shops and church. (6) Examine whether it is really necessary to have more than one car in the household, or consider the possibility of sharing a car with a fellow resident or friend so that financial costs are shared. (7) If the opportunity arises, consider replacing commuting with telecommuting by working some or most of the time at home. (8) Fast occasionally from the car, perhaps one workday each week or one day each weekend or month, breaking our dependence on it and supporting public transportation, on which the poor and needy are dependent.

Congregations also have a contribution to make here. They can give instruction on the responsible Christian use of the car, encourage car-pooling of members, provide congregational cars or buses where multiple staffs or needy members are involved and decentralize larger churches into regional ones so that people have less distances to travel. Those who work in transportation-related occupations have other things to offer. They can keep up the pressure for manufacturers to provide vehicles powered by alternative sources of energy, encourage more effective rapid transportation systems, give inducements to firms that reward employees for car-pooling or leaving the car at home, develop computerized transportation controls to improve efficiency and safety, experiment with dial-a-ride vans and buses in local areas or to busy destinations.

Putting the car in its proper place ultimately requires a combination of individual, group and institutional responses to an incredibly complex but increasingly urgent area of modern life. Difficult though it may be, we must make the effort. In this respect we should “not be conformed to this world,” as for the most part we are, “but transformed through the renewing of [our] minds” (Romans 12:2 NRSV). If we were to follow through on this, then one day we might begin to see a reflection of the idyllic urban situation pictured in the book of Revelation. In the “holy” and “faithful” city, “once again old men and women, so old that they use canes when they walk, will be sitting in the city squares. And the streets will again be full of boys and girls playing” (Zech. 8:3-5 GNB).

» See also: Commuting

» See also: Ecology

» See also: Mobility

» See also: Technology

References and Resources

T. Bendixson, Instead of Cars (London: Temple Smith, 1974); M. L. Berger, The Devil Wagon in God’s Country: The Automobile and Social Change in Rural America (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1979); D. Engwicht, Reclaiming Our Cities and Towns: Better Living with Less Traffic (Philadelphia: New Society, 1993); J. J. Flink, The Car Culture (Boston: MIT Press, 1975); D. Lewis and L. Goldstein, eds., The Automobile and American Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983); J. McInnes, The New Pilgrims (Sydney: Albatross, 1980); Organization for Economic and Cultural Development, The Automobile and the Environment (Boston: MIT Press, 1978); A. J. Walter, “Addicted to Mobility: The Morality of the Motor Car,” Third Way, 21 January 1985, 21-23.

—Robert Banks