Christian Ethics – and the Driving Test.

Can you be a Christian and drive a car?

Of course you can.

Can you be a good Christian and drive a car ?

Well, sometimes.

I have a theory about driving as a Christian’s moral training ground to see if we’re serious, practical and non-selective about Jesus’ teaching.

When someone makes a mistake, instead of light-flashing and horn sounding, you forgive as you hope to be forgiven. When someone is about to reverse into the same parking space as you intend to take, your parking space, let the last be first.  If someone cuts in and makes you slow down, be slow to anger. If the person at the petrol pump is taking an inordinate amount of time to fill up, then buys half the garage shop before joining the long queue to pay by card to the one attendant, do not worry, because, as I have proved, it doesn’t add a single inch to your stature.

Well, I can wish. But the way people drive their cars is a fairly accurate index of  their attitude to other people. How is it that calm, pleasant, community-conscious people get behind a steering wheel and are transformed into aggressive, abusive liabilities? Has it something to do with the way a car cuts us off from real contact, and face to face relationships? In the privacy of the car we don’t have to take the other person seriously as the human being they are.

The old-fashioned word courtesy describes an attitude that I think at its root is Christian. In fact it was used by Julian of Norwich to describe God. It means to respect and to love, to treat kindly and considerately, to look after the interests of the other person. So when those lit up motorway signs say optimistically to the hurtling traffic – or grid-locked commuters -‘Be a courteous driver’ – I wonder if their script writer had read Julian of Norwich. Nah!

I still wonder though if Christians are more considerate, courteous drivers? Does the Gospel make a difference to my road manners? It should. Used to be a bumper sticker that said ‘Honk if you love Jesus’. How about a more radical one, ‘Don’t honk if you love Jesus’.