The Animist and the SUV

Radio commentary for the Great Lakes Radio Consortium June 16, 1999

Host intro: Surveys show that Sport Utility Vehicles remain a popular choice among car buyers. But if you drive a small car, or if you are worried about air pollution, you may not be happy with the increasing numbers of SUVs on the road. Great Lakes Radio Consortium commentator Matthew Lawrence agrees, but he thinks SUVs are, on a deeper level, a spiritual problem:

I have a friend who is an animist -- he believes that the world is filled with spirits that inhabit stones, trees and flowers.

My friend also drives one of those enormous 4-wheel drive SUVs.

It's not unusual for my friend to be hurtling down the freeway at 90 miles an hour while musing upon the beauty of creation.

I was thinking this was kind of strange so I did a little research on SUVs. Did you know that because of two loopholes in the federal regulations, SUVs pollute as much as three times the average car, and burn 33% more gas per mile? I also found out that the EPA is right now thinking about closing those loopholes.

So I went to my friend; I said, "Isn't there some kind of contradiction between your automobile of choice and your piety of choice? I mean, here you are spewing hydrocarbons by the pound -- don't your tree spirits have a problem with that?"

Well, he didn't like this. He said, "Hey listen, the tree spirits don't need protection -- I do. I'm not dying on a highway in Michigan. The way people drive these days -- it's crazy."

Well, if it's protection he needs, he's got it. According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, if my friend were to get so caught up in his revery with the tree spirits that he missed a red light and hit my Honda Civic, I would be 47 times more likely to die than he. In collisions of any kind between an SUV and a passenger car, 81% of the people who are killed are in cars.

The fact that my friend is more likely to kill than be killed doesn't seem to cloud his sunny spiritual disposition. I only pray that, if there are spirits that animate the stones, there are also spirits inside our concrete highways, speaking words of peace to my friend's restless soul.

The Rev. Matthew Lawrence
Chaplain, Canterbury House
Director, Institute for Public Theology