Forget Harry Potter. Forget gay marriages. Forget abortion. It seems the real instrument of the Devil may be sitting in the driveway near you.

It’s a Ford Explorer. Or Mercury Mountaineer. Or Chevy Trailblazer.

Sport Utility Vehicles, or SUV’s as they’re more commonly known, are against God’s plan, at least according to a rapidly growing cadre of religious environmental groups. Some clerics and their followers have been picketing car lots in Massachusetts carrying signs saying "What Would Jesus Drive?"

Lovely. I’ve spent years fending off the Religious Right, now I get blindsided by the Religious Left.

The slogan is turning into a national campaign, with television ads featuring the inevitable sun-breaking-through-clouds imagery that lets us know we are about to receive a Big Religious Message and asking the question. The ads are produced and paid for by an organization called the Evangelical Environmental Network, "Because",

their website earnestly points out, "transportation is a moral issue." The site goes on: "We therefore invite the evangelical community to engage in a serious, sustained dialogue with these urgent questions: What transportation choices would Jesus make? What Would Jesus Drive?" And, of course, since they want serious, sustained dialogue, they’ve put the slogan on a bumper sticker.

SUV’s have become the new, hip whipping boy of American media. They’re too big, they use too much gas, they cause more pollution than other vehicles, yadda yadda yadda.

It’s not just the religious who see the SUV as a Big Evil. I actually heard a guest panelist on National Public Radio the other day who said, apparently with a straight face, that "SUV’s are an inherently aggressive statement. A Mom in an SUV with one kid, talking on a cell phone, is basically saying ‘You don’t matter. If you get it my way, I’ll kill you.’ " I swear to you, that’s exactly what he said. The Soccer Mom as serial killer. Am I the only one who thinks this is more than a little bit nuts?

There’s no little irony in the fact that none of the anti-SUV crowd seem to be calling for people to give up pickup trucks. This is ironic because many SUV’s actually are pickups everywhere it counts. Many share the same engine, transmissions, and chassis as their more countrified cousins. Why the difference in attitude? Well, for one thing, if you picket a white collar suburbanite in their SUV, all you’re likely to get is a guilty look. Get in some good ol’ boy’s face over his pickup and you’ll risk getting your teeth kicked in. Maybe if we could put gun racks in our SUV’s, people would leave us alone. After all, as noted above, some people already think SUV owners are psychopathic killers, so we might as well cultivate the image.

The idea behind the "What Would Jesus Drive" movement, of course, is environmentalism isn’t just a good idea, it’s God’s Law. "We are under a commandment to be faithful stewards of God's creation," intones Paul Gorman, executive director of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment (Must be one of the commandments I missed in Sunday school). "For us," Gorman goes on, "environmentalism didn't start on Earth Day, it begins with Genesis." Of course, for a lot of Christians, it ends with Revelation, when the whole world gets destroyed and replaced with a new one anyway, so what’s the point?

But anyway, back to the original question: what would Jesus drive? The Gospels give us little or no guidance, except for the recently discovered Gospel of Efird, which states that "Jesus did ride into Jerusalem, mounted on an ass; and the Pharisees did speak, saying Lo! That type of transportation doth violate the Law of Moses; for it wasteth too much fodder and polluteth the environment with its waste! Behold my sandal! I paid fifty shekels for these and look what that ass hath wrought!’ " This is not, however, considered to be an authoritative text.

Of course, the question of What Would Jesus Drive isn’t nearly as intriguing as how would He drive? Would he forgive those that cut him off in traffic, or would He be smiting the morons who wait until the last possible foot of pavement to merge when one lane is ending, just so they can get ahead of one more car? If He got behind a car with a bumper sticker that said "Honk if You Love Jesus", would He blow the horn would He be too modest? Would the Devil have tempted Him by pointing out that if He healed the handicapped, He could have all the parking spaces He wanted?

Offensive? Probably. Sacrilegious? Maybe. But I wasn’t the one who asked the original question, I’m just trying to answer it with the seriousness it deserves, which is darned little. You ask a stupid question, you get a stupid answer.

COPYRIGHT 2002 BY JERRY D. RHOADES, JR.