Beyond Bumper Sticker Christianity

I live about thirty-five miles from work, so that means about forty minutes in the car each morning and afternoon. Fortunately, the traffic on the freeways I drive is usually pretty good. It is generally smooth sailing at about seventy miles per hour. There is maybe one or two days per school year when traffic is bad due to an accident or road closures. Like one afternoon this past year, when wildfires surrounded the San Fernando Valley, my car crawled toward home on various surface streets as I tried to avoid the 101 freeway, the only westbound route out of the Valley. Unfortunately, several thousand people had the same idea and my trip home lasted nearly four hours. These rare occasions aside, my drive to and from work is typically a pleasant one.

Having driven that route some five hundred times over the past three years, I just sort of go on autopilot once I get on the freeway. I pay little attention to the billboards and green freeway signs that announce upcoming exits. Every so often, someone will hang a “happy birthday” or “welcome home” banner from one of the overpasses. And every week and a half or so some new graffiti adorns the center divider (I never could figure out how the taggers can stand there and spray paint the cement divider without getting nailed by on-coming traffic). But other than that, the scenery is simply visual white noise (it’s not really all that attractive anyway).

So in order to keep myself from going completely comatose during the eighty minutes I spend in my car each day, I have taken up the activity of people watching. Now, with each car traveling at speeds ranging from fifty miles an hour to over ninety, I only get a split-second glance at my freeway neighbors. I mostly see what you would expect to see: coffee-sippers, cell-phone-talkers, make-up-appliers, and the occasional nose-picker. I have observed a few out-of-the-ordinary sights worth mentioning. Probably my favorite was a shirtless man in a topless BMW who was shaving with an electric razor as he drove down the street. Seeing something like that sort of sticks with you for awhile.

I think that what people do when alone in their cars says a lot about who they are (I’m sure a clinical psychologist would have a field day with shirtless-shaver man). What we do when we think no one is looking can speak volumes about our character. Equally interesting and equally telling is our choice in the car we drive. The kind of car we drive can be very representative of our character and values and self-image. Cars, especially in Southern California, are a status symbol; they show how we measure up to the rest of society. They also, in sometimes subtly ways (and in sometimes very obvious ways), convey to those around us how we see ourselves. I’m sure there are personality tests (if nowhere else than on Facebook) that associate the various personality types to various makes and models of automobiles.

Not only does our choice in car reflect their personality and self-image, but how we adorn our cars says probably even more. I can remember some former students of mine, very hard-working young men, who would save and save to buy the cheapest, yet somewhat socially acceptable car they could find. They would pull into the school parking lot in a coughing and sputtering 1984 Toyota Tercel. Then over the course of the rest of the school year, that car would go through a subtle transformation. First a new chrome-plated muffler. Then a spoiler. Then maybe some detail work on the hood or doors. By the end of the school year, it was a bona fide “Pimp My Ride” wannabe. The amazing thing is that all the add-ons were probably worth more than the car they were added on to.

Perhaps the most fascinating means of automotive self-expression, and the one I have taken most notice of during my morning and afternoon commutes, is the bumper sticker. It’s almost like an archaic form of Twitter; proclaim to the world who you are, what groups you belong to, your political affiliation, or your sense of humor. All in a small, rectangular, adhesive strip. Most of these fall into a few general categories: the activities and accomplishments of our children, sports team loyalties, political advertisements or endorsements, religious themes, and attempts at humor. Most bumper stickers, especially those in the last group mentioned, are trite and clichéd, but every once in awhile there is one that makes me laugh or pause to think. I remember one in particular that I just didn’t know what to make of it. It was all black with white letters that said “F*** Cancer.” I don’t even know where to begin trying to understand that one.

I think that my favorite bumper stickers are the ones that endorse a political candidate who ended up losing the election. Those old “Kerry / Edwards” or even the ever more rare “Gore / Lieberman” stickers make me chuckle every time. Either the adhesive on the back of the sticker is really, really strong, or the person in the car is having a really, really hard time accepting defeat. My guess is it’s a combination of the two.

While I haven’t done an actual count, my rough estimate would be that religious bumper stickers, and especially Christian ones, seem to make up the plurality of stickers I see on a daily basis (I say rough estimate because in the morning I am not awake enough to keep track of the ones I see, and in the afternoon I am usually too tired to care). Growing in popularity are the “Coexist” stickers in which the letters are made up of various religious symbols. Nothing inspires tolerance and understanding and acceptance like white letters on a navy blue background.

The current “in” stickers for the Christian cars appear to be the varied forms of the “NOTW” (Not Of This World) ones. They seem to be what the shiny plastic Jesus-fish were in the Seventies and Eighties, and what the “WWJD” stickers were in the Nineties. These “NOTW” stickers, in their assortment of sizes and aesthetically pleasing shapes, are the new cool way to share your faith with your fellow commuters.

These bumper stickers, along with the “Christians aren’t perfect, just forgiven” and the “In case of rapture, this car will be unmanned” got me thinking a bit (what else is there to do during a forty-minute commute at 6:45 in the morning?). And I came to a conclusion: I don’t like Christian bumper stickers and I don’t plan on ever getting one. Let me tell you why:

First, I don’t see how I could ever be a good witness to my fellow drivers by the way I drive. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m a good driver. I haven’t had a ticket in about ten years. I drive close to the speed limit, or at least with the “flow of traffic” (whatever that means). But the problem is that no one ever pays attention to the good drivers; it is only the bad ones we notice. The “God allows U-Turns” sticker on the back end of your car isn’t going to do much good when you cut off the guy in the lane next to you. In fact, seeing that Jesus-fish might even act as a turn-off to the driver left in your dust. Now I’m not saying that Christians are inherently bad drivers; in fact I would hope that the opposite is the case. But as I said earlier, no one remembers the good drivers they encounter on the road. No one comes home from work to tell their family, “You’ll never believe it, I needed to change lanes so I could make my exit, and the nicest woman in a dark blue Volvo slowed down and let me over. She had an ‘NOTW’ sticker on her window. I think it means she’s a Christian. Maybe I should become a Christian too.” Instead it’s more like, “You’ll never believe it. Some idiot in a blue Volvo raced up on me and wouldn’t let me over and I nearly crashed into someone else as I tried to make it to my exit. Oh, and to top it off, that Volvo had a nice, shiny Jesus-fish on the back. Those Christians are the worse drivers.” When I do make mistakes in my car, I know I probably deserve the evil glares and the mouthed swear words that I try to pretend not to notice, but Jesus doesn’t. So why should his name suffer for my bad driving?

Second, these visual expressions of faith don’t seem to be all that effective in actual evangelism. I’ve been a Christian all my life, and I have been to more than my share of outreach events and revival services and summer camps. In most of those types of events, especially those with an evangelistic bent, tend to feature a speaker giving his or her testimony of how they found Jesus (or some might say, how Jesus found them). Many of these speakers’ stories include drugs, sex, gangs, and all kinds of wild and licentious behavior. Then someone introduces the sinner to Jesus and they get saved and are a new person after that. In all of these stories I’ve heard, and like I said I’ve heard a lot of them, not one that I can remember involves a Jesus-fish on the back of a VW bus. I realize I am using the “Proof-by-Lack-of-Evidence” fallacy here, but the point is that most of the testimonies I have heard do involve people who are willing to take time and invest relationally in the lost soul’s life and personally guide them to the Savior. If that is what is most effective, perhaps the five dollars spent on a bumper sticker might be better spent buying that unsaved friend a cup of coffee. It has a much more personal touch.

Third, those stickers, be they “NOTW” or the old-school Jesus-fish, give us Christians a false sense of security. Before leaving earth, Jesus told his disciples to go make more disciples. Paul calls us ambassadors for Christ. We are his representatives given the task of telling others about how Jesus saved us and trying to convince them to put their faith in Jesus as well. But that is kind of scary. It means talking to people about very personal matters. And everyone knows it’s impolite to talk about religion. But what if there was an easier, less confrontational way to let people know you are a follower of Jesus? A way that didn’t necessitate actual human interaction? Enter the Jesus-fish, “NOTW” sticker, the “I (Heart) Jesus” t-shirt, et al. But these things are about as effective as Linus’s security blanket. They give us a sense of comfort, a sense that we are doing our job, but are really not much good for anything (plus bumper stickers of any kind tend to lower the resale value of the car).

This third reason reminds me of the point made in Steven Curtis Chapman’s song entitled “The Change.” In this song, SCC describes not only the bumper stickers and Jesus-fish, but all the other Christian-y paraphernalia that we spend our hard-earned on to tell the world that we are followers of Jesus. This may all be well and good, but he asks in the chorus, “What about the change? What about the difference? What about the life that’s showing I’m undergoing the change?” Sure our cars are a constant reminder that “Life is fragile, [so] handle with prayer” but are our lives a testimony to the truth behind that statement? Do our lives demonstrate that “God allows U-Turns”? Are we truly “Not Of This World” in terms of our words and actions and choices?

So while these outward, automotive displays of our faith may be well-intended, they are not very effective and, if anything, are often counter-productive. So how do we move beyond a mere bumper sticker faith? How do we get the word out about the saving power of Christ? How do we follow through on Christ’s Great Commission?

I’m glad you asked. To answer these questions, another song comes to mind, one I remember singing in my Christian elementary school chapel services. The chorus and the title, in fact, quote Jesus’ words in John 13:35 by saying “They will know we are Christians by our love.” Jesus (who I would say is the authority on attracting followers) said that it is our love for each other that would make us known to the world. Our identifying trait, and what would hopefully attract others to Christ, ought to be the love we show for each other.

I’ve seen this in action (unfortunately not as often as I should). About a year and a half ago, one of my colleagues came home one Sunday afternoon to find his home had completely burned to the ground. Everything was gone. All he and his family had was the clothes on their backs and whatever possessions that were in their car. The ASB at school decided to act; they wanted to help by raising money to provide for this teacher and his family as they tried to rebuild their lives. They put plastic cups in every teacher’s classroom to collect donations, and several teachers offered to shave their heads or dye their hair or perform embarrassing musical routines if they collected five hundred dollars in donations. A week or two later, the fundraiser was over and ASB was set to give this teacher the fruits of their labor. The teachers all paid up on their bets, and the ASB advisor handed the teacher an envelope not with five hundred dollars, but over three thousand dollars. Seeing that outpouring of generosity made all of us teachers very proud of our students. But when I changed hats for a moment and saw this as a parent, my thought was that this is exactly the type of school I want my kids to attend. These are the types of kids I hope my own kids become. This is the type of love that Jesus was talking about. The type that demonstrates we are his followers. The type that attracts others to the source of that love.

So bumper stickers, they provide a momentary break from the monotony of the commute. They give me something to chuckle at or stop and ponder for a moment as I make my way home at the end of the day. But witnessing tool that will help us reach the world for Christ… not so much.