Have you rented a car recently? I have. Sometimes I get overwhelmed by all of the choices out there. But there can be a lot of them. To prove my point I went to the AVIS web site to see what types of cars they let you rent. There are 31 categories. That is not a typo. There are as many type of car choices at AVIS as there are flavors of ice cream at Baskin Robbins. Here are just a few of them:
Compact
Full-size
Midsize pickup
Economy
Luxury
Premium Elite SUV
I’m going to go ahead and say it. This is crazy. And what about size? What is the difference between a compact, economy, and midsize car? It’s pretty vague. My first car was a Pontiac Sunbird convertible. It was 181.3 inches long, 66.3 inches wide, and 53 inches high. Guess how long a Ford F-150 is now? They are about 209.3 inches long, 79.9 inches wide (without mirrors), and 75 to 78 inches high. Trucks are large. And America loves them. The top three best-selling vehicles in the country in 2022 were pickup trucks. The Ford F-150 has been the best-selling vehicle overall in America for over 40 years.
They didn’t always look like they do now. The first pickup trucks were 36% cab and 64% bed. Then in 1980 that changed to 40% cab/60% bed. It went to 50/50 in 1997. In 2004 it became 60% cab and 40% bed. And now (as of 2015) it is 63% cab and 37% bed. Read that first one and compare it to the last one again. It is almost exactly flipped. Why? It’s probably because pickup trucks are not largely used for hauling things and towing anymore. There are a lot of people’s main vehicle. Trucks are used for the normal, everyday vehicle purposes now. People use their pickup trucks to mostly pickup groceries and things from the retail stores. They commute to work with them and just drive around for pleasure in their trucks. This is one reason why trucks have gotten bigger over the years. They need to have a bigger cab space so that more people can fit in them.
But there is another reason for the growth of the pickup truck. It is a classic case of unintended consequences. Back in the 1970s when the OPEC oil embargo happened congress passes some laws that were meant to help with fuel economy of automobiles. The laws required that the average miles per gallon of a vehicle had to meet a certain threshold. The problem came when they made an exception for pickups and SUVs. In 1982 the standard needed for sedans and station wagons was 24 miles per gallon, but for trucks it was 17.5 miles per gallon.
You can guess what happened as a result. Carmakers started making more trucks and SUVs. Car advertisements in the1980s showed families taking trips in their large vehicles. This trend kept growing, and in the year 2002 light trucks comprised more than half of the new auto sales. It is a spiraling thing now. When trucks and SUVs are the vast majority of autos on the market, guess what people are going to buy? You might say that people buy larger vehicles for safety reasons. But that is probably also influenced by the kinds of cars on the road. If the majority of cars out there are large, the only way to feel safe is to be in a large vehicle yourself.
This practice is sometimes referred to as “Normalization of Deviance.” I’m not sure this example rises to the level of deviance, but you can get the idea. The point is that we don’t notice small changes that lead us away from our comfort zones. It is perfectly natural for people shopping for a new car today to consider large vehicles. But new car shoppers in the 1970s? Not so much.
Here is what the dictionary has to say about normalization of deviance.
‘The gradual process through which unacceptable practice or standards become acceptable. As the deviant behavior is repeated without catastrophic results, it becomes the social norm for the organization.’
Go back and look at any R-rated movie from the 1960s. Find out what it is that got it that rating. What rating do you think it would get if it came out today? I don’t have any data to back this up, but I am guessing you can find quite a few of those movies that would have a more lenient rating in today’s terms.
Paul wrote about this to the church in Corinth.
1 Corinthians 5:9-11
9 In my letter, I wrote to you not to associate with people who are leading immoral lives. 10 Obviously, I was not referring to contact with people in the world who are immoral or with those who are greedy or thieves or worshipers of false gods, since to do this you would have to leave the world. 11 What I really meant to get across was that you should not associate with any brother or sister who is sexually immoral, greedy, an idolater, a slanderer, a drunkard or a robber. You should not even eat with such a person.
Does it strike you as odd Paul would need to tell a new church not to engage in greed, idolatry, sexual immorality, of thievery? Wouldn’t that be obvious? Have unacceptable practices become that commonplace?
You can almost see it happening with the Israelites in the wilderness too. Moses has been gone for a long time, talking to God up on that mountain. The people get restless. At first nothing happens. Then people start to grumble about having no direction. Maybe they start talking about how good they had it in Egypt. Maybe they wonder where their fiery God has gone. The days go on. People start showing off their jewelry they got from the Egyptians, and they complain that gold can’t buy them bread out here. What good is gold when you are starving? Maybe someone suggests they do something with all that gold. Maybe if they combined it all they could turn it into something that could give them a focus. Someone steps forward and makes a speech. They donate their gold to the cause. As the days go by and Moses remains gone, more and more people donate their gold. Finally they have enough to make an idol. If any of them would have stopped to compare that day with the first day they reached the wilderness they would notice the difference.
We can ask ourselves three questions to avoid the normalization of deviance curse. Is this right? Is this acceptable? Would God be ok with this? Imagine is some brave Israelite would have stepped forward and asked the crowd these three questions.
Let God be the norm in our lives.
God Bless