Faith & Spirit Quote by Doug Coupland

God, in Doug Coupland's hands, doesn’t float in a beam of stained-glass light; He lumbers down the road in a specific, slightly over-upholstered land yacht. The joke lands because it’s devotional and tacky at once: “1973 Ford LTD Brougham” is so granular it feels like a receipt, and that deadpan consumer specificity is Coupland’s signature way of showing how late-20th-century North America learned to picture the sacred through product catalogs.

The car itself matters. A ’73 LTD isn’t a sleek sports car or a humble beater; it’s big, confident, slightly absurd - a rolling living room from the era of cheap gas and maximalist comfort just before the energy crisis and the long hangover of American certainty. Add the claret vinyl roof and oxblood leather and you’re in the realm of aspirational bourgeois taste: not luxury as refinement, but luxury as surfaces, textures, trim packages. The “opera window” is the punchline detail, a design flourish that mimics high culture while existing purely as ornament - a perfect metaphor for how spirituality can get reduced to aesthetic signaling.

The subtext is not simply that consumerism replaced religion. It’s sharper: even our attempts to imagine transcendence are constrained by the props of our childhood and the branding language we’ve been trained to trust. Coupland turns theology into upholstery, exposing a culture where the divine is most believable when it comes with options, colors, and a vinyl roof.