Faith & Spirit Quote by Doug Coupland

Coupland’s line weaponizes a childhood comfort object: the idea of God as a benevolent parent. The hook isn’t atheism; it’s the colder, more contemporary anxiety that even if the cosmic story is true, it might not be good news for us. That tiny pivot from “does God exist?” to “does God like people?” drags theology out of abstract debate and into the messy emotional economy of being judged, tolerated, or quietly resented.

The phrasing is doing sly work. “Except” reads like a punchline hinge, the way a friend corrects you mid-sentence with bad news. “Really like” is deliberately casual, almost petty, which makes the premise sting more: it’s not fire-and-brimstone wrath, it’s the vibe of disapproval. Coupland often writes from inside late-20th-century spiritual drift, where faith becomes consumer choice, and guilt becomes ambient background noise. In that context, a God who simply isn’t into us feels truer than the operatic God of old sermons.

Subtext: modern life has trained us to expect ratings, algorithms, and invisible gatekeepers deciding our worth. Coupland smuggles that logic into the divine, turning God into the ultimate curator with a human content problem. It also reads as a critique of our own species: ecological damage, cruelty at scale, vanity disguised as progress. If an authorial God exists, maybe the plot twist is that the characters aren’t charming.

The line lands because it replaces metaphysical uncertainty with social dread. Existence is one question; approval is the one that keeps you up.