The Church and Coca-Cola - "promoting thirst without quenching it".

The anti-hero in John Updike’s 1974 novel “A Month Of Sundays” is the Revd. Thomas Marshfield - a disgraced pastor.

In the novel the minister Thomas Marshfield is portrayed as the son of another ineffectual minister.

“Thomas” describes a part of his youth.

He says: **  “I did not confuse my father and God...... Nor was God in the Churches.  In general the churches, visited by me too often on weekdays – when the custodian was moving the communion table about like a packing case, and seeping up the chewing gum wrappers that insolently spangled the sacrosanct  reaches of the choir -  bore for  me the same relation to God that billboards did to Coca-Cola:  they promoted thirst without quenching it”.


**  ( A Month of Sundays”  Alfred A Knopf, 1992   page 22)



Location: Sarasota, FL, USA

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