Koinonia: Coca Cola and the American Ideal

I’m about as conservative as you can get. I am an unapologetic advocate of liberal democracy and the free market, a critic of an ever-expanding government and an opponent of legalized abortion and the redefinition of marriage to include same-sex couples. But political and cultural conservative though I am, I find the objections to the Coca Cola Super Bowl ad is misguided.

America is, thank God, a nation of immigrants and becoming American has never meant forgetting one’s heritage. What critics of the ad seem to have forgotten, or maybe never knew, is that being an American is not about speaking English exclusively. It is rather our shared commitment to those ideas about human life enshrined in at the beginning if the Declaration if Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

These ideals have survived wars, economic down turns, government corruption and even overcome the evil of slavery. If they could do this then certainly they can withstand a soft drink ad. And if not? They maybe we need to re-evaluate our own personal commitments to the American Experiment.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory