‘He Gets Us’ — But Do We ‘Get’ Those Ads?
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(OPINION) They’re pretty much everywhere, from billboards to the Super Bowl — those “He Gets Us” ads.
You’re surely seen them. You can hardly miss them. They’re slick and pithy, yet quiet and nonconfrontational. The “He” in the ads is Jesus, of course, and we’re assured that whatever problems we might be facing, he relates to us.
The message is that Jesus “was a refugee, had disdain for hypocrisy, and was also unfairly judged like other marginalized members of modern society,” as an NPR piece put it.
One print ad, for instance, declares: “Jesus confronted racism with love. He gets us.”
In a video commercial, we see a Central American family forced to flee their home to avoid persecution — then discover this to be the story of Jesus and his parents.
The ad campaign is funded by the billionaire Green family of Hobby Lobby fame and other wealthy evangelical donors, according to an article carried by Christianity Today that originated with Religion News Service reporter Bob Smietana.
Donors plan to spend $1 billion on the ads over about three years. The campaign started in 2022.
Its whole tenor seems at odds with the culture’s larger perceptions of contemporary evangelicalism, which is widely perceived — sometimes correctly, sometimes not — as politically conservative, condemnatory and confrontational.
“I think spending that much money, again, is a kind of admission on their part that there’s a problem,” Smietana told NPR in an interview. “And, you know, there is a problem for organized religion in America. It’s declining, congregations are declining. And these ads, too, are a way to chide their fellow Christians to say, ‘This is what Jesus is like, and maybe we know it, and maybe we’re not acting like Jesus.’”
Bottom line, the evangelical Jesus is getting a big-budget rebranding.
The least remarkable thing about this campaign — at least the most tiresome thing — is the knee-jerk reactions from both extremes of the political-religious divide. Both sides have found much to hate. You could write the tweets yourself without even thinking about them for five seconds.
And therein lies the rub if you ask me. Not that you did ask me.
I’ll defer on this particular aspect — the hot-take responses to “He Gets Us” — to Tish Harrison Warren, an Anglican priest and New York Times opinion columnist who wrote the best evaluation of the ad campaign I’ve seen.
That is my way of saying her opinion mirrored my own, although she expressed herself better than I might.
Warren wasn’t an unabashed fan of the ads. She said they tend to reduce 2,000 years of church history and a complex worldwide religion to, basically, a series of bumper stickers. Still, she didn’t find the ads offensive, either, and observed that several “fit nicely” with progressive social values, for whatever that’s worth to you.
What bothered Warren far more than the ads was how predictably they ginned up the political and religious rabble-rousers on both sides of the cultural divide.
For instance, on the left, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted, “Something tells me Jesus would not spend millions of dollars on Super Bowl ads to make fascism look benign.”
(Fascism? Really? We need to discuss definitions, methinks.)
On the right, the founder of the right-wing campus group Turning Point USA called the ad campaign a horrible disservice to Christianity and its producers “woke tricksters.”
(Woke tricksters? The Hobby Lobby people are helping promote drag queen story hours at elementary school libraries? I didn’t infer that from the ads at all. Who knew!)
In a nicely turned passage, Warren said:
“A friend of mine, an older Anglican priest, often tells me that the time between an event and our response to it is where wisdom grows. If this is true, then the way of wisdom and the path to success as an online influencer point in nearly opposite directions. Wisdom requires slowness, stillness, focus, patience and withdrawal from some of the heated demands and controversies of the moment. Online influence often requires one to speak out on each new topic as loudly, quickly and simplistically as possible.”
That expresses my own assessment to a faretheewell, not only about the reactions to “He Gets Us” but about the partisan responses to every hot-button issue.
One thing you eventually learn in life is that it’s not necessary to have an opinion about absolutely every matter, nor is it helpful to stay hopping mad about everything all the time.
A second thing you learn is that when you do need or just want to formulate an opinion, it’s better to give it space and plenty of time to develop. When you’ve thought a matter through for the 30th time, you get a much better grasp of it than you had the first time. You discover its nuances and your own internal contradictions.
That’s true with “He Gets Us,” as it’s true with much else.
Listen. Evaluate. Re-listen. Re-evaluate. Then do it all again. And again.
But such an approach seems to be anathema in our current culture. That’s too bad for all of us.
Paul Prather has been a rural Pentecostal pastor in Kentucky for more than 40 years. Also a journalist, he was The Lexington Herald-Leader’s staff religion writer in the 1990s, before leaving to devote his full time to the ministry. He now writes a regular column about faith and religion for the Herald-Leader, where this column first appeared. Prather’s written four books. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.