On Religion: Why Those ‘He Gets Us’ Ads Keep Triggering Arguments
(ANALYSIS) There is nothing unusual about a photograph of two men embracing at a pride march, surrounded by rainbow flags, banners and New Orleans-style beads.
But one of the men in this image from the latest “He Gets Us” Super Bowl advertisement is wearing a John 3:16 hat, as in the Bible verse proclaiming: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.”
Many of the ad's photographs are easy to interpret, such as a man removing “GO BACK” graffiti from a home, a woman helping a weeping man in a grocery store, a firefighter hard at work and a young football player comforting a defeated opponent.
But the John 3:16 hat raised the theological stakes in the pride photograph, noted Samuel D. James, an editor active in Christian publishing and founder of the Digital Liturgies Substack.
“It's obvious one of the goals of 'He Gets Us' is to cut across political and ideological divides,” he wrote in a column for The Gospel Coalition website. “The writers know where the fault lines in American religious culture are — abortion, LGBT+, race, class and so on. And who could resist being moved by these images of human vulnerability and compassion? Who can push out of his or her mind the many moments in the Gospels where Jesus met such needs and taught his followers to do the same?”
The ads seek to create “curiosity about and sympathy for Jesus,” he added, with a style targeting an “impressionistic, algorithmic generation.” But there's logic behind the debates triggered by these advertisements. Their content is vague, since the “image-based, music-backed ads lack exposition or annotation; such things would only get in the way of the audience's emotional response.”
The pride scene resembles a photograph in the 2024 Super Bowl ad, of a protester “washing the feet of a young woman outside of an abortion clinic,” said James, reached by telephone.
There's no way, for example, to know if the patient is entering or leaving the facility.
Many viewers “will assume that the woman washing the patient's feet has figured it out,” he said. She has “put down her sign and is showing love. ... She has learned something that the other demonstrators have not learned. That's one way to interpret this image. But we don't really know anything about what's happening.”
The new Super Bowl spot focused on the question, “What is greatness?” The multimedia "He Gets Us" project — which also uses billboards, ads on buses and a variety of online messages — is currently managed by Come Near Inc., a North Carolina nonprofit group.
The goal was to invite viewers to “consider the definition of greatness Jesus spoke and modeled,” said Come Near CEO Ken Caldwell in a Crosswalk.com Q&A. “Greatness as defined by our culture — through focusing on wealth, achievement, status and power — is a stark contrast to what Jesus defined as greatness.”
That's a worthy goal, wrote James, but it's almost impossible to know what visual images mean in a culture defined by “radical individualism” and a therapeutic approach to life. For many, “He Gets Us” will sound like “a mantra that reinforces the primacy of the self. This mentality keeps my personal psychology at the center, so the question that matters isn't 'What must I do to be saved?' but 'What must you do to affirm me?’”
With photographs about abortion, homosexuality and immigration, the ads — intentionally or not — have mixed evangelism with hot-button issues that fuel debates about politics, morality and religion, or all three at the same time, said James.
“These kinds of images might make sense in a culture in which you have widespread agreement about what 'love' is, what 'sin' is and what it means to turn to Jesus and be ‘saved,'" he said. "But there's no way to point people to something that you believe is objectively true in a culture built on images and the emotions they inspire. ... There are messages encoded in these ads, but there's no way to read the code.
“Different people are going to look at these photographs and see them in different ways. That's kind of the point.”
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Terry Mattingly is Senior Fellow on Communications and Culture at Saint Constantine College in Houston. He lives in Elizabethton, Tennessee, and writes Rational Sheep, a Substack newsletter on faith and mass media.