Among the advertisements you’ll see during Sunday’s Super Bowl, in between promotions for cars or candy or beer, will be plugs for a completely different kind of product: Jesus. A nonprofit organization called the Signatry is behind the $20 million buy, the latest in an ad campaign titled “He Gets Us.” The two new ads, part of a larger $100 million effort that launched last March, might seem like an earnest attempt to recast Jesus in a contemporary light. In truth, the campaign, funded by wealthy evangelical families, is aimed at rehabilitating the donors’ own tarnished image in the post-Trump era.
The He Gets Us campaign’s previous ads, which have been running on television for nearly a year, portray Jesus less as a messiah and more as a sympathetic and brave friend who will redeem us from the harms of divisiveness. An ad titled “Dinner Party,” which says that Jesus wanted to host all people for a feast of compassion, describes him as “radically inclusive,” someone who “went out of his way to care for people whom society had rejected” and “embraced people in historically oppressed races and ethnic communities.”
The Jesus of the He Gets Us ads is not the Jesus of the Christian right, which advocates exclusion of marginalized people, or of the MAGA world.
So far, so harmless. Another ad, titled “Outrage,” presents still photos of angry people and protesters as the narrator tells us that Jesus was a “controversial figure” who was “trolled” and called “ugly names. But he never took the bait.” Jesus, the ad says, “had to control his outrage, too.” Yet it is precisely this trope that outrage is bad, and one must suppress it, that hints to what is so wrong with these ads.
The Jesus of the He Gets Us ads is not the Jesus of the Christian right, which advocates exclusion of marginalized people, or of the MAGA world, where Jesus is inextricably tied with Trump. But the wealthy evangelical families backing the ads come from those…
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