He Gets Us Takes a Big "L" in the Superbowl

A billionaire funded ad campaign that trashes traditional conservative evangelicals

The $1 billion dollar ad campaign for Jesus called He Gets Us has been controversial from the start. And there was controversy again this year when they ran two new Superbowl ads on Sunday.

If you didn’t see them, they are available on Youtube under the titles “Foot Washing,” and “Who Is My Neighbor?”

I’m someone who defended the He Gets Us campaign after last year’s Superbowl outing. I said they might be flawed but were aiming at the right target, focused in on the key area of pre-evangelism that’s needed in today’s world. I even mentioned He Gets Us positively in my new book Life in the Negative World.

Given my record, I am clearly not biased against the He Gets Us. And given the psychological principle of consistency, where we are biased to take actions consistent with our previous actions, I should be primed to defend them again this year.

Unfortunately, this year’s He Gets Us Superbowl outing was terrible - unconscionable actually.

There are several problems with these advertisements.

1. These ads present Jesus as an ethical teacher and moral example rather than a savior.

Many of the He Gets Us ads try to show Jesus as able to relate to our condition. A good example is this ad called “Physician.” This relates to the Bible’s teaching from Hebrews that because he was made in all ways like us, he is able to sympathize with our condition, temptations, and weaknesses. It also makes reference to Jesus’ miraculous healings, as well as to his being sent as the Great Physician to those whose souls are sick with sin.

By contrast, the 2024 Superbowl ads portray Jesus exclusively as ethical teacher and moral example. He “didn’t teach hate” but rather he “washed feet.” He taught us to love our neighbor as yourself.

Clearly Jesus was an ethical teacher and moral example, but the view of Jesus that’s being portrayed here is identical with the view promoted by liberal mainline Protestantism. This ad is very much in line with a traditional liberal theological view.

Last year’s Superbowl ad “Love Your Enemies,” also links to a teaching. But the content of the ad emphasizes Jesus’ love for everyone - “Jesus loved the people we hate.” In fact, had the ad not included a URL with “LoveYourEnemies” in it, this ad may not have been connected in anyone’s mind with that particular verse. The other ad, “Be Childlike,” links directly to Jesus’ instructions on what one do to be saved (“become like little children”).

In short, there’s a big difference in the presentation of the ads in 2023 vs. 2024. In 2023 there was about Jesus’ love and about the path to salvation. In 2024, it’s about Jesus’ ethical teaching and moral example - a liberal Protestant emphasis.

One implication of that difference is that this year’s Superbowl ads were really more focused on us than on Jesus.

2. The ads are explicitly left-wing culturally and politically.

Last year’s ads did a great job of avoiding appearing to take sides on cultural or political matters. This year, they explicitly endorsed a culturally and politically left view of the world. Or, as the left wing pundit Matthew Yglesias, a secular Jew, correctly observed.

As is all too often the case, evangelicals are a day late and a dollar short here, pivoting into this just as DEI and some of the more extreme flavors of identity politics are getting called into question and dialed back in the world at large.

The foot washing ad featured twelve examples of people washing feet (one of which is a bit ambiguous). Only two of them featured non-white people washing someone else’s feet. In no case is a non-white person clearly washing a white person’s feet.

Additionally, many of the people getting their feet washed are left coded demographics: an American Indian, a Muslim woman in a hijab, an abortion clinic customer. While some of people who got their feet washed are possible Trump voters, none of them were clearly coded as conservative.

Beyond validating the intersectional view of race and identity, the ad also explicitly endorsed left wing political positions. One of the scenes has an oilfield worker washing the feet of an environmental protestor. Another shows an apparent bus load of migrants that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott sent to Chicago.

I don’t know for sure whether the people responsible for these videos are what I call cultural engagers or not, but these videos are very much aligned with that style. It is an example of what I describe in my book as shifting towards a posture of synchronization rather than engagment with the culture. It is putting a Christian stamp of approval on what are fundamentally secular moral and political visions.

Both this point and the previous one also illustrate my observation in the book that the cultural engagers seem to be following a mainline Protestant trajectory in some respects.

3. The ads trash traditional conservative evangelicals.

In addition to the previous point, beyond taking a left coded cultural and political stance, the foot washing ad also explicitly bashes traditional conservative evangelicals.

The scene at the abortion clinic looks like this:

The ad shows a woman washing the feet of another young woman who apparently just had an abortion. Meanwhile in the background there is a group of anti-abortion protestors (their signs are hard to read in this image but are anti-abortion statements like “save the unborn”). They are talking amongst themselves and completely ignoring the girl. In this scene, they are clearly the bad guys.

One of my most important and popular recent pieces was newsletter #78 from last summer which talked about how evangelical elites were getting rid of complementarian gender theology as a community identifier and replacing it with anti-fundamentalism. Fundamentalist in this case being a pejorative term for traditional conservative evangelicals they don’t like.

It’s important to stress that this is becoming part of their identity, core to who they are and how they conceive of themselves. For example, in Tim Alberta’s new book The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory, he basically describes the mission of David French and Russell Moore as combating Trump-supporting evangelicals. This is a negative identity, which is typically unhealthy.

I’ve noticed that it’s becoming harder for some of these folks to engage in the public square without managing to work in some kind of bashing of those ultra-conservative evangelicals over there that they don’t like. We see that here. Last year I noted that some of the people behind the He Gets Us campaign explicitly view various other Christians as a key problem for Jesus’ image. Nevertheless, they really didn’t let that attitude shine through in the ads that I saw.

Now, they apparently can’t restrain themselves anymore and have declared open war against conservative Christians they don’t like.

This ad, I think, shows what traditional conservative evangelicals are up against. They represent a clear majority of the people in the pews. But the people with institutional, cultural, and financial power are largely on the other side. And typically those people win out in the long term.

In this case, we have a multi-billionaire Christian family using their vast wealth to speak in the name of Jesus Christ in order to bash a certain class of other Christians during the most watched TV show in American history. That’s where we’re at.

By the way, I would not call this an example of the Negative World. This is intra-evangelical conflict. Some of my critics seem to be saying that any bad experience, critique, or injustice you might experience is an example of a kind of Negative World. That’s not what I’m getting at. The Negative World specifically refers to the fact that elite, official culture now has a negative, or certainly skeptical view of traditional Christianity. I see something like this as an example of how evangelical groups are responding to the Negative World, rather than a direct expression of it.

As for me, I’m going to keep calling them like I see them, trying to be your independent, fair, impartial voice. Last year, I was, with caveats, positive on what He Gets Us was doing. This year, they took a major L in the country’s biggest primetime arena.

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