DOES HE GET US?
Photo by Gift Habeshaw on Unsplash.
The recent Super Bowl ads, and the “He Gets Us” campaign in general, made many progressive Christians uncomfortable. The ads, in case you have not seen them, are a series of carefully crafted black-and-white images of modern life, overlaid with narration or thrumming music. The words on the screen at the end of each ad read: “He Gets Us. All of Us.” And then just one word: “Jesus.” The message of each ad emphasizes a different aspect of Jesus’ teaching – “Jesus loved the people we hate,” or “Jesus was a refugee,” or (as tagline to children showing kindness to each other across racial and cultural boundaries) “Jesus didn’t want us to act like adults.”
Progressive disdain for the “He Gets Us” campaign has been almost universal from the first, and almost none of it has been aimed at the largely unobjectionable content of the ads. Almost none, but not exactly none. I showed one spot to my son’s fiancé, who furrowed his brow in dislike. I asked him to tell me what it was he didn’t like, ready to scribble down the response of my test subject. For one thing it suggested I need to love white supremacists, he said. Well, I said, that…is kind of exactly what Jesus told us to do, when he said love your enemies. His frown deepened. Well I don’t like that, he said. While that did begin a whole conversation sitting there in my son’s car about why Christians care what Jesus said, other objections to the ads have been more theologically nuanced.
The distaste for the ads heightened and crystallized when it was revealed that among the many donors to the campaign (most of them anonymous) was the conservative family that founded Hobby Lobby. The reaction from progressive quarters can only be described as a crescendo of disdain, much of it for understandable reasons. Most financial backers of the “He Gets Us” campaign are presumably conservative evangelicals, and thus enthusiastic supporters of legislation restricting the rights of women and the LGBTQ community, not to mention their cozy relationship to gun culture and support of unrestricted firearms laws. Hobby Lobby in particular is known for its refusal to provide birth control for its employees. Liberal and progressive Christians alike find these stances discriminatory, morally repugnant, and counter to the Gospel.
On the other hand, the power of the outreach seems undeniable. The ads got immediate national attention, and articles about them appeared in mainstream outlets like USA Today, CNN, and NPR. But it was more than just media buzz. The campaign’s website has a “Connect” option that puts seekers in touch with on-the-ground pastoral care near them. Local churches can affiliate with the campaign, so they can be part of “Connect” through the app or website. I have several Episcopal priest friends who registered their parishes as an affiliate, which means that they receive messages from people looking for pastoral connection and counsel. One message a friend received was from a transgender man looking for prayers in his transition process; another has connected with 19-20 people looking for help with grief, loneliness, or spiritual advice, among whom was a woman from a traditional African culture who was struggling to reconcile Christian faith and psychiatric care.
So how should we feel about evangelism—even really effective evangelism—when it’s funded by people with whom we profoundly disagree?
This worry over the questionable origins of something we like is a peculiarly modern pastime we can call “source righteousness.” Source righteousness dictates many consumer choices among urban élites. For example, given the choice, many of us prefer to buy local organic produce and give agribusiness a miss. Source righteousness tells us not to get our chicken sandwich from Chick-Fil-A because of their homophobic stance, not to order our books from Amazon because of their ferociously oppressive labor practices, not to buy our lattés at Starbucks because they are polluting unionbusters. These are all fair points to debate, though whether there is any such thing as ethical consumption under global capitalism is also up for debate. Most often, consumers are left weighing which bad choice is less bad – unless, of course, you have the money to buy from a “pure” source. I can still remember the sting of being scolded by a colleague for buying non-organic milk, back when I was raising three kids on a teacher’s salary. A conscience, under capitalism, is an expensive commodity, and purity is only available to the rich.
Source righteousness lurks behind much of the worry over the “He Gets Us” campaign. It isn’t the content of the ads that concerns many so much as where the ads come from. The trouble is, Jesus said we would know them by their fruits, not their roots. As Christians, we believe that it’s where we end up, not where we start, that matters to God. Worrying about the roots over the fruits is troubling, to say the least. More importantly, applying source righteousness to evangelism turns Jesus into one more commodity we can use to demonstrate our own devotion to purity.
Jesus himself was untroubled by the wrong people™ spreading his message or even healing in his name:
38 John said to him, “Teacher, we saw a man casting out demons in your name, and we forbade him, because he was not following us.” 39 But Jesus said, “Do not forbid him; for no one who does a mighty work in my name will be able soon after to speak evil of me. 40 For he that is not against us is for us. (Mark 9:38-40)
The Gospel warrant for not worrying about the source when it comes to the work of the Kingdom is pretty clear. What mattered, according to Jesus, was working the mighty works, not worrying about who was doing them. The Bible is full of the wrong people™ saying the right thing, from Moses the murderer to Paul the persecutor. If there is hope for them, then there is hope for all of us too, because the gate of repentance is not the back door, but the main highway to the Kingdom.
There have been objections to more than just the messenger. Tish Harrison Warren in her New York Times op-ed and others have questioned the extraordinary cost of the Super Bowl ads, and whether that is something Jesus would find a good use of money. Assuming billionaires are providing most of the backing, there are certainly worse uses of their money than putting the name “Jesus” on millions of TV screens. But more than that, we know that Jesus is not in the habit of rebuking extravagance poured out for the glory of his name. When Judas tried to condemn Mary of Bethany for her lavish offering of pure nard for Jesus’ feet in John 12, Jesus told Judas to “let her alone,” and defended Mary’s choice.
Others have objected to the ads because the identity of the funders might turn people off from Jesus entirely. What if people google “He Gets Us” and discover that it’s backed by some conservative evangelicals? It’s a fair point, but it does assume that most viewers share the progressive politics of the objectors. It might be just anecdotal evidence, but the trans man who reached out to my friend shows that not all interest in the campaign comes from social conservatives.
The objection to the funders also ignores the possibility that the ads may in fact be aimed at people who are big fans of Hobby Lobby and its political stances. One particularly effective ad recasts the story of Jesus as a central American refugee, whose family flees military violence in search of safety and a better life. Amid images of frightened, hungry children and families, thescreen says: Jesus Was A Refugee. It’s a powerful reminder that Jesus identified with the lost, the marginalized, the poor, and the despised. The message of the ad is the message of the campaign as a whole, and it’s a simple one: Jesus isn’t who you think he is.
For people who haven’t connected Jesus with their lives in a long time, or who find him irrelevant to modern life, these ads remind them that Jesus lives in the thick of our own lives with us. And for those who think they already know Jesus – whether they be anti-immigrant conservatives or economically righteous progressives – the ads suggest that Jesus is asking us to love people we would prefer not to, whether they wear pussy hats or MAGA caps. Part of the power of these ads is their ability to speak to both disaffected Christians and committed Christians – to connect with the disconnected, and to rebuke the complacent. That’s a pretty fair summary of what Jesus spent his time on earth doing, and it’s a message that deserves a hearing, no matter who is saying it.
When that message carries the name of Jesus, it deserves our special attention. One of the most ancient Christian disciplines of prayer is the Jesus prayer, centered on the name of Jesus. Born from the mothers and fathers of the Egyptian desert, this prayer – Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner – shaped Eastern Christian monasticism and remains at the core of Orthodox spirituality today. The beating heart of this prayer is the one word, Jesus. The name of Jesus is held to have such power that it can reorder the breath and entire being of the one repeatedly and devotedly saying this prayer. This is the power of the name that St. Paul knew, when he wrote that “at the name of Jesus every knee should bow” (Phil. 2:10) in all corners of the universe. But even more than a summoning of power, the name of Jesus is the name of our beloved, the name we should rejoice to hear. However imperfectly, the “He Gets Us” campaign invokes that beloved name, and speaks it into spaces – like Super Bowl ads on American commercial television – where it is not accustomed to be.
Hearing the beloved name of Jesus should override all our concerns about the purity of the source. The real problem with checking the label on the Kingdom of God like we check the label on our organic lettuce is that in doing so, we turn Jesus into one more luxury item, one more overpriced chicken sandwich. And that’s the thing: the usual objects of our source righteousness are luxuries, not necessities. We don’t often subject our cell phone batteries to the same kind of source scrutiny we give our lattés. These items are not luxuries. We accept an imperfect supply chain in the case of cell phones, because if we insisted on purity, we would be without a necessity of our daily life and functioning. The “He Gets Us” campaign suggests that Jesus is not an add-on to modern life, but the heart of it. What if Jesus were as necessary to our daily life and functioning as a cell phone? What if sowing the seed of Jesus’ name were as needful to us as air? If it were, it might be we would worry less about the source, and rejoice more over the spreading of the message.
