Eagles fans aren’t the only ones expressing their anger after the game.
A Christian campaign called “He Gets Us” aired two commercials about their favorite boy during the Super Bowl on Sunday night. The ads reported $20 million price tag as well as their links with Hobby Lobby founder and billionaire David Green, among other things, it sparks a backlash online.
Those behind He Gets Us told Christianity Today in March 2022 that they are investing $100 million to launch the campaign nationwide. However, the head of the branding company behind the campaign told the same agency this month that the campaign expects to spend $1 billion on “He Gets Us” over three years.
The idea behind the campaign is to reach millennials and Gen Z “with a carefully crafted, extensively researched and market-tested message about Jesus Christ: He Gets Us,” according to Christianity Today.
But research on Twitter shows that users are getting a completely different message.
“Something tells me Jesus *wouldn’t* spend millions in Super Bowl ads to make fascism look benign,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (DN.Y.) tweeted Sunday night.
Other Twitter users agreed, pointing out that the ads’ simplistic messages of kindness are funded by people with not-so-kind agendas. Others compared the ads to Kendall Jenner’s controversial 2017 Pepsi Super Bowl ad.
The two commercials – aired in the middle of commercials for mayonnaise, beer, and Ben Affleck’s attempt to indoctrinate more Americans into the Dunkin’ cult, presented lessons Americans should remember about Jesus in our divided times.
The first ad featured photos and clips of children doing acts of kindness backed by Patsy Cline’s “If I Could See The World (Through The Eyes of a Child)”. It ended with a line of text that read, “Jesus didn’t want us to act like adults.”
The second spot presumably showed “us” acting like adults with images of people, often of different races, engaging in conflict to emphasize a message of inclusion. This ad ended with the phrase “Jesus loved the people we hated.”
Although most of the “He Gets Us” donors are anonymous, Green — whose craft store Hobby Lobby denied insurance coverage for contraceptives and tried to control which bathrooms employees were allowed to use — said publicly about his involvement in campaign finance. The campaign’s website also says it is run by the Servant Foundation, a Kansas nonprofit that claims it is not “left-wing” or “right-wing” or a political organization of any kind.
Yet lever reported that the Servant Foundation gave more than $50 million to the Alliance Defending Freedom, a nonprofit known for fighting abortion rights and anti-discrimination laws, from 2018 to 2020.
Bob Smietana, national reporter for Religion News Service, told NPR that the ads target those who feel at odds with modern Christianity, such as members of the LGBTQ community, those who lean politically to the left, or those repulsed by current abuse scandals.
“I think spending that much money, again, is kind of an acknowledgment on their part that there’s a problem,” Smietana said. “And, you know, there’s a problem with organized religion in America. It diminishes, the congregations diminish. And even these ads are a way of rebuking their fellow Christians for saying, “Jesus is like that, and maybe we know that, and maybe we don’t act like Jesus.”
“The problem facing American evangelicals in particular is that their political ambitions and their deep religious beliefs and ethical convictions are in conflict right now,” he added. “So the things that will help them win politically will alienate people.”
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