If those Jesus Gets Us ads look too good to be true, it’s because they are.
My progressive Christian friends have been almost giddy over their apparent emphasis on peace and justice, on immigrant rights, on a thoroughly human Jesus who knows the limits of politics, of family, and of judgmental fear mongering instead of forgiving. After all, they are beautifully produced, and if you didn’t know better you’d swear that they signal a theological shift of epic proportions. Let’s face it — none of us have ever seen religious ads like these on television, especially not during the Super Bowl. Was someone finally flipping the script on doctrinal purity while answering the question, WWJD (What Would Jesus Do?) by proposing that we actually follow his example of love and sacrifice instead of hatred and division?
One thing was certain. Nobody knew who was funding the campaign, but a little digging reveals a lot, and reminds us that “buyer beware” applies to more than just widgets. A dark-money group called Signatry and its front the Servant Foundation got a huge donation from our very own Green family, who owns Hobby Lobby and built a Museum of the Bible containing religious artifacts. They sued all the way to the Supreme Court for the right not to provide contraception to their employees if it violated their personal religious beliefs.
A consulting firm was hired to find out why Christianity is dying and why young people prefer the coffee shop to the sanctuary. What they found was exactly what everyone already knew, namely that the church is imploding in the stench of its own hypocrisy, turning out people who care more about being right than about being loving. Legions of young people in this country can’t stand most organized religion and no longer want anything to do with Christianity, but they still find the life and teachings of Jesus remarkable. So let the branding begin.
Watching the ads evokes memories of how people must have first responded to a penniless rabbi from Nazareth, the Teacher of Righteousness, who comforted the afflicted and afflicted the comfortable. One shows us that Jesus was himself a refugee (based on a literal reading of Matthew’s infancy narrative), but the people who paid for the ad are largely Christianity nationalists who use the plight of today’s refugees as political fodder. If you go to the campaign’s website, you are funneled into a right-wing media universe that includes Focus on the Family with all its homophobia and misogyny. One of my colleagues at the university, Mark Davies, said that if the HeGetsUs ads were a table, Jesus would have flipped it over. He goes on to say, “The HeGetsUs campaign comes off as a form of ‘Jesus Washing’ by a billionaire who doesn’t get us spending tens of millions of dollars telling us Jesus gets us while also spending millions of dollars to elect politicians that embrace values and implement laws and practices that are antithetical to the messages being conveyed in the campaign.”
The researchers who came up with this campaign slogan learned that the people who must be reached if Christianity is to survive want peace about all else and help coping with “toxic relationships.” They think that the institutional church does not have the answer (since it is often the source of division in families and relationships) but that the message of Jesus is the answer, because HeGetsUs. The problem is that when the ads are responded to by people who want to learn more, they reenter the same world that they left. This is not repentance by the Christian Right. It is cultural seduction. It is what one colleague called “fundamentalism in streetwear.” Using the language of social justice that conservatives love to hate, it becomes a bait-and-switch.
Not surprisingly, some evangelicals are not happy about the ads either because they say the message focuses too much on Jesus as a compassionate mortal instead of a divine savior. Natasha Crain, a well-known fundamentalist blogger writes, “The HeGetsUs campaign does not practice biblical evangelism, and it does not present the biblical Jesus.” She goes on to urge that fundamentalists reject it as watered-down capitulation to “culturally palatable versions of social justice.”
So, it seems as if both progressive Christians and evangelical Christians see a different kind of Trojan horse, but there may be a silver lining in all this. By trying to appeal to the spiritual-but-not-religious crowd, Christian Nationalists like David Green may have unwittingly endorsed the progressive movement while unmasking their true intentions. By being nervous about watering down the divinity of Jesus, fundamentalists may have reminded those who left the church over dogmatism in the first place that they made the right decision.
One of my colleagues in the progressive Christian movement, Jim Burklo, suggested that we flip the hidden script here. He suggests we change it from He Gets Us to He Gets us TO. He gets us TO welcome immigrants; He gets us TO embrace other religions; He gets us TO celebrate same-sex marriage; He get us TO save the earth from human-caused climate change; He gets us TO take the Bible seriously not literally; He gets us TO end systemic racism; He gets us TO stand up for women’s right to choose; He gets us TO resist the right-wing agenda of the funders of HeGetsUs.com.
After all, he did say once that we should be as wise as serpents and as harmless as doves. Let’s take advantage of the conversation this has started, about theology, about honesty, and about the future of the spiritual life. David Green may have unwittingly released a Jesus to the masses that cannot be reeled back in.
If it’s true that what we mean for evil God means for good, then he really does get us. Maybe he will even get TO us.
The Rev. Dr. Robin Meyers is pastor of First Congregational Church UCC in Norman and retired senior minister of Mayflower Congregational UCC in Oklahoma City. He is currently Professor of Public Speaking, and Distinguished Professor of Social Justice Emeritus in the Philosophy Department at Oklahoma City University, and the author of eight books on religion and American culture, the most recent of which is, Saving God from Religion: A Minister’s Search for Faith in a Skeptical Age. Visit robinmeyers.com.
