Judging by social-media reactions, this year’s most controversial Super Bowl commercial was not the VW spot featuring a prairie-church wedding with two brides (and making some choice omissions about the company’s past) but the latest installment of “He Gets Us.”
That big-dollar media-evangelization brand, with its characteristic ads featuring emotion-baiting soundtracks, stark tableaus of human suffering, and the reassuring message that Jesus understands that suffering, is no stranger to controversy. Last year, for instance, it came under fire from “progressive” Christians for receiving underwriting from conservative Evangelicals who must have been using the ads as a front for a homophobic, racist, exclusionist agenda.
This year, the brand is under control of a new nonprofit group, and apparently gone are the ties to the old conservative donors. And now the script has flipped, with conservative and traditional Christians largely panning the Super Bowl ad (though some on the religious left are still warning us not to fall for the pro-Maga trickery).
One reason for the criticism is the new ad’s embrace of hot-button political imagery. In the sixty-second spot, set to a cover of the 1980’s torch standard “Never Tear Us Apart,” various figures intended to represent the downtrodden are having their feet washed by figures intended to represent the powerful, followed by the message, “Jesus Didn’t Teach Hate.” Images include:
- a pro-life protester washing the feet of a pregnant girl outside an abortion clinic
- a cop washing a young, tough-looking black man in an alley
- a suburban woman washing a bussed-in migrant girl
- a Christian minister washing a gay man who had been roller-skating at the beach
Whether or not I agree with them, I “get” the criticisms over some of these images and others (still others were non-controversial and even poignant). The Gospel example of Jesus washing his disciples’ feet should not be appropriated for another context without extreme care, and it’s certainly debatable whether invoking modern politics and culture wars constitutes such care. It’s also debatable whether the ad is communicating opinions on some of those issues that are contrary to Catholic teaching or right reason.
But I’m noticing a deeper vein of debate dividing Christians: over the question of whether this approach is evangelically fruitful.
In one corner is the camp that says that messages like this “He Gets Us” ad are all bark and no bite; all Easter and no Good Friday; all consolation and no conversion. That the promise that Jesus “gets us,” full-stop, is too easy to take as an assurance that we are good just as we are. And so you end up converting people to moral therapeutic deism, which is probably where they already were anyway.
The other side counters that simply to be told that we are loved and understood in our suffering—and, yes, sin—is revolutionary. That for many people it’s all they’re able to hear and process at this point in their lives. And so it’s the milk they need before the harder food of faith and conversion, a necessary first baby step on the road to discipleship.
The parameters of this debate seem to me strikingly like those around the recent declaration Fiducia Supplicans, which permitted clerical blessings for couples in “irregular” unions. One side saw it as a capitulation that will have the effect of confirming people in their sin; the other, as a gentle invitation to begin hearing the promptings of the Spirit.
Me? I think these are both examples of a classic evangelistic balancing act: to challenge but not repel; to sympathize but not enable; to convict but not pronounce judgment. I think the “He Gets Us” spot, whatever else may be said of its methods, its enormous cost, its underlying theology, and so on, both succeeds and fails at achieving that balance. Which is probably the case with most of our efforts to evangelize.