Super Bowl Jesus

How Christian is the "He Gets Us" campaign?

I feel terrible. No, really.

I feel terrible that I have to be the party pooper once again and tell people that what they just saw with their own eyes—or thought they saw—isn’t real.

I’m a part of the Official Facebook group for “Catechism in a Year,” now counting 148,000+ members. Monday morning, the page was all atwitter (pun intended) with excitement over the Super Bowl Sunday ads from a campaign called “He Gets Us.”

I hadn’t watched the Super Bowl since all things sport are anathema to me, except for table tennis. I thought I was exceptionally good at it… until my parish priest summarily destroyed me in a ping-pong game. (Yes, Father J., I’m looking at you.)

But I digress. The Catholic Facebook peeps were beside themselves for joy that “finally, Jesus has been invited to the Super Bowl” and “millions of people were exposed to him.”

There were some detractors who warned that this wasn’t what it seemed to be, but they were shouted down by the enraptured crowd as being “negative, divisive, and paranoid.”

When I heard about the ads, my BS-meter went up instantly—for the simple reason that nothing holy has ever come out of the Super Bowl.

In fact, the halftime shows have been known to enact sexually explicit and sometimes downright satanic scenes. So it seemed weird to me that all of a sudden, it should have turned into a paragon of saintliness.

So I went to investigate and looked up the commercials (and their origin).

The first commercial is titled, “Be childlike,” and features pictures of cute kids loving each other and their pets. The text says, “Jesus didn’t want us to act like adults,” followed by a link to the website.

The linked-to page talks about how children are loving, trusting, and naturally humble… and that Jesus displayed the same qualities of unconditional love, compassion, and forgiveness. So far, so good.

The second commercial is titled, “Love Your Enemies,” and shows people fighting and screaming into each other’s faces. The tagline is, “Jesus loves the people we hate,” again, with a link to the website.

That line kind of irks me. We Christians don’t usually hate people. In fact, we’re not allowed to. We are supposed to love and pray for our neighbors, including our enemies; it’s the top commandment aside from loving God with all our soul, all our heart, and all our strength.

So I follow the links to the website, and sure enough, it becomes quite clear what this is all about. Scrolling down, I find a main article titled, “He Gets Us has an agenda”… and boy, does it ever, if you can read between the lines.

Coated in sugary language, different things jump out at me right away:

• I can’t find any mention that Jesus is the Son of God and the Lord Our Savior. Rather, he’s portrayed as a great humanitarian and teacher. The website also never mentions that he died on the Cross for our sins. Actually, the word “sin” is nowhere to be found either, nor is the word “repentance.” Hmmm…

Here’s a pull quote from the article:

• The words “oppression” and “activism” are bandied about quite a bit, another red flag. The whole thing smacks of a social-justice campaign based on woke Marxist, CRT-type ideas of oppressors and oppressed, equity, and “radical forgiveness.”

Who are the people who aren’t willing to radically forgive? Why, conservative Christians, of course.

Ah, here comes the kicker (bold parts are my emphasis):

The more ideologically defensive we become, the more we are willing to sacrifice things like kindness, patience, and the respect and dignity of others for the sake of victory — the righteous ends justifying the dehumanizing means. And it’s tearing us apart. We experience it in politics, in the workplace, in schools, and even in churches. And at the heart of the conflicts is a fundamental disagreement about what it means to be good.

Keep going…

Throughout our shared history, Jesus has represented the ultimate good that humankind is capable of aspiring to. And though some no longer believe in God, most are still compelled by the idea of a person capable of unconditional love for others despite their differences. But many of us simply cannot reconcile the idea of that person with the way our culture experiences religion today. Whether it’s hypocrisy and discrimination in the church, or scandals both real and perceived among religious leaders, or the polarization of our politics, many have relegated Jesus from the world’s greatest love story to just another tactic used to intensify our deep cultural divisions. 

Do you notice something about the quote above? Jesus’s humanity is being emphasized, but his Godhood is being downplayed.

Because then we’d have to ask the hard questions: If Jesus was not just an admirable human being, but God Himself, what does that mean for us? What does he want from us? And what is our obligation in this relationship?

And “the world’s greatest love story”? Is that what Jesus’s ministry and passion boils down to? Maybe, if you consider that “God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son.” But there’s no mention of that.

It also becomes clear that the makers of the “He Gets Us” campaign believe that they are the ones who truly get Jesus. Unlike those so-called “Christians,” who use sweet, loving Jesus as their scapegoat to hate on LGBTQ people and women’s rights. Those spoil sports who always want to talk about commandments and sin and obedience and consequences—all that unloving, cringy stuff that no one wants to hear about.

One last piece:

How can we rediscover the life and teachings of Jesus, the world’s most radical love activist? That is our agenda at He Gets Us: to move beyond the mess of our current cultural moment to a place where all of us are invited to rediscover the love story of Jesus. Christians, non-Christians, and everybody in between. All of us.

They never say that you have to actually believe that he is the Son of God and our Lord and Savior to benefit from the gifts he has to offer.

But it gets worse. Believing in itself is not enough; even the demons believe in Jesus. His invitation is even more radical: “Deny yourself, pick up your cross, and follow me.”

But that’s inconvenient and no fun, so let’s skip that part and stick to the imaginary “Buddy Jesus” who is totally game for anything. After all, we know from the Bible that he used to hang out with “a remarkably diverse cast.”

They called him a friend of sinners. It was supposed to be an insult, but Jesus wore it proudly. He was a friend to everyone. And what do friends do? They eat dinner together and share in each other’s lives.

So that’s what Jesus’s mission on Earth can be reduced to—eating dinner with his friends and being nice. What He Gets Us forgets to mention is that he called those same sinners to repentance and conversion, saying, “Go and sin no more.”

By the way, here’s a fantastic article by Christian author and apologist Natasha Crain who explains this deception much better than I ever could.

And make no mistake thinking campaigns like “He Gets Us” are harmless hippie babble. They’re baby steps toward the persecution of Christians who follow and defend the real Christ, the one with the inconvenient truths.

VatiGod, I’m coming to realize that my many years as a New Ager and victim of diabolic deception were not a curse, but a blessing. Thank you for teaching me what Satan looks like when he disguises himself as an “angel of light.”

For false messiahs and false prophets will appear and produce great signs and omens, to lead astray, if possible, even the elect.

(Matthew 24:24)