If you watched the Super Bowl yesterday (or really any cable network over the past several months) you might have seen one of the “He Gets Us” advertisements. The ads are slickly produced, featuring some excellent music and a very simple message. God is still here, even during the chaotic times that we’re living through, and Jesus gets us. All of us. The ads encourage people to remember that message and reflect it in our daily lives. That’s pretty much the entire story.
But not so for the folks at MSNBC. Sarah Posner, one of the network’s journalists and the author of two books attacking “the American Christian right,” saw something entirely different. In an article on their site, she declares in the title that “The touchy-feely ‘He Gets Us’ Super Bowl ads hide a dark truth.” Oh, really? And what “dark truth” might that be? Posner dives into her investigative journey and finds “wealthy evangelical families” behind this sinister plot who are supposedly trying to fix their “tarnished images.” She even manages to drag Donald Trump into the story, though you had probably guessed that much already.
Among the advertisements you’ll see during Sunday’s Super Bowl, in between promotions for cars or candy or beer, will be plugs for a completely different kind of product: Jesus. A nonprofit organization called the Signatry is behind the $20 million buy, the latest in an ad campaign titled “He Gets Us.”
The two new ads, part of a larger $100 million effort that launched last March, might seem like an earnest attempt to recast Jesus in a contemporary light. In truth, the campaign, funded by wealthy evangelical families, is aimed at rehabilitating the donors’ own tarnished image in the post-Trump era.
If you wade through that article, you might find yourself wondering if Ms. Posner might not be in need of a bit more Jesus in her own life or at least some stabilizing medication. She picks out one advertisement that characterizes the Son of God as being “radically inclusive” of all people, embracing those from “historically oppressed races and ethnic communities.”
That’s a pretty fair description if you’ve read the New Testament. But Posner immediately turns around and declares that the people behind the ads must be phonies because the Jesus in these advertisements is “not the Jesus of the Christian right, which advocates exclusion of marginalized people, or of the MAGA world.”
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She also declares that “Jesus is inextricably tied with Trump.” Posner later pulls back the lens a bit, determining that this ad campaign is part of “the Christian right’s long campaign to eviscerate church-state separation and expand religious freedom for themselves.” She even ties in the current conservative majority on the Supreme Court as part of this sinister plot.
It’s really too much to be believed. Of course, Posner isn’t alone in objecting to these advertisements. AOC got in on the action because of course she did.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., said Sunday she did not believe Jesus would support Super Bowl commercials that she claims make fascism “look benign.”
“Something tells me Jesus would *not* spend millions of dollars on Super Bowl ads to make fascism look benign,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote in a tweet.
Everything is a plot for these people. Everything is a trap. And any open embrace of Christianity is a fundamental threat to the New World Order that progressives envision. All I can say is that the left’s reaction to these advertisements says a lot more about them than it does the people running the ads. Here’s one of the ones that Posner specifically called out as a “trope… that hints to what is so wrong with these ads.” Let us know what the ad makes you think of. (You should have the sound on for this.)
