The word “NO!” has a high potential of being yelled during the Super Bowl. Maybe the opposite team scored, or a referee made a poor judgment on a flag that you don’t quite agree with. But this year, the “no” was yelled by many people during the commercials, not once, but twice.
This year’s Super Bowl advertisement lineup featured two ads about Jesus that seem to have outraged more people than they inspired.
“Something tells me Jesus would *not* spend millions of dollars on Super Bowl ads…” Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted afterward.
The millions she’s talking about? An estimated $7 million for 30 seconds of air time. Between the 30-second ad “Be Childlike” and the 60-second ad “Love Your Enemies,” the “He Gets Us” campaign spent $21 million on purchasing air time alone. Who knows how much they spent on production costs?
“If Jesus can afford to advertise during the Super Bowl, he can afford to pay taxes,” Twitter user Michael Blalock tweeted.
The two advertisements shown during the Super Bowl featured a 30-second ad with children loving each other and later a 60-second ad with adults fighting, presumably to show how Jesus was just like the regular people of today. After the commercials were done, a title card that read “He Gets Us.com” showed.
Okay, now what the fuck does that mean?
“He Gets Us” is an Evangelical church campaign that was launched in 2022, showing short ads with general messages about Jesus and Christianity on TV, social media and outdoor advertisements that target young people and people who are “skeptical about religion.”
Ironically, the “He Gets Us” ads have appeared to have done the opposite, turning their target demographic away.
The campaign is a subsidiary of The Servant Foundation, and according to CNN, they, and other donors to the campaign have ties to conservative and “far-right” ideologies. The Servant Foundation has also been donating millions in support of a Christian legal group called Alliance Defending Freedom and supporting anti-LGBTQIA+ and anti-abortion laws.
The only thing they have on their website about The Servant Foundation is located at the very bottom of their about page, “Now, bear with us as we use some official language for those who care about this stuff. He Gets Us is an initiative of Servant Foundation, a designated 501(c)(3) organization with a 100/100 Charity Navigator rating.”
The advertisements are designed to look like they are not from one specific branch of Christianity; in fact, they even try to hide who is behind all of it on their campaign website. After digging deep into the belief systems of “He Gets Us” it was found that the campaign supports and follows an important document in Evangelical churches, the Lausanne Covenant.
The Lausanne Covenant is a religious manifesto that is important to the Evangelical church, as it promotes both the need to fulfill the gospel and to spread Evangelicalism worldwide.
“We affirm that Christ sends his redeemed people into the world as the father sent him and that this calls for a similar deep and costly penetration of the world. We need to break out of our ecclesiastical ghettos and permeate non-Christian society,” reads one part of the Lausanne Covenant.
Based on the Covenant, controversial religious activist Billy Graham founded The Lausanne Movement in 1974.
At its surface, the campaign seems to be an open and honest campaign that has the main purpose to get young people back in church again. But deep below, there is a far-right agenda lurking. They (“He Gets Us”) want you to find Jesus – their anti-LBGTQIA+, anti-abortion, far-right Jesus.
