While enjoying Super Bowl LVII, football fans will see two ads Sunday night from the multi-million dollar “He Gets Us” advertising campaign to promote Jesus Christ and Christianity to an audience of more than 100 million viewers at a time.
“We simply want everyone to understand the authentic Jesus as he’s depicted in the Bible — the Jesus of radical forgiveness, compassion, and love,” the “He Gets Us” website says.
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One of the Super Bowl ads will be “The Rebel” and opens with the line “a rebel took to the streets” while black and white photos show visuals of people with sunglasses and neck tattoos, other people running, skateboarding up walls, jumping over property fences in hoodies, and slowly driving in cars through a city.
It ends by saying, “But they weren’t a part of a gang spreading hate and terror. They were spreading love.”
The words “Jesus was wrongly judged. He gets us” pop up on a black screen in white letters.
The YouTube video description explained the messaging of the video: “The government and religious authorities of Jesus’ day saw Jesus and his disciples as troublemakers, lawbreakers, and rebels. Jesus and his crew were eyed with suspicion whenever they entered a new city or walked down the street. Rumors and false accusations swirled. Everything they did was questioned or challenged.”
“The truth is, they were rebels. They were challenging authority. But they were not criminals. They were rebels for peace. They challenged others to love everyone… They did the right thing despite the misunderstanding and biases within their society.”
One YouTube critic of the video wrote, “Please quit trying to ‘reimagine’ and modernizing Jesus to fit your image. Jesus wasn’t a loving gangsta.”
Super Bowl viewers will get to see one of other ads from the marketing campaign. The campaign has been promoting several videos including “Jesus was a refugee” which depicts poor families in impoverished Central American towns being forced to leave their homes. The ad takes a open borders turn: “But they were far away from the atrocities taking place … in Bethlehem.” The screen flashes to the words, “Jesus was a refugee.”
The “He Gets Us” campaign promoted their messaging and the upcoming Super Bowl ads on their Instagram account.
In one of the posts declaring “Jesus was a refugee,” it stated, “Under the threat of death to their newborn child, Mary and Joseph fled from Bethlehem to Egypt. They just wanted to keep their new family safe. #HeGetsUs”
“You should make accurate claims if you’re going to launch a campaign that makes an impact,” wrote a social media user.
Other Instagram commenters told the ad campaign that they are playing “fast and loose with the scripture.”
An immigration attorney chimed in on the Instagram post, “As an immigration attorney, Jesus was not a refugee. Your organization keeps repeating this. It’s not legally true nor factually correct nor Biblical. He did not go through a legal process, no determination, there wasn’t a national crisis, and he successfully relocated to another country but did not stay. Stop twisting the Gospel!”
Another Instagram post from “He Gets Us” states, “Jesus didn’t feel welcome at church.” As one social media user responded, “Since there wasn’t a “church” in his day, this is a bit of a stretch.”
The Signatry, a Kansas-based Christian foundation, helped raise a $100 million budget from a group of 75 wealthy donors who funded the effort. They enlisted Haven, a Michigan creative agency, to create the television and social media ads. Many of the donors remain anonymous, but David Green, the billionaire co-founder of Hobby Lobby, reportedly helped support the ad campaign.
While the issue of faith generally has not been promoted in most Super Bowl commercials, the recent popularity of the #1 crowdfunded television show The Chosen, a series about the life of Jesus, has shown a mainstream appetite for well-produced Christian messaging.
The series now has over 471,500,000 views on the Angel Studios app in almost every country in the world and in 58 languages. It has beat popular movies at the box office when they have shown special episodes in movie theaters across the country.
The two “He Gets Us: television ads will air Sunday night during the Super Bowl game between the Philadelphia Eagles and Kansas City Chiefs in Glendale, Arizona.
