Back in 2021, a group of evangelical families, including the founders of Hobby Lobby, began funding a new ad campaign, hoping to help skeptical Americans give Jesus a second look and to convince people to be a little kinder to one another.
The website for the campaign describes the mission this way: “Our hope was that more people could encounter love. More joy. More peace. A greater sense of purpose.”
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Jesus’ humanity a key focus
Known as “He Gets Us,” the campaign, which launched in 2022, focused on the human side of the Christian Messiah, with billboards and black-and-white video ads showing people with loneliness, anxiety and other struggles, and ending with the claim Jesus understood those struggles.
Other ads showed Jesus as an immigrant or a rebel against the status quo, who loved those he disagreed with.
An ad for the 2023 Super Bowl, titled “Love Your Enemies,” featured images of Americans at each other’s throats and in each other’s faces, as English singer Rag’n’Bone Man’s hit song “Human” played.
“Jesus loved the people we hate,” the ad claimed.
For the 2024 Super Bowl, “He Gets Us” offered an ad with a series of foot-washing tableaus, each featuring an unexpected pairing: an older woman washing the feet of a young girl, a cowboy the feet of an Indian, and a white Catholic priest the feet of a queer Black person.
Last year’s Super Bowl ad continued the “let’s all get along” theme, showing Americans from different walks of life helping each other, including a man in a John 3:16 hat embracing another man at a Pride march, with the tagline “Jesus showed us what greatness was.” The ad also featured Johnny Cash’s cover of “Personal Jesus.”
Americans still polarized
Yet four years — and more than $700 million — after the launch of the ad campaign, Americans remain just as polarized. Few seem convinced Jesus can bring the country together or feel a need to love their political enemies.
And while the decline in religion in America has paused for now, that decline will likely be short-lived, according to long-term polling data.
That reality, along with pushback from evangelicals claiming the ad campaigns were too “woke,” has led the “He Gets Us” campaign, now run by a nonprofit called Come Near, to shift course.
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EDITOR’S NOTE — This story was written by Bob Smietana and originally published by Religion News Service.
