The Superbowl!

I watched the Superbowl with some friends and when the ‘He Gets Us’ ad came on my reaction was “Hun?” it looked like an affirming ad, that it was for diversity, women rights, etc. but I was still confused about the ad.

The ‘He Gets Us’ Super Bowl ads brought back bad memories
How the Christian ‘seeker’ movement can cause serious harm.
Christian News Service
By Kirsten Powers
February 14, 2023


Almost 20 years ago, in early 2005, I tagged along with a boyfriend to a Presbyterian church service on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. I assumed it was a mainline Protestant church and didn’t bother to get any further information because I honestly didn’t care. I was a lapsed Episcopalian and, depending on which day you asked me, agnostic or atheist. I was just going to church to please my boyfriend.

Long story short, it was an evangelical church that sought to be “seeker friendly.” They led with the good stuff: Jesus was an immigrant, a radical when it came to treating women equally and a champion of the downtrodden. It was an intellectually stimulating format, including sermons that were laced with poetry, art references, philosophy and pop culture. I was intrigued, to say the least.

I remember back in high school when I attended Catholic mass they had a folk music to bring in the youth (I attended the mass because my girlfriend at the time played in the folk band). It was the hook that they thought would pull in the teenagers and young adults.

The organization “He Gets Us” has pledged to spend a billion dollars to target skeptics, seekers and lapsed Christians by “reintroducing Jesus” to them. From CNN:

The campaign is arresting, portraying the pivotal figure of Christianity as an immigrant, a refugee, a radical, an activist for women’s rights and a bulwark against racial injustice and political corruption. The “He Gets Us” website features content about of-the-moment topics, like artificial intelligence and social justice. “Whatever you are facing, Jesus faced it too,” the campaign claims.

These things are all true about Jesus. The problem is that while the organization won’t disclose its financial backers, the billionaire Hobby Lobby founder David Green told Glenn Beck that his family is a major funder. If Green expressed his views on what the phrases “women’s rights” and “racial justice” mean, they very likely would not be what most people think of when these subjects come up. (Green’s family sued the government over the Affordable Care Act because they didn’t want their employees’ insurance plans to cover drugs that might cause an abortion.)

When I asked “He Gets Us” representatives what they meant by “women’s rights,” they pointed me to a link on their website that lays out the various ways that Jesus was extraordinary for his time in the way he treated women. It’s true, he was. But they must know that when most people — especially those they are targeting — hear “women’s rights,” they don’t realize that just speaking to a woman was a radical act for Jesus.

A religious non-profit here in Connecticut was opposed to a law requiring “abortion clinic” to list their services and they fought it tooth and nail!

Here in Connecticut in 2021 the legislature passed a bill requiring truth in advertising for abortion clinics, AN ACT CONCERNING DECEPTIVE ADVERTISING PRACTICES OF LIMITED SERVICES PREGNANCY CENTERS. Why did conservative Christian non-profits oppose it? Because they thought that “religious freedom” gave them the right to lie to save the unborn!

What they were doing was calling themselves “Abortion Clinics” when they didn’t proved any abortion services they only counseled against abortions, they strung along the woman until it was too late to have a legal abortion.

The CT Mirror reported that,

Critics have said that staff at the pregnancy centers sometimes pose as medical professionals to lure in women and hand out misleading information about abortions.

The CNS article goes on to say,

If the day I walked into that Upper East Side church service the pastor had given a sermon calling homosexuality a sin or said that women should submit to their husbands, I would have gotten up and walked out. I only learned that these were core teachings after I had been attending a year and a half and was in too deep. Abortion was never addressed from the pulpit (at least to my knowledge), but once I started asking, I found the church community fairly homogeneous in its anti-abortion beliefs, a view that the pastor expressed publicly many years after I left the church.

Lies by omission.

We see this in many organizations that want to control their disciples.

Case in point:

Do you remember prominent GOP Representatives and Senators saying that they want to cut Social Security and Medicare and then quickly backing off saying that they didn’t mean it? They still want to do it but those representatives and senators broke a cardinal rule… they talked about it!

The problem of the lack of up-front honesty about theological beliefs in evangelical churches led to the creation of the organization Church Clarity. My story is not a one-off. It happens all the time.

Which is why the refusal of “He Gets Us” to disclose their donors is so problematic.

The link they sent me explained that they are keeping their donors a secret to keep the focus on Jesus, which doesn’t really make sense. How would saying that there are progressive Christians funders in addition to the conservative funders violate anyone’s desire to keep their involvement secret or distract from Jesus?