(CP) A Super Bowl ad from a faith-based organization is igniting a debate amongst Christian conservatives, who expressed concern that its intended message of unity could possibly be misconstrued as a justification for engaging in certain sins and that it fails to speak a biblically accurate account of Jesus.
The “He Gets Us” campaign, which describes itself as an effort to remind people of “the instance that Jesus set while inviting all to explore his teachings so we are able to all follow his example of confounding, unconditional love,” aired a 60-second ad during Super Bowl LVIII Sunday.
The ad, titled “Foot Washing,” featured still photographs of individuals washing one other person’s feet in various situations.
One image depicted within the ad showed an older woman washing a younger woman’s feet outside a facility labeled as a “Family Planning Clinic.” In the background were protesters on either side of the abortion debate holding signs reflecting the differing positions on the hot-button issue.
Additional images within the ad featured people washing the feet of individuals with clearly divergent ideologies and/or social statuses. Two of the images illustrated protests demonstrating against police brutality and in favor of environmentalism. It concluded with an on-screen message declaring, “Jesus didn’t teach hate. He washed feet. He gets us. All of us.”
Andrew Walker, an ethics and public theology professor on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary who also serves as a fellow on the Ethics & Public Policy Center, took to XÂ Monday to boost concerns in regards to the implications of the ad.
“He Gets Us framed evangelism with a leftward tinge, communicating the respectability of certain sins over others in our culture (although I’m undecided the ad even communicated that the respectable sins were sins in any respect),” he wrote.
“It is curious that Jesus never showed up washing feet at a [Make America Great Again] rally, a truck stop porn store in Alabama, to dilapidated and drugged-out factory employees in Ohio, or a white nationalist militia meeting in Michigan,” Walker added. “If Jesus really is for all sinners, we must always want right-wing racists converted as well, right? How would we reply to Jesus washing the feet of somebody outside the Capitol on January 6?”
Suggesting that the video displayed bias when choosing what situations to discover as opportunities for foot washing, Walker remarked that within the ad, “the socially high-status sins of the Left are those Christians are told to evangelize, not the low-status sins of the Deplorable Right because, it seems, they’re those truly outside redemption’s reach.”
He maintained that “the conditioning effect of those commercials in framing and reaffirming the social castes of American sin” is “really something.”
“The truth of the matter is that Jesus redeems sinners from each the Right and the Left, whether high-status or low-status. Everyone is equal of their need for Christ (Rom. 3:23). That might have been communicated, but wasn’t,” he concluded.
Pro-life advocate Ryan Bomberger reacted to the ad in an X post Sunday. He addressed its premise that “Jesus Didn’t Teach Hate” by proclaiming, “Yes. And No.” Asserting that Jesus “taught us to like each other as He has loved us,” Bomberger stressed that “His word also teaches us to ‘love what is nice & hate what’s evil.'” The pro-life activist identified one other necessary lesson that “disagreement & truth ≠hate.”
Allie Beth Stuckey, conservative commentator and host of the “Relatable” podcast, responded to the argument that Christians should “just be blissful Jesus’s name is attending to thousands and thousands of individuals” in an X post Sunday.
“If it is not the Biblical Jesus, then no. If you have the cash and opportunity to purchase a Super Bowl ad slot, share the gospel,” she wrote. “Don’t waste it on some ambiguous mumbo jumbo that makes Jesus into our image relatively than depicting Him because the King and Savior He is.”
Podcaster Michael Knowles took to XÂ Sunday and wondered if he was “the one conservative who didn’t totally hate the ‘He Gets Us’ ad.”
While acknowledging the concerns of critics that it “speaks ‘woke-ese,'” “it is not for us; it’s for secular libs” and poses “a risk it results in heretical complacency,” Knowles contended that “if it gets some lost lib to even consider Our Lord, I’m not totally opposed.”
“Your green-haired lesbian cousin who hates her dad just isn’t going to read the Summa Theologiae set you didn’t buy her,” he predicted. “But if she begins to feel even a slight affection for Our Lord, she *might* activate a podcast. Maybe that podcast could possibly be Fr. Mike Schmitz’s Bible in a Year. The ad would not be my first selection for evangelism. But Our Lord has used much worse things for good.”
“He Gets Us” elaborated on the intended message of the ad in a statement posted to its website.
“We recalled the story of Jesus washing his disciples’ feet and realized this was the right example of how we must always treat each other, even those individuals with whom we do not see eye to eye,” the statement reads. “Jesus had washed Peter’s feet, a loyal friend who would publicly deny that he knew Jesus later that very night. And much more astoundingly, Jesus washed Judas Iscariot’s feet, the one who would betray him for 30 pieces of silver.”
Noting that Jesus washed the feet of his 12 disciples throughout the Last Supper as a “symbol for all of his followers to see how they need to treat each other,” the “He Gets Us” campaign states that “foot washing required humility on the a part of each parties: the one willing to scrub one other’s feet and likewise the one willing to have their feet washed.” The group characterised foot washing as “an act of mutual admiration” that enabled Jesus to eliminate “any notion of rank or caste amongst his disciples.”
“We began to assume a world where ideological others were willing to set their differences aside and wash each other’s feet. How would that look? How would our contentious world change if we washed each other’s feet, not literally, but figuratively? Figurative foot washing could be so simple as giving a compliment to a co-worker or paying for a stranger’s lunch. It can be as difficult as not responding to someone who’s criticizing you or reaching out to an estranged member of the family.”
Insisting that “acts of kindness done out of humility and respect for one more person could possibly be considered the equivalent of foot washing,” the “He Gets Us” campaign expressed hope that “our latest commercials will stimulate each societal discussion and individual self-reflection about ‘who’s my neighbor?’ and the way each of us can love our neighbor at the same time as now we have differences and serve each other with more kindness and respect.”
