This Evangelical Billionaire Family Wants to Convert You on Super Bowl Sunday

Andrew Perez and Tessa Stuart
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The Super Bowl will once again feature ads promoting Jesus, thanks in large part to the billionaire family that leads Hobby Lobby.

He Gets Us, the billion-dollar campaign to further raise Jesus’ profile, will be back at the big game this year to spread the good word. According to Greg Miller, a spokesman for the campaign, a 60-second spot will appear in the first quarter of the matchup between the Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers, followed by a 15-second spot in the second half of the CBS and Univision broadcasts. Both ads “will emphasize loving our neighbors like Jesus did, encouraging people to respect and serve each other,” Miller says.

The He Gets Us campaign is being driven by the billionaire family behind Hobby Lobby, the arts and crafts chain infamous for its crusades to deny its employees birth control coverage and use of bathrooms associated with their gender identity. Hobby Lobby co-founder David Green has previously disclosed helping fund the He Gets Us ads, but his eldest son, Mart — Hobby Lobby’s “Ministry Investment Officer” — is one of three board members at the new nonprofit managing the ad campaign, documents show.

The Green family, worth an estimated $15.2 billion, has long committed to operating its crafts store empire on “Biblical principles.” The family and Hobby Lobby previously led a successful fight at the Supreme Court opposing the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate, citing “their sincere religious objections to facilitating the provision of abortifacients.” The case led to a 2014 ruling finding that closely held corporations do not have to comply with the mandate if their owners express religious objections.

Hobby Lobby separately led an unsuccessful 11-year legal fight to block a transgender employee from using the women’s restroom at a crafts store in Illinois.

In 2022, David Green announced that the family would transfer ownership of Hobby Lobby to a trust; the decision, he wrote at the time, reflected his view of himself as a “steward” of the company, and one with “a responsibility to the employees that God had put in my charge.”

Hobby Lobby did not respond to a request for comment about the Green family’s involvement with He Gets Us.

The motivation behind the He Gets Us campaign, according to Green, is a desire to reshape public perception of Christians: “What we’re known as, as Christians, we’re known as haters,” he said in a podcast interview last year. “We’re beginning to be known as haters — we hate this group, we hate that group. But we’re not. We are people that have the very, very best love story ever written, and we need to tell that love story. So, our idea is, let’s tell the story. As a Christian, you should love everybody. Jesus loved everybody.”

In addition to its two Super Bowl ads, He Gets Us will have a presence on the ground in Las Vegas ahead of the game. He Gets Us is the lead sponsor of the NFL’s official Super Bowl breakfast on Saturday. The organization is also hosting a public event at a Christian community center, where it plans to give out free lunch and pre-bagged groceries.

A one-minute Super Bowl ad from He Gets Us last year featured scene after scene of tense conflicts between people, before text appeared on the screen: “Jesus loved the people we hate.”

In the YouTube description for the ad, the campaign laments that people today “align ourselves on different sides of the fight in battles of politics, religion, justice, and too often, we let that conflict morph from a dignified defense of something good into a dehumanizing attack on the people we don’t agree with.” At the time, the campaign was closely tied to a conservative legal group leading the fight against abortion rights and LGBTQ protections.

Until this year, He Gets Us operated as a subsidiary of the Servant Foundation, a Kansas-based charity that has been a major funder of the Alliance Defending Freedom. ADF is a conservative Christian litigation shop that has led fights to ban abortion and allow businesses to discriminate against LGBTQ customers. This spring, ADF lawyers will be at the Supreme Court pushing to limit access to the abortion pill and to allow states to bar hospitals from performing emergency abortion care.

While He Gets Us is no longer part of the Servant Foundation, the Green family has ties to the National Christian Foundation, a top financier of ADF, as Salon first documented a decade ago. In 2022, Mart Green sat on the board of the Illuminations Foundation as it donated $23 million to NCF; that same year, NCF contributed $14 million to ADF.

New corporate documents show Mart Green is on the three-man board of directors at Come Near, a North Carolina nonprofit that recently took over the He Gets Us campaign, in place of the Servant Foundation. The other board members are Bob Hoskins and Marwan Rifka, who are both executives at OneHope, an evangelical ministry focused on sharing gospel messages with children around the world; David Green says his family has supported OneHope for 25 years. (Come Near’s CEO, Ken Calwell, was previously the chief marketing officer at the Christian charity Compassion International.)

“We feel like God has guided us to do a few things in a larger way. We’re involved with He Gets Us — that’s a larger thing,” Green said last year. He noted that OneHope has “given a billion kids the gospel.”

The Green family also funds the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., which opened to the public in 2017. The museum attracted attention when a Department of Justice investigation found it had purchased thousands of stolen Mesopotamian artifacts; the museum reportedly relinquished roughly 12,000 of its antiquities to the government of Iraq in 2021.

During an interview last year, Green explained why He Gets Us decided to advertise during the Super Bowl, the most expensive TV event of the year.

“We really feel that we need, as a group of Christians, to tell 350 million people that He cares about you and He gets you,” he said.

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