What would Jesus say to Americans at Easter? Let's learn to love each other.

We can choose many different ways to begin to repair the frayed social fabric of American life. But regardless of which path to healing and unity is our favorite, it's beyond imperative that we work to rebuild trust among the political tribes in our country.

Organizations dedicated to political depolarization such as Braver Angels and members of the Listen First Coalition lean into dialogue across divides (as is the focus of this month's National Week of Conversation). Groups like the Forward Party founded by Andrew Yang see the answer in electoral reform.

But there are those who believe that the answer to healing America’s social wounds rests in Jesus.

He Gets Us campaign promoted loving our enemies

Some of the people who believe this are willing to spend incredible sums of money making the case. An ad campaign called He Gets Us seeking to “rebrand Jesus” in America recently took the airwaves by storm with a $100 million spend, culminating in two commercial slots during the Super Bowl. In one, the ruggedly rhythmic lyrics of Rag ‘n’ Bone Man’s "Human" played over a montage of images highlighting America’s bitter social and political divides, ending in text that read “Jesus loved the people we hate,” and a reminder that you must “love your enemies.”

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The ads were beautiful — and they kicked off something of a firestorm in the public discourse. From left to right there were strong, albeit wildly different, complaints. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-New York, tweeted, “Something tells me Jesus would not spend millions of dollars on Super Bowl ads to make fascism look benign.”

Conservative activist Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, criticized the ads just as strongly from the other side, tweeting, “He Gets Us has done one of the worst services to Christianity in the modern,” adding that the people who imagined the campaign were “woke tricksters.”

I sparked controversy myself within the ranks of Braver Angels, America’s largest bipartisan, grassroots organization dedicated to the work of political depolarization, when, as a Christian, I endorsed the message of the He Gets Us campaign in a newsletter to our members, stating “We do need love and forgiveness in America. Is it wrong therefore to say we need Jesus too?”

For a cross-partisan organization like our own with many secular and non-Christian members, the idea that we need Jesus to heal America is a challenging one. Likewise, there were surely many who watched the He Gets Us ad campaign and bemoaned this resurgent attempt to popularize Christianity for a new generation, even as some Christians bemoaned what they took to be a watered down portrayal of Jesus.

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But in an America where 47% or Republicans and 26% of Democrats favor a national divorce (according to a recent Rasmussen poll), one in which bad blood between the parties continues to float around all-time highs, learning to love and understand one another should not be an unwelcome message for those of us who wish to heal our nation's wounds.

Such messages do not need to come by way of Jesus and the Bible for everyone. Yet, for many Americans they do. Although rates of church participation and religious association have been declining in America, the United States remains one of the most religious nation in the western world.

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This weekend, at Easter, churches will once again be packed. A 2022 poll found that 42% of Americans — that's more than 139 million people — said they planned to attend a church service.

More than 60% of Americans identify as Christian, and almost half of those (close to 100 million people) identify as evangelical. They tend to be the sort of Christians for whom the institution of the church and the person of Jesus are center pieces in their social lives and the way in which they look at society and the world.

It is hard for more secular people, and even for some Christians, to imagine that way of living in the world. But tens of millions of Americans do not just attend church on Sundays but do so in the middle of the week for Bible study, and perhaps every day of the week when it’s time for Vacation Bible School.

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Millions of Americans are educated in Christian schools and invite their pastors into their families and marriages as a regular counselor and confidant.

To say to such Americans that we should be empathetic toward others out of conscience or common sense is one thing. But to remind those believers that this common-sense moral intuition finds support in Christ’s admonishment to “love your enemies” and to “love your neighbor as you love yourself” places such wisdom in the context of their culture, faith and sacred heritage.

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I live in a community such as this. Black Los Angeles is a culture largely transplanted from the traditions of the rural South, as is much of Black culture across America (Latinos in such communities are similarly devout). Evangelical values are not the exclusive property of white conservatives.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke to both of these evangelical groups in terms explicitly meant to appeal to their Christian conscience. To southern white evangelicals who defended the Jim Crow status-quo, King implored them to remember that the equality of all men before God demanded an equal dignity for all people before the law, regardless of the color of their skin.

To the African-American evangelical community, King summoned a remembrance that even their racist neighbors were children of God and that we must love and pray for those who persecute us.

King was inspired by Mahatma Gandhi's nonviolent movement that led to Indian independence. But both as a practical matter, as well as a reflection of his own deep devotion to Christian ethics, King spoke to the Christian conscience of a nation whose history and contemporary culture were deeply rooted in belief in Jesus — America’s sacred legacy of pluralism notwithstanding.

Jesus strikes me as indispensable now as ever to the work of appealing to America’s conscience. That doesn't mean all Americans are Christians, of course.

But to the extent to which Jesus can help us find the means and language by which we can advance the cause of goodwill and forgiveness in American life, I support those who would reintroduce him to us as an avatar of the better angels of our nature.

Lord knows we need them.

John Wood Jr. is a columnist for USA TODAY Opinion. He is national ambassador for Braver Angels, a former nominee for Congress, former vice chairman of the Republican Party of Los Angeles County, musical artist, and a noted writer and speaker on subjects including racial and political reconciliation. Follow him on Twitter: @JohnRWoodJr 

More from John Wood Jr.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 'He Gets Us' ads rebrand Jesus. Our divided America needs his message