Jesus still ‘gets’ – and provokes – us

Back in the 1960s, there was a series of curious public service announcements (PSAs, in TV lingo – free advertisements for informational or charitable purposes rather than for commercial reasons) that were produced by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints – the Mormons. These PSAs were contemporary re-tellings of the parables of Jesus. They were simply animated, basically without dialogue and lasted 30 seconds.

The one I recall best was the parable of the Good Samaritan, set in the Old West, with the traveler as a cowboy, beaten and robbed by bandits; the passersby who didn’t stop to help were a judge and a parson; and the Good Samaritan who stopped and tended the cowboy was a Mexican peasant. I thought it was brilliant – clever, to the point and memorable.

Bear in mind that although the Mormons produced these PSAs, they were aired for free.

I remembered those little films when I saw the recent ad campaign, “Jesus. He Gets Us.” You’ve no doubt seen the ads, since one or two aired during the Super Bowl. They use dramatic contemporary black-and-white photos and draw parallels between Jesus and current social situations.

In one striking ad, we see photos of Latinos in a village setting. Over soft guitar music, a female narrator says in a Spanish-tinged accent, “There was a mother and a father who had a small son. They lived in a small village and didn’t have much money, but they were happy. One day, they heard that the head of their country was sending soldiers to their town because he thought they were part of an insurrection. The young family decided to flee. They grabbed what they could and ran. … They were scared, hungry, exhausted. But they were far away from the atrocities taking place – in Bethlehem. That’s all Mary and Joseph wanted. A safe place to call home.”

The ads’ tag line is “Jesus was a refugee. He Gets Us. All of Us.” Other themes include “Jesus loved the people we hate” and “Jesus had to control his outrage, too.”

The ads were produced by an ad hoc group whose major contributor is David Green, the notably evangelical co-founder of the Hobby Lobby family company. Launched in October with an accompanying website, they are not PSAs but advertisements whose airtime is purchased. The cost of the campaign is reportedly $100 million.

The ads have certainly generated controversy, partly over the content, partly over the people behind the ads and partly over the question whether it’s a good idea to advertise religion as if it’s a product. The critics are all over the map, politically and theologically.

For example, after the Super Bowl ads aired, U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), an idol of the political left, tweeted, “Something tells me Jesus would *not* spend millions of dollars on Super Bowl ads to make fascism look benign.” It’s not clear to me what she meant about fascism, unless she referred to Green, whose company has policies that have been deemed anti-abortion and unfriendly to LGBTQ persons.

On the other hand, conservative Christian leader and commentator Charlie Kirk, while expressing admiration for Green, accused him and the ad campaign of caving in to “woke” politics. About the “refugee” ad, Kirk tweeted, “Do you think open borders is biblical?”

As the Business Insider noted, a campaign that preached a message of unity just made people angry. But the ire it has provoked from both the left and the right suggests the campaign must be doing something right.

My own view of the ads is that there is nothing wrong with them. Indeed, much like previous religious ad campaigns, including the ones from the Mormons but also from Catholics and others, “He Gets Us” is simply using modern methods and storytelling devices to make the figure of Jesus intelligible in our day and time. A commentator in my local paper claimed the campaign is evidence of the decline of Christianity. I think it’s evidence of its vitality and imagination.

Like the Mormon PSAs, there is a certain brilliance to the “He Gets Us” ads. And if it provokes people, well, so did Jesus. In that respect, he really does get us.

Cary McMullen is a retired journalist and the former religion editor of The Ledger. He lives in Greensboro, NC.

This article originally appeared on The Ledger: Jesus still ‘gets’ – and provokes – us