Jan 8
Who is Behind the “He Gets Us” Ads?
Is this a sincere attempt to turn the American church away from its tainted history or a highly deceptive right-wing recruitment front?
You’ve probably seen one of those “He Gets Us” ads by now, especially if you frequently interact with content that deals with Christianity, social justice, or both. At first, these ads seem like they’re from a progressive church. They draw viewers in with lines like “Jesus confronted racism with love” and “Jesus was fed up with politics, too”.
The “About Us” page is rather vague and doesn’t really say much about the people who started the campaign other than being an initiative of the Servant Foundation. The Servant Foundation aims to receive and take care of “gifts, monies, and other properties” that benefit the church. In addition to money, they accept “property, stock, bonds, insurance, charitable bequests retirement plan assets, and charitable bequests” just to name a few.
In addition to accepting a wide variety of financial assets, the Servant Foundation is backed by The Signtary, a donor-advised fund. As a donor-advised fund, The Signatry doesn’t need to disclose which projects it funds. This allows organizations to minimize transparency and transfer large sums of money without creating their own foundations.
Steve French, the president and CEO of both the Servant Foundation and The Signatry, hopes that the “He Gets Us” campaign reaches out to others the way that the 1979 movie Jesus did. Made by the marketing agency Haven, each ad focuses on Jesus struggling with an issue that we face today. This may be one of the largest campaigns of its kind, but using secular means to reach out to (potential) Christians isn’t new.
Last year, Bill McKendry, the creative officer at Haven, and the American Bible Society set out to change Americans’ perceptions of Jesus. He started the “He Gets Us” campaign with the intent to reach out to the “movable middle” of Americans who believe in Jesus but aren’t particularly religious. McKendry’s work includes advertising campaigns for the American Bible Society, Alliance Defending Freedom, and Focus on the Family.
All in all, this campaign falls short with many audiences. Some people take issue with this campaign saying that it detracts from Jesus’s divinity while others don’t trust it at face value. After all, many aspects contemporary social justice revolve around understanding how Christianity has been abused throughout history to subjugate, silence, and even attempt to exterminate others.
The “He Gets Us” campaign is backed by a number of Christian philanthropists and creatives who have worked with anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion causes. At first, these ads seem alluring to the socially conscious Christian, but they just rehash old platitudes and fail to challenging existing Christians when it comes to reconciling their faith with the atrocities that the church committed and was complicit in.
