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Notes -
He Gets Us
There has been great controversy over a recent Christian ad that played during the Super Bowl.
“He gets us,” the ad in question, and the organization that created it, is a subsidiary of the ‘The Signatry,’ a fund that aims to spread biblical teachings around the planet, which is also a business alias by another organization called “The Servant foundation.” It is one of the largest Christian Grant foundations in the world, with donations from many of the top churches in the country as well as billionaires such as David Green, the owner of hobby lobby. It has pledged over half a billion dollars to the spread of their message on a global scale, with a large portion going to America exclusively.
This has caused habitual controversy within secular circles among those blue tribe adjacent, with many of their reactions being familiar to those already within religious denominations. What is ironic, however, is that these ad campaigns were modeled in a way that was specifically tailored to the leftist worldview by very modern sects of Christianity. The campaign focused on a perception of Jesus with traits that are explicitly progressive. Examine some of the perspectives given by the organization
-Jesus was a refugee and an Immigrant
-Jesus was an ‘influencer’ who got ‘cancelled’ after standing up for something he believed in
-Jesus was wrongly judged
-Jesus had to control his outrage too
Take a look for yourself at some of the ads in question.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=0z0J-2P8a3s&ab_channel=HeGetsUs
https://youtube.com/watch?v=v1IJFJwexus&ab_channel=HeGetsUs
https://youtube.com/watch?v=QEEq5VTfmic&ab_channel=HeGetsUs
Since I assume most members of this forum are atheists, most would not look any deeper into the motivations or presentation of this ad campaign with any closer analysis than they would any other form of Christian evangelism. But the point of my post is not to examine this ad campaign, but to extrapolate on a current trend of modern Christianity that is exemplified within it.
To say that the ad campaign was a complete failure is an understatement. It resonated with very few non-religious people, failed spectacularly with leftists in general, and came with the same amount of pushback that any other Christian sentiments in popular media would receive.
AOC claimed that the ads “Makes fascism look benign.”
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/aoc-jesus-ad-fascism-definition-superbowl-he-gets-us-b2281862.html
For full disclosure, I am a Christian who converted as an adult, and have perspectives of both religious and non-religious worldviews. There is a succinct lack of understanding of the goings on in the Christian community by non-religious people and I wish to shed a light on some of the current underpinnings.
Unbeknownst to many outside the church, Christians are dealing with a type of heretical civil conflict within their own faith. ‘Progressive Christianity’ has become commonplace in most urban centers around NA, and it is exactly as it sounds. They usually set up their own churches so they may freely practice their beliefs. Usually, they attract members with a more serious Christian appearance and then slowly ingratiate their own ideology as time goes by. They are a denomination that has made multiple doctrinal changes that are completely against more traditional Christianity.
They do not accept the divinity of Jesus. While traditional Christians believe Jesus to be the literal incarnation of God that walked the earth, progressive Christians merely believe that Jesus was a man who set a good moral example. This also implies that they deny the literal resurrection of Jesus. While these beliefs are not universal, the importance of faith in general is placed very low on the totem pole of progressive Christianity. This turns their interpretation of salvation into human self-actualization. Along with this, there comes with it a denial of the bible as ultimate authority. They believe the bible only goes so far as to give guidelines, but ultimately puts the bible secondary if it contradicts modern sensibilities.
Due to the first point, this lack of belief in the Divinity of Jesus and with the resurrection turns something that was once about salvation into simple moralism. This allows the Christian doctrine to be molded into something that fits more contemporary progressive worldviews, and gives them authority to shame and accuse other churches or Christians of not following 'correct' christian doctrine.
They embrace homosexuality. Gay people can become pastors and other authoritative figures within their churches. While traditional Christianity considers homosexuality a sin, progressive Christian will spout Jesus’ example of love and kindness to trump any biblical teachings that come from other writers in the New Testament. This allows them to still maintain some moral high ground that they accuse other churches and Christians of "unchristian like behavior" and "Not true Christians."
These are the churches that are heavily advertised on Tik-Tok and other social media websites and are extremely popular in that niche. The reality of the churches, however, is vastly different. I have been to many of these churches out of sheer curiosity, and I have never seen any of them survive for any significant period of time. The numbers they draw will repeatedly dwindle, as many of the congregation begin to understand the perspectives being espoused, and will leave the church for a more traditional one. I have many in my Church who are refugees from progressive churches and most of the stories are very similar. Over time their numbers will progressively dwindle, until they cannot afford to stay open and have no congregation. People who are not religious are not interested in becoming religious for simple political motivations, and people who are religious are interested in the legitimate spiritual traditions of the faith, not materialist interpretations of said traditions. Leftists who already hate Christianity are not going to be convinced by a softer form of it. Likewise, people who are already Christians are not going to be effected by people who don't even really believe in the core tenets of Christianity to begin with.
Everyone is familiar with the trend of progressive ideologues infiltrating certain niches and groups and slowly turning them into spokesman of their causes. Regardless of your views of religion or Christianity, it is an extremely durable belief system. It has survived for thousands of years, multiple empires, countless plagues, and disasters, and I don’t think far leftist types yet have an understanding of why that is. Christians don’t go to church or believe out of a hatred or dislike of Homosexuals. Christianity promises eternal life and spiritual salvation for just the simple belief in its figurehead. Progressive Christianity will always fail, because in order to justify their own inclusion of contemporary social beliefs they must subtract the very things about the philosophical aspects of Christianity that make it appealing in the first place.
Indeed, there's a schism over LGBT between the declining progressive English Anglican Church and its more hardline African branches which now far outnumber the home source: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/church-of-england-crack-up/
Pretty sad that there's no future for these religions in the countries in which they were born! 1% of UK's 18-24 year olds were Anglican, apparently.
On the contrary, I find the progressive arguments for Christianity pretty repulsive. It's just signalling 'enemy, enemy, enemy'. I'm with AOC on it making fascism look benign, the woke are more correct than the mainstream on this at least.
This part really threw me when she said it, and since you seem to agree I'd like to ask: What? How? Is Christianity fascism now?
Because these days the word "Fascist" is not understood as describing a specific variety of totalitarian technocratic socialism (IE the politics of Mussolini, Franco, Hitler, Et Al). It is understood as a "boo-light" indicating any political position that a progressive college professor or media personality might disagree with, and by those criteria mainline Christianity is very obviously "fascist".
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It’s because she watches The Handmaid’s Tale.
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Isn't everything to the right of the far-left fascism (in the rhetorical eyes of the far-left)?
No.
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If I'm not mistaken, didn't the Bolsheviks and other revolutionaries in Russia also align themselves against the Church (Orthodox or otherwise), seeing it as an element of the oppressive Empire? That probably didn't help the relationship between Christianity and the Left.
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"The poor you will always have with you" doesn't work so well for economic leftism either.
More generally, though, Leftist salvation is physical, while Christian salvation is spiritual. That's not a difference that can be papered over, and it will always resolve one way or the other.
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I'd add that the vatican, on some issues, is aligned with left wing position. For example it has been very pro immigration for many decades. It has also opposed every war in the past 60 or so years which was usually considered a left wing position (not so much recently).
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In principle, no. In present-day United States culture, I think yes. It didn't have to be this way, but it turned out this way. Kind of analogous to how the "we take covid super duper serious" position didn't have to be left-coded (and at first it wasn't), but in the US at least that's how it shook out.
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There is... I don't have the number, but I keep seeing them pop up in forums all over the place(and for several years), so there's at least an amount of left-aligned individuals whom are absolutely convinced that America is only One Bad Day away from getting turned into a Christian Theocracy.
AOC is presumably one of those people.
I think they're not entirely wrong, but if I had to put money on it, I'd predict that, in the event of FedGov collapse/takeover, things would actually continue as normal and not go fascist at least for a while--maybe even long enough for things to return to something resembling the status quo ante. America is big and spread-out enough to keep all of it from going all red-banners-everywhere.
To back this up: Imperial Germany collapsed economically and politically in 1918, and Weimar Germany never obtained political stability (rapidly emerging and disintegrating governments) but it didn't succumb to totalitarianism until the early 1930s. For most of the intervening period, the social democratic left pushed for reforms, and even the (significantly large) authoritarian right almost all pined for the good old days of pre-WWI Germany, rather than the totalitarian revolution of Nazism.
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I believe this was most lucidly established in the Hulu documentary "The Handmaid's Tale".
Didn't find it especially persuasive, myself, but have no shortage of female friends and relations who whisper about it in hushed tones with many significant glances.
Then again, I could possibly be described as a Christian theocrat.
I've seen the argument touted about for far longer than Hulu's version of the Handmaid's Tale, so. (And I won't go into a minor aside regarding Margaret Atwood, or the fact that said book was taking pages from what happened in Iran, or...)
I think it's a fairly silly take, myself.
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She's saying this is fascism and that the ads make it look benign. I'm saying that the ads make fascism look benign, in a joking sense, that the ads represent a similarly totalitarian, all-encompassing worldview.
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I was having a hard time parsing that, too.
I think it’s because the group behind these ads is explicitly Lausanne-Covenant evangelist.
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