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I'm not even Christian, but all that ad said to me is "Ha ha, we stole your religion!"
It came off exactly like the smarmy atheist who claims that Jesus really would have been an open borders communist. Not because he's studied the bible and the context of primitive Christians, but because it's a meme he chooses to believe and it pisses off equally ignorant Christians who can't argue against it any more than he can argue for it.
And so the ad spends it's time ritually humiliating Christians, showing them debasing themselves, subservient to people who hate them. All while making a facile claim that it's actually the true expression of their religion.
Trying to google who sponsored the ad, apparently the left maligned family behind Hobby Lobby did it? Which doesn't exactly mesh with my immediate reaction to it. But then again, plenty of religious organizations are acting as suicidal hollowed out zombies of late, so who knows.
I don't have a problem with the fact that it humiliates Christians - humility is a virtue in our religion after all. The first shall be last and the last shall be first and all that.
But I do share a roughly similar feeling about the ad in the sense that it falls into a genre of "non-offensive" Christianity that keeps all the love-thy-neighbour stuff but excludes the wages-of-sin-is-death stuff. An absolutely central part of the faith is forgiveness for repentant sinners, but again and again I've seen that twisted into outright acceptance or celebration of sin itself. And this ad pattern matches to that sort of thing.
The message of Christianity is "You are evil and deserve hell but Jesus loves you anyway". That first part gets interpreted as "hate" pretty often. So when I see something emphasising the "Jesus loves you" while distancing from "hate", while I agree with the literal message, it feels very much like a flavour of Christianity that is never going to get around to mentioning that sin is a thing and you're supposed to repent and turn from it.
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Isn't your response in the same genre? You are telling a group that you are not a part of how they should feel about a particular issue on the basis of your beliefs about what that group believes.
I don't think so. If Coil is anything like me, he's had some experience fighting the Christian Right in his heyday before The Turning. We have a rough familiarity with what the average US Christian tends to value and believe because we spent years sparring with it. As outsiders, our understanding may have been necessarily imperfect, and our arguments motivated. But we could detect the general shape of the thing, and it did not include 'love poor migrants', 'the kids are totally fine', and 'kiss black people's feet'.
That may be a generalization (it is), and I may not be a Christian (I'm not), but it's not impossible for me compare where Christian status and power stood in my youth versus today. I can't NOT notice how that ad panders to so many modern lefty sensibilities, meanwhile actual churchgoers I know are decidedly on the Right, regardless of what their religious leadership decrees towards the purpose of modernizing the faith. Is there any cultural bone they could have thrown to social conservatives (y'know, the foremost representative group in US Christianity), or would that have been too icky?
Like... don't show me an ad full of lefty tokens with every group that's been earning side-eye getting their feet smooched and pretend my criticism is some sort of gatekeeping. It's disrespectful to my old foe, and I just feel bad for them.
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I'm not an op-ed journalist. I'm not ranting on a conservative Christian message board trying to rally them to offense. I'm not on twitter stirring the pot for attention or rage-click/income. I had a reaction I kept to myself, and my wife, until it came up here. And here is notable as a place relatively removed from both the ignorant edgy atheist and the ignorant triggered Christians.
No, I don't think my response is the same at all.
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