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Notes -
“He Gets Us” doesn’t get it
[repost because server wipe, if that’s cool with everyone. Same post as yesterday, but probably some uncorrected mistakes from my note app]
The Christian advertising campaign “He Gets Us” aired two ads during the Super Bowl. The first ad asks “who is my neighbor?” interspersed with shots of mostly unsavory characters. The one you don’t value or welcome, the ad answers, to the drums of glitch-y hip hop. The second ad is titled “Foot Washing” and proved quite controversial. Among the scenes of foot washing depicted in the ad, the following have generated the most discussion: a Mexican police officer washing the feet of a black man wearing gold chains in an alley; a “preppy” normie-coded girl washing the feet of an alt girl; a cowboy washing the feet of aNative American; a woman washing the feet of a girl seeking an abortion (with pro-life activists sidelined, their signs upside down); an oil worker washing the feet of an environmental activist; a woman washing the feet of an illegal migrant; a Christian woman washing the feet of a Muslim; and a priest washing the feet of a sassy gay man. This last ad has tenfold the views on YouTube, in large part due to the negative response by Christians and conservatives, for example Matt Walsh and Babylon Bee editor Joel Berry. Joel writes,
I mostly agree with Joel. I think that this ad campaign is a failure.
The campaign fails to understand what brings people to a religion, or any social movement for that matter, or even any product, and as such it will not lead viewers to join their evangelical church or behave in the intended Christian manner. The audience of the Super Bowl is jointly comprised of people who care about what’s popular and cool, and people who care about remarkable feats of strength and dominance. These people are not going to be compelled to “love” their crack addict neighbor because you tell them to, because why would they listen to you? — there is no deeper motivation substantiated as for why they should do this. In the Gospel, Jesus doesn’t say “love your neighbor because it’s nice to do that and I am guilting you”, he says “love your neighbor so as to be a son of God whom created you, and obtain His reward, or else risk judgment from the eternal judge.” This is reward-driven and status-seeking behavior, the reward being administered by God and the status being administered by the church body. In its context, it requires a belief that the person saying it is the ultimate judge of both life and afterlife. (To behave Christlike, the required motivation is the totalizing significance of Christ... hence the name of the religion.) The starting point of the faith is the most dominant and powerful person telling you to care for the poor, not some cheeky “you should care about the poor because you should.”
Again, the Super Bowl viewer cares about what is popular and what is dominant. That’s normal, I’m not criticizing it. So could you not pull anything out of the religious tradition to depict the popularity and dominance of God? What, you feel bad playing off of FOMO to get people to your church? Jesus did just that on many occasions. 1, 2, 3, 4. Do you somehow feel guilty describing Jesus as glorious and powerful? What about the 72,000 angels he commands? You don’t want to tell the viewer that their prayers will be answered, when every 10 minutes there’s an ad for betting and gambling? Viva Las Vegas, non Vita Christi. So it has to be asked, what exactly is the purpose of the campaign? How is this getting people to your church, or even just getting people to behave better? “Jesus gets me” because… biker smoker and crack addict?
If the object of the ad is the instill a sense of pity to compel the viewer to behave morally, then there’s clearly more relevant subjects. Why not the focal point of the religion, the “innocent beautiful sacrificial lamb slain for our freedom” motif? The religion already comes with a built-in way to empower pity. You could say, “he gets us because he dealt with all our pain and temptation”, and that would make much more sense, while incentivizing the intended result of the ad. As is, I get the idea that the ad campaigners are afraid of any depiction of the life of Christ. I don’t get the sense that these people believe he is an essential ingredient of the moral life. And it’s fine if they don’t, that’s their business, but then dont make multimillion dollars ads that about it. If Christ is indeed essential, then your multimillion dollar ad campaign ought to be directed toward producing an image of Christ that is alluring, whether this be through scenes of pity or scenes of power. In an attempt to make Christianity subversive you should not be subverting Christianity.
Back to Joel’s critique of the ad: yes, the foot washing ad is problematic. Beside the fact that it is misinterpreted (explained below), it only works to further demean the image of Christianity to an irreligious America. “If I become a Christian, I’ll have to wash an old man’s feet?” The only viewers that will be compelled here are the foot fetish enthusiasts piqued by the alt girl. You are not going to convince anyone to join your social movement by promising them the opportunity to wash a man’s feet in an alley.
As was mentioned, the ad elevates the status of people who are not exactly Christ-coded, and those whose status is already elevated. During a Super Bowl, it’s not subversive to elevate the status of a vaguely athletic black man wearing gold chains. The half time show was Usher! Neither is it subversive to show an oil rig worker subservient to an environmental activist. In whose world is an environmental activist not more privileged than a dust-coated oil worker? And a wholesome girl washing an alt girl’s feet is not subversive in an event inaugurated by Post Malone’s national anthem. No, no; show me a wealthy and attractive CEO washing the feet of his fat ugly employee, if you must. But don’t just reinstitute the high/low status dynamic already in place by the world.
My last criticism I’ll try to keep short: the theological ground of these ads is spurious. There is indeed a scene where Jesus washes the feet of his disciples, but the writer goes out of his way to clarify the meaning behind it. It begins by mentioning that Jesus “loved his own who were in the world”, namely his followers present and future. The students are shocked when their superior attempts to perform this subservient act, until it is explained to be necessary. “If your Lord washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have given you an example, that you should do just as I have done to you. I am not speaking of all of you [not Judas]; I know whom I have chosen.” So, rather than being an act that a Christian is compelled to do to anyone, we have an act that Christians do to one another, to cultivate humility spirit and esteem for their brethren. They are told not to do it to merely self-labeled Christians, like Judas, let alone those of other faiths, as the ad suggests they do.
Foot washing was a culture-specific action that reflected the status hierarchy in a way that has no direct American parallel. An approximate American parallel would be for a boss to allow his employer to use his office, or for a boss to cook his employee’s family a dinner, or to clean his employee’s keyboard. The difficulty in understanding the event without careful study is the reason why it’s a mistake depict it as a means of propagating your worldview. Nothing is accomplished.
Reporting my reply from before the wipe:
The purpose of a Christian ad in the Super Bowl is to reach non-Christians.
From a non-Christian perspective, the Christian God is neither dominant nor popular, and it's not clear to me how one would change that through the medium of a Super Bowl ad.
Yes, and the successor culture has long-since made memetic antibodies to such appeals ubiquitous: Any talk of hell, sin, or damnation is simply assumed to be an expression of hate and intolerance. If you are attempting to communicate the message of Christ to the world, you need to engage with the fact that the world you're speaking to is not merely unaware, but actively armored against your message. Now, it's an interesting question where a Christian's responsibility goes from there, but it seems to me that interpretations of Paul's answer are at least colorable:
Jesus also told people that his yoke was easy and his burden was light, and that they would find rest for their souls. He told people that the poor and the suffering were blessed, while the rich and prosperous were destined for woe. This is not to say that the Gospel message can be reduced to a message of naive love-as-the-world-understands-it, any more than it can be reduced purely to hellfire and damnation. Both damnation and love-as-it-actually-is are integral, and different people need to hear different parts of those elements at different times.
No, but such descriptions are meaningless and pointless to people whose understanding of Jesus amounts to a cartoon.
I think it's aimed at saying "we do not and will not hate you." Given the considerable effort by the faith's opponents to paint sincere Christians as fundamentally hateful, and given the nature of the society we find ourselves in, this seems to me to be a plausibly-valuable message.
@reactionary_peasant brings up the salient point about how each era pretends that one virtue is the only virtue that exists. This is very true. He further quotes C.S. Lewis' observation that the current era's virtue is charity, and again, this is true. It seems to me that there's two other points that should go along with it, though. First, Lewis made that observation more than half a century ago, and it seems to me that our society is very clearly and quite rapidly moving away from Charity as the virtue du jour, toward Justice. The old days of universal license and freedom and live-and-let-live liberalism have largely gone away, and now we are all hurtling toward the opposite extreme, toward authority, laws, demands, and vicious enforcement. And secondly, to the extent that Charity is still over-played by the culture at large, the value of actual, balanced charity is not thereby reduced. It is still both good and necessary to maintain proper charity in balance with the other virtues, regardless of how the broader culture behaves.
God is love. Christianity is defined by emulation of God's love. Our message is not hateful, and there is no room for hate of other humans within it. Walsh argues that washing the feet of sinners and enemies of the faith can be seen as affirming their sin and opposition. While such misinterpretation is obviously possible, it does not seem to me that it is inevitable, or indeed, strictly speaking, avoidable. We are, in fact, explicitly commanded to love our enemies. We are, in fact, explicitly commanded to repay evil with good. It is true that the Gospel does not record Jesus washing the feet of non-believers; it does record him dying in humiliating, wretched agony to secure their salvation, which is a rather more extreme form of submission than washing feet. Showing kindness to defiant sinners does not necessarily concede approval of their sin, and showing kindness to real or presumed enemies is the direct command of our savior. Misperception of such kindness as approval of sin requires either willful blindness, or a complete absence of meaningful communication.
Christians, also, need the reminder that we cannot hate. We may oppose our enemies, and perhaps we may even fight or kill our enemies, but whatever we do must be compatible with love for those on the other side. It seems to me that this requirement is much less restrictive than many in the world would presume, but I do not believe that this makes it any less meaningful a restriction. The civil war killed more than half a million Americans, but when it ended, the winners did not exterminate the losers, nor even enslave them. Instead, they made peace, and many soldiers who had spent years earnestly trying to kill each other laid down their arms and lived together. Our modern society spits on that idea, furious that the wicked were not sufficiently punished, that injustice was merely greatly reduced rather than entirely eliminated. I do not, and it seems to me that Christians should not. Humans will always sin, and many of them will always embrace their sin defiantly. Nothing we do or say will change that fact. Our job is to attempt to reach them despite their defiance, and that requires contact, communication, personal connection. Given the current climate, "We refuse to hate you" seems like a reasonable attempt at a start.
Is it? The purpose of this one appears to be trying to reach Christians and explain to them why the Christian thing to do is submit themselves to the left.
I disagree, for reasons explained in the rest of the comment.
Christianity demands a balance between loving the sinner and hating the sin. Non-Christians seem determined to insist that we only do one or the other, as their short-term-preferences dictate, but we will continue to do both regardless.
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