Does "He Gets Us" get the church?

What's missing from the campaign's new advertisements

Despite the moaning and groaning of football purists, the Super Bowl has become more than a sporting event. In reality, it operates more like our culture’s high holy day, a larger phenomenon of which the game is now only a part.

The game, the musical performances, and the dozens of eye-catching commercials ensures that there is something for everyone. Record-breaking numbers tell us that this year’s Super Bowl was the most popular telecast ever. As new media speeds us toward fragmentation, the Super Bowl provided a much older service—it brought us all together.

And into this American assembly spoke the He Gets Us campaign, a group of well-funded evangelicals attempting to share the story of Jesus in a new way to new generations of None’s (people who do not self-identify as part of any organized religion).

One ad in particular generated a wave of online chatter and featured several AI-generated slides depicting various scenes of foot-washing. The reference is the account in John 13:1-20 when Jesus washes the feet of his disciples. In the passage, we get a glimpse of the Savior’s humility and love for an imperfect people which is fully revealed in his atoning sacrifice on the cross.

Building off the drama of that passage, the ad idealizes modern applications including one in which a Christian cleric washes the feet of a gay man and another in which a woman has her feet washed outside an abortion facility. The point was surely a shock-and-awe tactic of showing Christian love for individuals who the culture typically perceives as victims of religious intolerance.

However, I do not wonder so much about what the campaign says about those represented in the advertisement as much as it does about those who are glaringly absent.

Missing from the campaign is anything or anyone representing the institutional church, Christ’s ordained means of gathering his people and ministering to them through Word, sacrament, and prayer. Though purportedly sharing the story of Jesus, He Gets Us presents a mostly church-less form of Christianity. There is the Jesus, the bridegroom, but where is his bride?

Of course, there are several reasons why He Gets Us would make such a choice. The first is demographics. It is no secret that younger millennials and Gen-Z are highly distrustful of institutions. Organized religion, we are told, is the source of so many calamities—abuse, violence, bigotry—that no wonder the number of de-churched and un-churched people continues to rise. Perhaps by downplaying the relevance of the church, they think they can open up opportunities to reach new groups who would otherwise never darken the doorstep of a cathedral.

The second reason is simply the nature of the group behind the campaign. He Gets Us is a project of loosely tied evangelicals working through marketing firms and unaccountable to any single Protestant denomination. As such, He Gets Us operates similarly to several evangelical efforts from the mid-twentieth century. Just as the early evangelicals wanted to differentiate themselves from the socially stigmatized fundamentalists, so too can we assume from the ad that He Gets Us wants to distinguish itself from the rest of conservative Protestantism.

Though we may applaud their evangelistic impulse, the unfortunate reality is the ad either signals that the church is irrelevant or embarrassing, neither of which is a great posture for a group trying to market itself as the truly faithful remnant.

Keeping in mind real demographic changes and assuming a noble desire to reach new people with the gospel, what would a better approach look like?

It is worth comparing the efforts of the evangelical He Gets Us campaign with its Roman Catholic counterpart. Like the foot-washing He Gets Us ad, many of the Roman Catholic Church’s Come Home videos highlight Christian acts of mercy and service to outsiders. However, the videos quickly transition to scenes from the inside including worship, the administration of the sacraments, and Christian fellowship. The message is clear: you do not get the former without the latter.

The divergence in Roman Catholic and Protestant ecclesiology certainly explains some of the differences but not all of them. Fundamentally, the contrast is that of a mood—Roman Catholics lead with their love for the church while He Gets Us, either out of indifference or embarrassment, has decided to get to that part later.

This is especially surprising considering the abuse scandals which the Roman Catholic Church has faced in recent decades as well as its adherence to many traditional doctrines about life and sexuality despite internal and external pressures to change. Generally speaking, Roman Catholics have found a way to both admit their faults and be social pariahs without compromising their views of ordination, marriage, and sexuality. And the most interesting thing is that it is working! Though the overall decline of Roman Catholic registries mirrors a similar collapse in many Protestant denominations, they are making significant inroads with younger people disillusioned by modernity and looking for antidotes in things like the Traditional Latin Mass.

Protestants can learn something here. Our culture continues to rush toward fragmentation. As it does, people will look to satisfy their natural desire for community and belonging in other things—Super Bowl’s if we’re lucky; Super PAC’s if we are not

In this ecosystem, the institutional church could prove itself a compelling witness as we gather for worship, are nourished by Word and sacrament, and equipped for every good work.