Among the many strange, wacky or confusing ads that aired during Super Bowl Sunday, one stood out as particularly eye-rolling: a foot-washing ad from the “He Gets Us” campaign. The ad featured a series of images of people washing another person’s feet, most offering an interesting reversal of the roles of oppressor and oppressed: a cop washing the feet of a young black man, a white woman serving a migrant and, for the one that made me laugh the hardest, an anti-abortion protester kneeling in front of a presumed patient at a family planning clinic. “Jesus did not teach hatred,” read the slogan as INXS coverage aired. “He washed his feet.”
The backers of the ad were obscure to the public, leaving open the question: Are the people behind it just naive? Are they the last liberal Christians trying to convince Donald Trump-obsessed evangelicals to stop the tidal wave of hatred? Or is this ad a bait and switch, trying to lure non-believers with a false message of love and acceptance, only to get them to join the MAGA movement?
There’s no point in creating false suspense: that’s option number three. Jesus may have been against lying, but his self-proclaimed richest champions in American society have no qualms about using deception to build their army of MAGA Christianity.
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As many journalists have carefully detailed, the The “He Gets Us” campaign is largely funded by the Green family, owner of Hobby Lobby. Their life mission, in addition to getting rich by selling cheap trinkets, is to pushing their far-right brand of Christianity into the country. The Greens-funded group that released the “He Gets Us” ad last year has .In anti-LGBTQ hate groups and organizations opposing women’s rights. THE the family funded initiatives to put religious propaganda in public school classrooms, demanded the right to fire people for being gay, passed off forgeries under the name “Dead Sea Scrolls”, stole antiquities from Iraq and, well safe, refused to comply with COVID-19 pandemic restrictions for fear of losing profits. . They also successfully sued to block their employees to use their own health insurance to cover contraception.
Despite its opposition to birth control, Hobby Lobby also doesn’t like women having babies. When a Hobby Lobby employee got pregnant in 2010, she alleges she was fired for requesting time off to have the baby. Losing your job is the Christian “compassion” the people behind the Super Bowl commercials have to offer.
The Greens have been upfront about their donations to the “He Gets Us” campaign, but other donors remain anonymous. This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the layers of deception used by the campaign to lure unsuspecting people with the enticing but false promise of love and acceptance offered in the ads. The group behind the ads, for example, is the new Come Near. The far-right Servant Foundation ran it last year. This change in leadership, not coincidentally, allows the campaign to further conceal its funding and leadership, as its tax documents are not yet publicly available.
The sleaze gets even worse if one visits the “He Gets Us” website. On the FAQ sheet they claim “Jesus loves gay people and Jesus loves trans people.” This could lead queer people to falsely believe that they will find affirmation from this group. In reality, as the anti-LGBTQ donation log suggests, this is the game that right-wing Christians are playing when they say that “loving” gay people means telling them that they are sinners who need to give up their ” lifestyle “.
“This is the game right-wing Christians play: ‘loving’ homosexuals means telling them they are sinners who need to abandon their ‘way of life’.”
The site also offers the opportunity to “connect with someone near you who can help you learn more about Jesus and his life or to connect with a group where you can ask your questions about life and the faith”. But when I clicked on the link, it didn’t put together a searchable list of churches or Bible study groups that a person could research on their own before contacting. Instead, the user is asked to fill out a form and told that someone will contact them. This is a giant wake-up call. There is no way for a user to know who this information is intended for. Instead, they will be contacted by someone whose affiliations and agendas are hidden and who is likely to use high-pressure sales techniques to manipulate someone who was alone enough to click on those links in the first place.
This has all the hallmarks of what psychology experts call “spiritual abuse,” which is when a person craves faith or a higher sense. used as a weapon to control them. I interviewed experts on this topic for an upcoming investigative report, and repeatedly they point out that high-control religions often use bait-and-switch techniques to bamboozle vulnerable people. First, the person is subjected to “love bombing,” during which they are repeatedly told that they are safe and cared for now that they have joined this community. Once they become emotionally dependent on the church or group, they become victims of bullying and degradation. If they are gay, they are told they will go to hell unless they try (and invariably fail) to change who they fundamentally are. If they are women, they are told that their duty is to give up their ambitions and even their self-esteem, in order to be a “help” to a man.
There’s no doubt that this is exactly the shift happening here, which is why there are so many layers of obfuscation around who is behind the “He Gets Us” campaign. To someone who sees the ads and is unaware of the malicious politics of the people behind them, the packaging is quite appealing. It’s easy to understand how queer people, young women, or progressives can think this religious community is for them, only to find out long after being recruited that, no, it’s actually the same right-wing Christianity that they chose. been avoided. The tactic is to engage them so deeply that, by the time they realize it, they are too afraid of losing their community to leave.
Evangelicals claim to believe in “the truth and the light,” and yet here they are, using deceptive techniques borrowed from the world of con artists. But this is sadly unsurprising, in an era when white evangelicals have convinced themselves that they are at war with the culture as a whole. The “holy war” framework authorizes the violation of all kinds of moral codes. On 60% of white evangelicals support Trump’s big lie about the 2020 election, and almost a third of them believe that political violence is justified to achieve their ends. (Chances are the real number is much higher, but there is a reluctance to admit it to a pollster.) White evangelicals feel entitled to use lies and violence to gain power policy. So of course they are okay with using deception to get more people to become warriors for MAGA Christ.
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