By Chris Satullo
I tend not to watch Super Bowls in which neither of my two teams is playing. Given that my teams are the Eagles and the Browns, that means I tend not to watch most Super Bowls.
But two weeks ago, my wife wanted to watch the Usher halftime show (roller skates!?!). Out of rainy Sunday inertia, I ended up watching the compelling second half and overtime.
I did, however, boycott the first half – which meant I missed the foot-washing.
During the game’s first 30 minutes, a group called Come Near expensively rolled out the latest installment in its Jesus – He Gets Us campaign. The one-minute ad presented a series of still photos depicting people washing the feet of other people – a Muslim woman, an immigrant fresh off a bus, a dreadlocked Black teen, a trans person – whom they might be expected to scorn. With INXS’s “Never Tear Us Apart” as its soundtrack, the ad ended with the message: “Jesus did not teach hate. He washed feet.”
If you didn’t see it, click here and give it a watch. (And if you don’t know about the Gospel roots and meaning of the ritual of foot-washing, click through here to the Gospel of John 13:1-17.)
In a vivid demonstration of how polarized, dug in and screwed up our nation really is, this ad unleashed cascades of bile from both the right and the left.
A host of outraged evangelical conservatives denounced the ad as “woke” and as blasphemously depicting Jesus as nothing more than “a divine social worker.” (My wife the social worker would like to have a word. Also, might I mildly observe that some of these same evangelicals seem to regard Him as little more than a motivational speaker and investment adviser.)
There exists a type of American Christian whose Bible is well-thumbed near the Old Testament pages that speak of vengeance, inflexible rules and thundering judgment. But the Gospel verses that detail the Beatitudes, or Jesus’ words about not casting the first stone, or it being harder for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven? Not so much.
During this Super Bowl ad break, these evangelicals were experiencing painful cognitive dissonance. The visual style of the photos staged by photographer Julia Fullerton-Batten – unironic, busy, tonally drenched – likely was for them cozily reminiscent of bygone days. They recalled covers of 1950’s Look magazines, or Norman Rockwell paintings, or the illustrations in old Sunday school booklets – artifacts from back when people like them were unquestionably in charge, and all was right with the world.
So, the visual vibe was familiar, but the message – You actually aren’t doing Christianity right – enraged them. Hence the spluttering outrage.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the divide, you might think that liberals who preach tolerance, equity and inclusion might celebrate an ad that affirms such values, while enlisting The Big Guy to drive home the message.
Sweet thought, but no.
For some on the left, several things stood in the way of them embracing an ad that basically says that Jesus prefers their vision for America over Donald Trump’s.
First off, and I admit this gets double-helix tricky, a lot of the money behind the He Gets Us campaign stems from Hobby Lobby. That’s the arts and crafts chain which – in its own policies and in its funding of right-wing advocacy groups – has clearly been anti-gay, anti-trans, anti-abortion and anti-contraception. Speaking of cognitive dissonance, it’s hard to square that record with the message of this ad.
But last year, a new organization called Come Near took over running the campaign and distanced itself somewhat from all that anti-ness.
For example, its website states flatly:
Many of those who represent Jesus have made people in the LGBTQ+ community feel judged and excluded. And others in the Jesus community have simply ignored their stories and lived experiences. So let us be clear in our opinion. Jesus loves gay people and Jesus loves trans people.
The son of the Hobby Lobby founder is still on the board of Come Near. Could it be that the next generation is struggling toward the light?
But many progressives just can’t take the win – just as they can’t take the win from Bidenomics, from progress on climate change, or anything that suggests progress is possible even when they, and their particular vision, aren’t totally in charge.
I often turn to Vox to get a fair, nuanced take on complicated issues. The site’s pop culture/media writer, Aja Romano, recently tackled the swirling reactions to the foot-washing images. They (I use the writer’s preferred pronoun out of respect, while lamenting how it messes up syntax and meaning) tried so hard to be fair-minded. In the end, however, Romano just couldn’t get past the Hobby Lobby problem and their own difficulty with conceiving of Christianity (or perhaps any religion) as a force for good and justice.
Romano’s piece is littered with adjectives and phrases that betray discomfort with the idea that a religious message could be sincere, healing and dedicated to bending the arc of history toward justice (historical irony intended). The foot-washing “ethos” is “even weirder than it sounds.” The ad is “bizarre,” “unnatural,” “disjointed” and “quizzical.” (This last modifier is used ungrammatically, but I should be more kind. Romano is so trying to be fair here.) Moving along, the choice of song is also somehow deemed “puzzling.”
Romano notes – while exaggerating somewhat the degree to which this is true – that many of the images depict the foot-washer as a middle-class white. They conclude this makes the act of foot-washing insincere and “performative.”
First (and please imagine my face here with a look of indulgent amusement, not bilious anger), the idea of a young, woke progressive tweaking anyone else for being performative is endearingly pot-kettle-black.
Second, Romano and others seem to miss that having the cis, white and comfortable be the foot-washer does not make the imagery safe or wish-washy. It makes it tough and radical. It’s saying to its real target audience – the border-wall lover, the abortion clinic protester, the trans bathroom hysteric, the Back the Blue flag-waver: Yo, you need to get off that moral high horse of yours and find Jesus where he’s waiting for you, down in the dirt, ready to wash the feet of people whom you fear, scorn and dismiss.
Third, any symbolic ritual is, to a degree, performative. What distinguishes a meaningful performance from performative hypocrisy is whether the stance adopted for the sake of a ritual is genuinely reflected in the person’s heart and actions.
It’s traditional in many Catholic dioceses for the bishop to wash the feet of laypeople on Maundy Thursday, the day before Good Friday. When Pope Francis does this, it’s movingly authentic. When certain American cardinals who ruled with iron, Pharisaic rigor washed feet, it was galling hypocrisy.
Granted, the He Gets Us campaign’s Hobby Lobby ties still make it an unsettled question whether there’s a serious hypocrisy problem lurking here. But might we all at least grant that this ad, and the whole campaign, could prove to be brave, positive, and useful? It may have the power to nudge some evangelical conservatives to pause, to reread their Gospels and think. I offer my prayer to God that it might also help some secular liberals discover that the Christian faith includes tenets, wisdom and adherents that do not fit the biased stereotypes they harbor in their minds.
If nothing else, consider this a matter of practical, urgent electoral politics: It is an axiom of Trumpist rhetoric that the left despises Christianity and Christians and can’t wait to banish them – and Jesus – from the public square.
Giving He Gets Us the benefit of the doubt and praising its powerful message is one way to put the lie to that rhetoric. Spending more energy on denouncing the campaign’s origins or questioning its sincerity is simply a gift to Donald Trump.
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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia