Jesus Ad Christianity

The 21st century installment of a long tradition

This week’s essay is a couple days early. Hope that’s OK!

First of all, a summary of the Super Bowl ads as a collective this year:

Were I a Chiefs fan, that would also be my reaction to the game. As it is, even the very welcome but admittedly still bizarre annihilating Eagles victory contributed to an entire evening that encapsculated the otherworldly, out-of-body experience that has been 2025 so far.

The ads were…(fumbling for the word for weird in a bad way). There were major celebrities hawking obscure websites using very bad copy. There were tongue calisthenics. There was the singer Seal as a seal. There was a boy with a cowboy hat head. Like, the hat was not on his head, it was his head. There was Catherine O’Hara and Willem Defoe playing pickleball together, when neither of them are known for either pickleball or ever being seen in the same genre much less frame (unless I’ve missed something). It gave “let’s pick two celebrity names out of a hat and have them drink beer" vibes. There were things so dumb and/or inscrutable that I can’t even describe them for you.

Then there was Kendrick Lamar, who I am perfectly willing to believe is incredibly talented and whose performance was a profound statement on the meaning of America. I am told it was also a troll of our Troll President, which I am all about. God bless Kendrick. I also gather Kendrick is enemies with Drake, whose music I am slightly familiar with because it is ubiquitous in Africa and, I believe, intentionally produced to drive a person to madness. I am definitely #TeamKendrick.

But I am not Kendrick Lamar’s intended audience and the entire performance zoomed over my head like a New York City seagull stalking a pizza slice. Watching it added to the experience of alienation and confusion.

And that brings me to this year’s installment of Jesus, The Ad. As you are probably aware, there has been a Jesus ad campaign for a few years now, paid for by the same people who destroyed Jesus’s image in the first place, such as the Hobby Lobby family, a major Trump donor.

I mean, pro tip: If your God needs an ad campaign, something has gone horribly wrong.

If you haven’t seen them, they are very arty, well done ads that assure us that Jesus “gets us,” and that “us” includes people who would definitely be suspect to the average Hobby Lobby shopper. I dare say these ads are woke AF, straight outta some currently banned CRT-DEI training videos. This year’s included a gay person at a pride parade, lots of Black and brown folks, as well as people cleaning up hateful graffiti that could have been lifted from a Trump rally sign. A Trump rally that the people who paid for these ads also funded.

In fact, when the ads first aired a few years ago, MAGA Christians were briefly up in arms over them, until they were assured by their handlers that they were actually some kind of weird psy-op against the liberal heathens.

Which, of course, they are. The Jesus ads are just another case of the crazy-making, Alice-in-Wonderland, Orwellian mind games of the MAGA movement, ripped straight from the authoritarian playbook, or even that of your average narcissist next door. They use projection, hypocrisy, disinformation, and indefatigable shamelessness to create an upside-down, mirror-image reality in which the sane are crazy, the law-abiding are criminals, the truth-tellers are liars, the patriots are traitors, and the devout are apostates.

And those who take Jesus’s teachings seriously become the ones threatening the faith. And the ones actually threatening the faith are the policemen of Christianity.

The Jesus of the ads is the real deal. He humbly serves others, cares about refugees (WAS a refugee, we are told), embraces LGBTQ people, makes peace between warring factions, and shows us that true greatness is about loving the least of these. Here’s this year’s:

But through the ads, the real Jesus is appropriated by false prophets. It’s the wolves donning the clothing of the sheep in 60, highly effective, seconds flat.

If only the folks who paid for these ads actually followed the Jesus in them. If they did, maybe USAID wouldn’t be shuttered right now and the lives of the world’s most vulnerable wouldn’t hang in the balance. Maybe an autocrat wouldn’t be taking a sledgehammer to democratic institutions that have guaranteed liberty and stability for all of us, including Christians of all kinds.

Maybe my Ukrainian friends wouldn’t be facing deportation. Maybe my Black friends wouldn’t be disparaged as DEI hires. Maybe the trans people I know could exist in peace. Maybe my many, many friends who have survived sexual abuse and assault wouldn’t have a rapist as their president, his Cabinet filled with more. Maybe a massive movement of Christians wouldn’t be brainwashed on lies, denigrated by their associations, and separated from their reality-based family and friends.

Maybe the $100 million that this ad campaign costs could be used to feed the hungry and house the homeless. And maybe it wouldn’t even be deemed necessary (it’s not necessary anyway), because Jesus’s message and ethic wouldn’t be completely covered in toxic sludge that the people behind this campaign shoveled on top of it.

If you think this kind of bifurcated, compartmented spiritual existence—in which Christians act like Jesus in some carefully curated contexts while otherwise laying waste to everything he was about in a vile bid for power—is new, well, you haven’t studied the history of white American Christianity, most notably its southern, more fundamentalist strain, which is the most direct theological and cultural ancestor of present-day white evangelicalism.

I keep coming back to the absurdity and hypocrisy of the beginnings of the American missionary movement in the 19th century, a movement that remains the pride and joy of white evangelicalism. How the world’s and history’s largest, most sophisticated mission board, the Southern Baptists,’ was very literally started in order to appoint slaveholders as missionaries. How they kept right on sending out people to “spread the good news” to Black and brown people around the world for decades and decades while brutally oppressing, exploiting, and even murdering them here at home. How so many missions supporters continue to celebrate the good work “their people” do around the world, while they vote for a man who uses racism and fear and bigotry to kick out refugees, close off even legal immigration, and cut off aid to the poor around the world.

(Side note: Aid administered in many cases through their own organizations! Franklin Graham, whose Samaritan’s Purse receives USAID funding, defended Trump’s actions last week, claiming USAID is under the control of evil leftists and that SP won’t be affected due to a State Department waiver (a dubious claim). More likely SP and other “approved” organizations will get government money more directly and with less oversight. And I can tell you, having some familiarity with both private charities and government work, there is far less accountability in the former. Government contracting and agencies are bound by laws and regulations and overseen by Inspectors General and Congress.)

Or, along a parallel track—how a culture so obsessed with certain people’s sexual behavior and gender identity, who are so afraid of a marginalized one percent of the population, they have repeatedly voted for a rapist and criminal and covered up massive, systemic sexual abuse in their own midst.

In my experience and in my study of American religious history, white American Christians have long expended more energy convincing themselves they are good—and by extension, deserving of power—than they have actually striving to be good.

And I’m not necessarily talking about missionaries and other charitable Christians themselves; many of them are incredible people doing amazing work. I’m talking about a large segment of the culture that supports such people and work.

I’m talking about how, for decade upon decade, white Christians have used such work to absolve themselves of serious introspection or consideration of their own hearts, their own behavior, their own agendas, their own love of power. And of core features of their own theology that are deeply intertwined, from their very birth, with maintaining racial, gendered, and other hierarchies that are anathema to the Gospel.

Maybe the reason you make Jesus ads is to avoid following Jesus. You go out and save the world to avoid reckoning with your own moral peril. You pursue power to avoid your own vulnerability. You loudly proclaim your version of the Gospel so you don’t have to listen to the real thing. You project certainty to flee from your doubt. You claim to love so you don’t reveal your fear.

I texted our friend

Diana Butler Bass

after the ad aired last night, looking for some reminder or validation of why these ads drive me so forking insane. Because on the surface, they are more than unobjectionable. They are beautiful. They are what I imagine Christianity should be.

She wrote back matter-of-factly, “They have great ads. And retrograde theology. The ol’ bait and switch.”

She went on to describe how Jesus Ad Christianity plays out in many evangelical churches. “They are cool and hip, they have great websites and social media…It’s the brand. Rope ‘em in. And then brainwash folks.” You get people in the door with fun music and good coffee and the Jesus in the ad. Then you feed them with a theology of selective grace, targeted judgment and discrimination, and in many cases these days, a destructive political agenda.

I’ve heard gay Christians describe the deliberate stealth involved. They scour church websites or email or call ahead of time to determine if they will be welcome in a particular church. They’ve learned the hard way that unless they get an unequivocal statement of affirmation, it’s going to end up being a “no.” They joke about pastors saying, “I’d love to get coffee to talk about it” as code for, “No, we don’t accept you, but I’d like the opportunity to try to make that sound better than it is.” I’ve had similar interactions regarding women’s constrained roles in churches, as if female subjugation is somehow wonderful if you just look at it from just the right angle.

Journalist Kirsten Powers has written and spoken extensively about becoming involved in a conservative Presbyterian church at a time of “deep emotional vulnerability,” only to realize she had apparently signed on to an entire political and cultural program she didn’t want, including a theology of patriarchy. She also got an overall religious framework that was more dogmatic and fear-based than it seemed at first.

During my religious era, I ironically was the most fearful I've ever been in my life. Here I thought finding God would lead to peace and a sense of meaning. Instead, I was given the competing and crazy-making messages that God loved me and there was nothing I could do to change that and that if someone was living out of God's will, they very likely would go to Hell for eternity.

I became completely neurotic, and it took years of therapy, religious deconstruction, and healing to become myself again.

I spent many years in similar contexts and had a similar experience, although I also recognize that many people find healing and true community in such places. There are many cases of lives changed for the better in these contexts. I’ve seen that.

The question is, what else are they finding, and what does it cost others? Who else suffers when the ranks of those who single out gay and trans people for condemnation are swelled? When the chorus of voices telling women they primarily exist for men’s benefit grows louder? When a culture that teaches unquestioning obedience to authority protects those who abuse their power?

And these days, we have to ask—what is the impact of such a system of belief for all of us who co-exist in a pluralistic democracy? What social problems are ignored and allowed to fester when everything is boiled down to personal salvation in an unproven afterlife? What happens when 80% of believers infuse an authoritarian movement with religious obligation? And when their political participation is enough to saddle a secular nation with the results?

Jesus Ad Christianity wants to have Jesus and ignore him, too. It wants to hide rotten fruit in beautiful Gospel boxes. It wants to celebrate humility as greatness, but only for the duration of a one-minute Super Bowl ad.

I definitely fall short of Christ’s example in many ways and on every single day of my life. I don’t give all I should to the poor and suffering. I am not generous with my time. I can be judgmental and bigoted. I can be foolish and unkind. In many respects, I, too, invest more in the idea of my goodness than in actually following its path. There are lessons here for us all, whether or not we are even religious.

My substandard faith and human frailty has hurt feelings and broken relationships and inflated my ego and wasted my gifts.

But thus far, it has not imperiled one of history’s great democracies.

And that’s ultimately my problem with Jesus Ad Christianity.