by Steven Ertelt, Lifenews.com
Some leading pro-life advocates are not happy with a Super Bowl ad that appeared to justify abortion.
During the big game last night, one of the ads sponsored by a Christian group shows people in various settings washing people’s feet. The ad is meant to convey the Biblical principle of Christians serving other people as service to the Lord.
One of the situations depicted is an AI photo showing a woman washing the feet of a woman outside an abortion business that the ad misleadingly labeled as a “Family Planning Clinic.”
Some pro-life advocates criticized the ad for making it appear that it was endorsing women getting abortions, which kill unborn children and violate Biblical pro-life principles. Other say the ad merely calls on us to follow Jesus’ command to love our neighbors and people regardless of who they are and what they do.
Joel Berry, the managing editor of the Babylon Bee, thought the commercial was leftism surrounding by a Jesus message.
There’s a reason the “He Gets Us” commercial didn’t show a liberal washing the feet of someone in a MAGA hat, or a BLM protestor washing an officer’s feet. That would’ve been actually subversive. Because they were strictly following oppressed v oppressor intersectionality guidelines.
This tells me they were either: A) trying to sell Jesus to Leftists by hinting Jesus thinks just like them, or B) cynically using Jesus to sell a political movement.
Here is the take of Ryan Bomberger, who leads the pro-life group Radiance Foundation. He cautioned that the ad could be seen as endorsing abortion rather than loving God and people but hating the sins.
Interesting ad from #HeGetsUs. It declares: “Jesus Didn’t Teach Hate.” Yes. And No. Of course He taught us to love one another as He has loved us. His Word also teaches us to “love what is good & hate what is evil.”
Even so, ad is thought-provoking and captures the beauty of humility.
I will say, however, that there can be all kinds of confusion with what they’re saying. If no one visits the website and digs deeper, it may appear to be sending a message that “He Affirms Us” instead of “He Transforms Us”. Also, disagreement & truth ≠ hate. Maybe better campaign name that captures Christ’s essence would be: #HeChangesUs
Southern Seminary professor Andrew Walker is one of those who took issue with the presentation of the commercial, sponsored by He Gets Us.
“He Gets Us framed evangelism with a leftward tinge, communicating the respectability of certain sins over others in our culture (although I’m not sure the ad even communicated that the respectable sins were sins at all),” Walker said on X (formerly known as Twitter).
“The socially high-status sins of the Left are the ones Christians are told to evangelize, not the low-status sins of the Deplorable Right because, it seems, they are the ones truly outside redemption’s reach,” he said. “Jesus loved the outcast, the broken, of course. So should we. That’s the beauty of Jesus—there is no partiality in the degree or type of brokenness in need of his redemption. The conditioning effect of these commercials in framing and reaffirming the social castes of American sin, however, is really something.”
“The truth of the matter is that Jesus redeems sinners from both the Right and the Left, whether high-status or low-status. Everyone is equal in their need for Christ (Rom. 3:23). That could have been communicated, but wasn’t,” he added.