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The Super Bowl is a cultural phenomenon that reflects America’s consumerism, economic precarity, and civic religion. The National Football League (NFL) has created a multimedia machine worth tens of billions of dollars, with the Super Bowl becoming an unofficial national holiday. This year’s game featured the Black National Anthem for the first time, but most of the NFL’s players and coaches are Black and brown individuals who are expected to remain silent on political and social matters unless they are “conservatives,” perpetuating the notion that they are second-class citizens. Some right-wing propagandists and “culture war” bloviators attacked the Super Bowl for its supposedly “woke” politics, and ads for “Jesus Christ” were aired during the game.
The anonymous group of “Christian” big money funders behind the ad campaign, “He Gets Us,” wants to turn the country into a White Christian theocracy. Their ads, which have shown up on billboards, YouTube channels, and television screens, are spreading the message that Jesus understands the human condition. The donors backing the campaign, until recently, remained anonymous, but billionaire co-founder of Hobby Lobby, David Green, told talk show host Glenn Beck that his family was helping fund the ads.
The “He Gets Us” campaign is using the language of social justice, but there is no material commitment to practicing social justice. This lack of commitment disturbs Josiah Daniels, who is an Associate Opinion Editor at Sojourners. The real motivation behind the new “Jesus Christ” ad campaign is to increase the power of White Christians in American life, as their numbers are shrinking. Christian nationalism is an existential threat to American democracy and freedom, as shown by new research from PRRI (Public Religion Research Institute) and the Brookings Institution.
PRRI’s findings indicate that Christian nationalism is correlated with hostility towards pluralistic democracy, support for political violence, racism and white supremacy, misogyny and hostile sexism, nativism and xenophobia, authoritarianism, and social dominance behavior. The new “Jesus Christ” ad campaign, with its focus on the teachings and example of Jesus, ultimately gets at the real political underpinnings of the campaign: the belief that America will become a more peaceful, successful, and wholesome place once it has become a more fully Christian nation. On Sunday, $20 million was being placed on that bet.