Among Beyoncé flogging Verizon and ads for Mexican avocados, yesterday’s Super Bowl offered up a smorgasbord of best in class advertising all rudely interrupted by a football game.
However, one spot that’s being called out for all the wrong reasons was from the US Christian awareness group He Gets Us (which is reportedly funded by the billionaire family that owns US arts and craft chain Hobby Lobby.)
Called “Foot washing” and the work of Dallas-based creative agency LERMA, the AI-generated ad plays on the Christian egalitarian view of washing someone’s feet who is believed to be beneath you.
In the work a policeman is seen washing the feet of a homeless man, a woman washing the feet of a person outside an abortion clinic and a neighbour washing the feet of a Muslim woman.
The whole thing is set to INXS’s classic “Never Tear Us Apart”. Watch the ad below:
According to He Gets Us, the campaign is aimed at modernising Jesus. A spokesperson for the group said: “As we explored creative ideas, we recalled the story of Jesus washing his disciples’ feet and realised this was the perfect example of how we should treat one another, even those people with whom we don’t see eye to eye.”
However, not everyone is happy with the charitable message of the ad. US news site SB Nation labelled it “easily the worst Super Bowl ad of all time”.
Interestingly the ad appears to be equally hated from both the left and the conservative, religious right.
Joel Berry, editor of conservative publication The Babylon Bee, wrote on Twitter/X that he believed the commercial was “strictly following oppressed v oppressor intersectionality guidelines” and trying to either “sell Jesus to leftists” or “cynically” use Jesus to “sell a political movement.”
Pastor Darrell B. Harrison posted to Twitter/X, “It would take a week — at least — to properly exegete this mission statement by ‘He Gets Us.’ At best, it is moralistic therapeutic deism. At worst, it is gnostic heresy that posits Jesus as a divine social worker.”
Author Travis M. Snow wrote, “Jesus washed the feet of people who repented of their sins and left everything to follow him. He Gets Us is the epitome of hijacking the symbols of the New Testament Gospel in service to the secular Left.”
Meanwhile you can check out some of the social media hate below:
