🎶 Jesus Is a Brand of Mine 🎶

The He Gets Us campaign's brandification of Jesus won't save us.

It’s probably unavoidable that the Church tends to take on the energy of the era’s dominant institutions. It’s part of what has made it such a durable animal over the centuries. We evolve. 

In the ‘80s, churches were businesses, with pastors acting as CEOs of small companies delivering a weekly product. 

In the 90s, Gen X pitched Church as a counterculture fad, defined more by what it wasn’t than what it was. The Church took cues from Kurt Cobain and Lost Boys. Christians were different. Christians were rebels. Christians were freaks. 

In the ‘00s and 10s, as entertainment became the focal point of American culture, the Church became an experience. Pastors were rock stars, celebrities, delivering eye-popping spectacle, the best show in town.

But now, the vibes have shifted away from monocultural group experiences and towards faux-curated drivel organized around our clicks and purchasing habits. Post-Covid, the corporate, communal services that have been the American Church’s hook for centuries are starting to look a lot less appealing. 

In this landscape, the Church is pivoting to become a Brand — an amorphous collective feeding off name recognition and vibes, barking for attention from your timeline and/or TV set, assuring you that despite the lack of face and body, it is definitely your friend, someone who thinks and talks just like a human person would. It gets you. 

This is He Gets Us, the campaign about which you’ve surely heard. Having rather dramatically failed to be the hands and feet of Jesus, a staggering $100 million has been poured into outsourcing the job to a series of ads run by a corporate subsidiary with the comically sinister name of The Signatry. 

The whole thing has the air of a celebrity Notes app screenshot apology after a scandal. “My fans know that recent actions do not represent the real me and I apologize if anyone was offended. — Jesus”

And now several million Super Bowl viewers got to see a hyper-personalized chunk of digital advertising conceptualized by a series of influencing teams before getting focus grouped into a flashy ladle of algorithmic slop begging you to stop scrolling for two seconds so that the backend code can register your briefly detained attention span as a “view” for a creative team to present to a corporate board who will poke and prod those numbers into the programming for future ad campaigns for Jesus or whatever other product your data ends up being useful for.