Over 100 million people watched the Super Bowl this Sunday. Many viewers were surprised, though, by two commercials that ran during Sunday’s game. One of these ads, from the HeGetsUs campaign, ran in the second half of the game. In the ad, there’s a thumping electronic beat and rhythmic claps, fueling a sense of momentousness. A series of images play. Scenes of conflict, often in familiar settings—shops, parking lots, schools, and restaurants.

The intensity of the scene increases, then the audio suddenly changes as the song fades away and we hear crowds, screams, and shouts. Sounds of violence and fear. We see a scene of angry protesters with signs that proclaim the Black Lives Matter slogan “I can’t breathe.” Second, just two photos later, we see a White man with a megaphone, wearing a Viking-style horned helmet like those worn in the Capitol Insurrection. The images come faster and faster, mere flashes amidst an audio assault. Then, silence. A siren wails in the distance. Words appear on a black screen: “Jesus loved the people we hate.”

White Evangelicals have always been adept at using the tools of commercial culture for evangelistic purposes. The twentieth-century Evangelical approach to mass media was to create wide networks of Christian mass media to rival, or at least parallel, secular/mainstream media. From John Roach Straton evangelizing atop a 1920s automobile to Christian influencers on TikTok, Evangelicals have exerted social influence by appropriating media culture and using it to evangelistic ends.

Read more at University of Chicago Divinity School: Sightings