(RNS) — Nothing commands Americans’ attention like the Super Bowl — an old-fashioned ceremonial event with something (an athletic contest, a musical performance, funny commercials, a celebrity romance) for everyone. It’s only fitting that the religion ads that ran during this year’s game harked back to post-World War America, when public religiosity was designed to bring us together.
Back then, the country’s presumed religious layout was, as the title of Will Herberg’s 1955 book put it, “Protestant-Catholic-Jew” (no nones need apply). Sunday’s ads were exactly that: two Protestant, one Catholic, one Jewish.
The Protestant ones were sponsored by Come Near, one of those nondenominational media outfits that have been pumping the Good News out to Americans since the early 1800s. This was the second year of its “He Gets Us” campaign on the Super Bowl broadcast, the “He” of course being Jesus and “Us” being, well, everybody.
“Who Is My Neighbor?” is a 15-second spot showing a series of apparently troubled people representing, as the ad puts it, “the one you don’t notice/value/welcome.” It ends with “LoveYourNeighbor” followed by “Jesus,” the last two letters, “us,” highlighted in yellow.
“Foot Washing” shows a minute-long sequence of photos of improbable foot-washing: a cop of a Black youth, a white rancher of an Indian, an anti-abortion protester of a young woman about to enter a family planning clinic, an oilman of an environmentalist, a suburban housewife of a Latino mother and baby who’ve just been bused to her neighborhood, and so on. “Jesus didn’t teach hate,” read the concluding message. “He washed feet.”
Both ads convey a message more in tune with the social gospel of Charles Sheldon’s mega-bestselling novel “In His Steps” (which gave us the phrase “What Would Jesus Do?”) than the political gospel of today’s MAGA Christianity. Small wonder that they’ve been assailed as promoting a “satanic” progressive Christianity.
The 30-second Catholic ad, sponsored by the Catholic prayer and meditation app Hallow, features Mark Wahlberg urging viewers to thank God “for this time to come together as a family, as friends, and as a country,” while urging them to ask for help “especially this Lent, to grow closer” to God.
With images of a church interior, people crossing themselves and a man being marked on his forehead with an Ash Wednesday cross, the import of the message is at once broadly inclusive and assertively Catholic. It harks back to “Life Is Worth Living,” the popular 1950s TV show in which Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, decked out in his full episcopal regalia, delivered generic religious advice to the American public.
Finally, there’s “Silence,” a 30-second ad sponsored by the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism, which was founded five years ago by the New England Patriots’ Jewish owner, Robert Kraft. It’s narrated by Martin Luther King Jr.’s speechwriter Clarence Jones, who imagines himself writing for King today “to remind people that all hate thrives on silence.”
Beginning with images of a burning cross and a burning swastika, the video montage includes a young yarmulke-wearing man and a hijab-wearing woman scrubbing away painted graffiti that reads “No Muslims.” Says Jones, “When we stand up to silence, we stand up to all hate.”
The ad could hardly make a clearer connection to the Civil Rights Movement, in which Jews disproportionately participated. Now as then, we conclude, to combat prejudice against one minority is to combat prejudice against all.
Throwbacks to postwar American culture, the Super Bowl ads promote a more irenic role for religion than what’s on tap these days. I’m all for it.
