I think the confusion is that there are two different videos. The one during the Super Bowl was the Leftist one -- "He gets us" with all the footwashing. Then a day or two later, someone else produced a "He saves us" video, which was actually very good.
www.aaronrenn.com
This criticism honestly strikes me as absurd. For one thing, it's not hard to imagine why someone wouldn't think this is the best way to spend $7 million, even with a good video. But also, does he really think it's easy to amass that much money for a Superbowl ad? That statement made it hard to see the article as a whole as a good-faith argument.
Yeah I thought that part was ridiculously naive at best.
Yeah, you're not watching it in accordance with their intent. There's a reason why the woman about to get an abortion is having her feet washed while the mean-faced pro-life protestors are in the background when the word HATE pops on the screen. There's a reason why it is the woman about to get an abortion who is having her feet washed... and not the "hateful" pro-life protestors. There's a reason why it shows an LGTBQ advocate having their feet washed, but not a hateful "Westboro Baptist" protestor.
Author must be super rich, thinks that everyone has $7 million lying around that they could easily spend on a Superb Owl commercial.
Now, that I'd like to see!
If that was their aim, then there was no need to have a scene intentionally portraying those who protest abortion as hateful. Not to mention the fact that some of the people whose feet were being washed were not obviously guilty of any particular sin. If that was the message they were going for, this was not the way to get it across.
That, I think, helps to demonstrate that we're never going to succeed in making the gospel palatable to a world full of born God-haters.
If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard “preach the gospel, use words if you have to,” I would be moving up in the tax brackets.
I think that it is false application of Francis of Assisi. Since many of the peoples the early Franciscans encountered didn’t speak Latin or Italian, they play acted biblical stories.
Yes, I thought they were aiming for something close to that. I felt the intent was to start with people who are different from each other in small ways (age, social group, etc.) and progress toward portraying people whom the world claims Christians hate. Those people are also depicted as needy. They're needy due to circumstances, injustice, false messages the world is giving them—and they are needy due to their sin. People in trouble are complicated that way, but the love of Christ spans all those needs. His reaction to needy, troubled (and yes, trapped-in-sin) people is not hate but love. That's the truth amid all the false perceptions.
I agree that portraying abortion protesters as hateful would be bad, but I didn't see that in the ad. Are there different versions? In the version I saw, the abortion protesters looked gentle, not at all like the bad stereotype found in movies. I thought the person washing the feet might have even come from the group of protesters, who were kind folk like her. Maybe we see what we expect to see. I expected an ad from the Hobby Lobby camp, who have a history of being broadly pro-life and gospel-affirming, and that's what I saw.
At the very least, this speaks to the poor design of the ad, whatever the intent might have been. But when you have a large group of people engaged in an activity that the culture would describe as hateful, juxtaposed to someone doing a very different activity that's clearly supposed to represent love, and there are no indicators in the video itself connecting the two, it's hard not to see that as indicating contrast and difference rather than association and likeness.
I see how the culture might have conditioned us to think that any abortion protest we see on TV must be intending to make us think "hate." But it's really hard for me to look at this image and think the creators meant to depict hateful people.
Fair enough; I'll admit that my focus was more on the juxtaposition than on the specific way in which the protesters were portrayed. But I still think the juxtaposition bears more weight than the specific portrayal of the protesters. I think Aaron Renn (link to his article posted by someone else in an earlier comment) has the right read:
And again, even if that's not the right understanding of the intent behind the image, it's a pretty natural way to understand it. Even if your understanding is correct, it's far too subtle to be effective. We really have to take seriously how strong the cultural association is going to be between protesting abortion and hate, especially in an ad in which, "Jesus didn't preach hate," is pretty much the only message.
I completely disagree with your assessment. And what’s more, I think your assessment is illustrative of something about what is wrong and why Christians can’t change things: because there’s always someone trying to argue for the merits of what is bad. There’s always someone trying to call good what we rightly see as problematic. Just stop.
This is the second time this month I have noticed you drop a rhetorical bomb and then be content to leave the conversation.
I do agree with this, but I also agree with Solas comment on Jack's assessment. We need to stop supporting the trash that progressive "Christians" put out. It's the wrong message to support.
