Editor’s Note: Woke Wars, formerly an email newsletter from The Sentinel meant to cover the cultural insurgence of wokeness in our society, is now exclusively available on our website.
Super Bowl viewers were greeted with a somewhat less woke set of commercials this year.
As wokeness continues to fall out of fashion among major companies and other institutions, Americans saw the return of more normal and nonwoke advertisements as they watched the game.
Budweiser had a wholesome commercial involving a baby Clydesdale. Harrison Ford was seen talking about his Jeep. Pringles had a quirky advertisement about moustaches. Bud Light even ditched self-described transgender Dylan Mulvaney in favor of Shane Gillis and Post Malone.
A return to normalcy.
But the most woke advertisement of the evening came from He Gets Us, an evangelistic campaign that has developed a reputation for mixing Jesus Christ with social justice.
Their advertisement this year showed a Christian street preacher hugging an attendee of a “pride parade” surrounded by rainbow flags, a man power washing the words “go back” spray painted on a home, and other caricatures that tried to speak into modern cultural issues.
The problem was not that Christians were shown displaying affection for sinners or demonstrating compassion for immigrants. The problem was the way in which He Gets Us boiled down the issues at hand in such a way that Christians who affirm that homosexuality is sin or assert that mass immigration is harmful to their nation are made out to be villains and false believers.
If you still think the He Gets Us advertisement was an effective evangelism tool, then view this alternative that had a far more straightforward message, made by a pastor in his spare time rather than marketing firms paid millions of dollars. They should have hired him instead.
A rather straightforward task.
Christian institutions, much like certain purported conservatives, have long been plagued by a mindset of copying the world, except in a more cheesy manner and on a five-year or ten-year delay.
That is why Christian institutions are still woke even though the culture is becoming less woke.
The solution is to set culture rather than follow culture. Christians cannot achieve that task unless we fear God over man while asserting a pure and timeless gospel message, affirming the realities of both judgment and salvation, and advancing a positive cultural vision for our world.
