They Fought the Gyre ... and the Gyre Won

Back in the beforetime when we all still had senses of humor about ourselves, the pastor at my church loved to talk about the approach to preaching adopted by our kinda sorta denomination called the Association of Vineyard Churches. "I want to tell you something," he'd say in self-deprecating imitation, "and if it doesn't work for you, just put it on the back burner, let it simmer for a while, or just throw it on back. So please don't be offended...but I feel led to tell you that Jesus loves you."

This low pressure, hippie aesthetic was a cultural trademark of the Vineyard, a church movement that, like Calvary Chapel, grew out of the Jesus People movement of Chuck Smith, Lonnie Frisbee, John Wimber and many others in the 1970s. That aesthetic exists even today, to such an extent that it caused a rift with the original congregation down in Anaheim when the broader church association wasn't willing to go Full MAGA a few years back. It's not that the Vineyard wasn't theologically conservative in a lot of ways, but that hippie history always created an emphasis on "doing the stuff" that Jesus did in ways that necessarily reduced the emphasis on Correct Opinions that dictated a lot of where the American evangelical church drifted over the last two or three decades.

But to be clear, the pastor's bit was also a classic preacher joke. To the uninitiated or godless heathen among you lot, a preacher joke is just a dad joke turned up to eleven - with all the potentially funny bits taken out. This was exactly that. It was also a clever bit of self-examination about how being seeker-sensitive - a term used by some evangelical churches to describe a more welcoming approach that doesn't hit new members too hard and fast on notions of sin, shame and judgment - can be taken much too far. At a certain point, if you've got a mind to make disciples, those hard things are things you've got to deal with.

Still, it is hard for me to imagine a message any more innocuous than the one promoted in the last few months by He Gets Us, a media initiative of a charity called Servant Foundation. In everything from advertisements on Reddit to multi-million dollar Super Bowl ad slots, He Gets Us has tried to promote what I think you'd have a lot of trouble describing as anything other than simple descriptions of the person and teachings of Jesus Christ.

For the Super Bowl, they ran this ad. The link at the end sends you here.

They also ran this ad, along with this short essay.

Before the Super Bowl, He Gets Us produced many other videos, too, like this one showing Midjourney AI imagery produced using prompts of love the way that Jesus described it. Forgiving someone who betrayed us. Spending time with prisoners. Clothing the poor. Feeding the hungry. Eating dinner with outcasts. Helping a neighbor in need.

While not an entirely faithful analogy, this video presented a way of understanding the plight of the refugee through the story of Jesus himself.

They also published a video about how the ministry of Jesus was one that resisted centers of wealth and power, embraced outsiders and pursued acts of love and justice even when that sometimes meant breaking the law.

You don't have to like the videos or the campaign.

Maybe you think they're pointless and saccharine, unlikely to be helpful in a cynical world. Maybe you think they're hypocritical, a wild and frivolous expenditure of financial resources that would have been better spent pursuing the ideas contained within them. Maybe you're a Christian who thinks they're counterproductive and milquetoast statements that will make it harder to bring people into the true discipleship Jesus wanted. Maybe you think they're harmless, if a bit silly, on account of the fact that you think just about everything to do with Christianity is completely made up.

I may not agree with most of those conclusions (I do think it a frivolous expense, and I do think they err a bit on the side of easy answers for a man who described himself as the rock who would make men stumble), but I think an entirely reasonable person could arrive at any of them.

Yet for the most part, the conversation and coverage of the campaign has not been about any of those conclusions. The narrative of the He Gets Us campaign has been completely dominated by the question of who funded it and what they must be up to. The graph below is a network map constructed from articles published about the He Gets Us campaign from a very broad dataset from LexisNexis. I'd do our usual explanation of how to read a graph like this, but in this case the explanation is a bit easier. Each dot, or node, is a single article. The ones in bold are articles which include framing around the secret backers of the campaign. Yeah, it's not the whole enchilada, but it's enough of the enchilada that nobody's asking for a to-go box.

In short, no one in the media cared about the ad campaign. The media cared that there was an ad campaign funded by The Wrong People - and heavily promoted this framing.

Thing is, The Wrong People aren't the wrong people to everyone. Much of the remaining enchilada, therefore, can be largely accounted for by a smattering of folks framing the campaign as being not about the literal Nazis who funded it but about those damned woke progressives who used it to impose their politics on a Gospel message.

And since news reporting in 2023 is so inundated with what we call fiat news, or opinions presented as fact, that coverage was almost never presented with only information for you to process as you saw fit. You see, dear reader, it is very important that you always be guided to the correct conclusions. Contain your shock upon learning that since the beginning of 2023, the density of fiat news language - language meant to tell you how to think about the news - was three times higher for coverage of "He Gets Us" than for the average news article in our dataset. It was also meaningfully higher than for any of our most fiat-sensitive sub-categories, including coverage of American political news.

Fiat News Index - Selected News Topics (1.1.2023 - 2.13.2023)

The result in the popular consciousness was a sort of bizarre apoplexy about an utterly benign, if mindblowingly expensive, campaign to spur people to think about being more loving, generous, forgiving and kind. So while I also don't think this is how Jesus would spend money, uh...

Meanwhile, in MAGA land...

How does this happen?

How does a campaign to encourage people to love like children, forgive extravagantly, embrace outsiders, speak their minds and still show mercy and grace end up with common knowledge that is simultaneously absorbed by our two disparate tribes as fascist and woke, respectively?

If you look at the people who funded the foundation that funded the ad campaign, watch a couple of the other videos they published that seem to dance on MAGA hot buttons like being canceled and disowning family for their beliefs, then rub your bust of Howard Zinn in a rather special way, you might catch a fleeting glimpse of whatever fever dream seems to have gripped everyone in the public sphere calling it "fascist" or "white-washing."

If, instead, you look at the images in the videos of refugees with brown skin, the people screaming disrespectfully at police and the people wearing masks during a pandemic (LOL, sheep!), then go read some of the admittedly watered-down platitudes on the He Gets Us website and meditate in front of your first edition of The Art of the Deal, all the while intoning "Kari Lake can still win, Kari Lake can still win," your mind's eye may fathom how a dramatized reading of some basic stuff said by Jesus of Nazareth in a commercial is really part of some elaborate NWO, CRT, woketivist plot.

But here's the thing.

Even if the sources of funding had been pure as the driven snow or the messages of the videos a Jonathan Edwards-style sinstravaganza with lots of Beth Moore and David French insults to placate the theobros on Twitter, I think the result of the campaign would have been exactly the same.

Why?

Because the reason the He Gets Us campaign got caught up so fully IN the widening gyre isn't because it was too woke or funded by fascists. It is because its primary purpose was to extract the Gospel FROM the widening gyre.

The widening gyre is our term, borrowed from Yeats, for the political environment created when we move from a coordination game to a competition game, which we believe took place in 2016, if not somewhat earlier. It describes what happens when our political identity becomes existential. It describes why we Americans live in two different realities, and why nearly every single issue, no matter how remote it might seem to our political lives, is now auto-tuned to the narrative of our political tribe.

The He Gets Us initiative is not only aware of the extent to which the Christian church in America has become enmeshed in this Widening Gyre. It is explicit that its core goal is to take it back. Their agenda - and they correctly and honestly call it exactly that - is to turn Jesus from "a tactic used to intensify our deep cultural divisions" back to "the world's greatest love story."

From politics to sexuality and religion, so many of us feel like our values, beliefs, and identities are under attack by the ideological “others” around us. Many perceive those who differ with them on issues of justice, dignity, and humanity as not just wrong or misguided but also as evil. As enemies. We often see these “others” as close-minded, selfish, hypocritical — and if we’re honest, many of us respond in kind. The more ideologically defensive we become, the more we are willing to sacrifice things like kindness, patience, and the respect and dignity of others for the sake of victory — the righteous ends justifying the dehumanizing means. And it’s tearing us apart...Whether it’s hypocrisy and discrimination in the church, or scandals both real and perceived among religious leaders, or the polarization of our politics, many have relegated Jesus from the world’s greatest love story to just another tactic used to intensify our deep cultural divisions.

From He Gets Us has an agenda

This matters to me. Strange as it may sound to those unaffected by it, division in the church over opinions about governments and leaders has caused more pain and separation in my life than almost anything else in the last two decades. If you're agnostic, atheist or subscribe to another faith, I recognize that may not be your experience. That's fine. Replace the church with any cultural institution you deem important that has been subsumed into the widening gyre, and I think you'll see some of what I see. I see how the tribal impulse to win within the widening gyre has corrupted so much that was good about us.

I've even written about it. And I came to a similar conclusion.

What does the path of history tell us? What does the aftermath of one of America’s greatest natural disasters and human tragedies tell us? What can we do to survive and escape a Competitive Game that doesn’t allow us to pull away from the table? If you’re reading this, you’re probably in the investment industry, or at least have an interest in financial markets. If you’re in the investment industry or in the financial markets, you like to win. So you’re not going to like my answer.

We play. And we lose.

The story of history, I think, is that the only way to defuse a Competitive Game is to win by eliminating your competition, or to choose to play a Collaborative strategy even when you know it is sub-optimal.

There is a time for war, and that is usually our instinct. But there is a time for sacrifice, too. In 529 A.D., Benedict of Nursia chose sacrifice. At a time where the Competitive Game had so gone off the rails that Rome fell into ruin, Benedict and his adherents isolated themselves from society and devoted themselves to service, industry and memory. The result of their efforts was isolation, poverty and celibacy. It was also the preservation and creation of much that was and is good about European culture and society. They preserved and practiced techniques for making foods and wines. They preserved writing, language, literature and histories. Agricultural methods and metallurgy. They were the Foundation during the collapse of the Empire.

What about us? What can we do?

We can start by laying down our right to take offense. We can be unfailingly committed not only to the principles of freedom of speech, but to the value of free expression and exchange of ideas. In other words, by not pursuing the counterproductive, obstructive aims of the worst cartoon the otherwise brilliant Randall Munroe ever made. We can be vulnerable, we can let our opponents assign us identities and titles we would never adopt for ourselves without complaint. We can believe the best about people, even if we know it may cause us harm. We can give up our right to be right.

Source: Before and After the Storm, or Make America Good Again (Epsilon Theory)

In the end, I think that's the part that He Gets Us didn't get. They thought that if you could marshal enough financial resources, enough powerful creatives, if you could maximize engagement and tether it to a message that was memetically powerful enough, then maybe, just maybe, you could take something beautiful that got sucked into the polarized, tribal, deeply unserious gravity well of the widening gyre and rescue it.

But it doesn't work that way.

You can't fight the Widening Gyre by trying to pull something you want to salvage out of it.

You fight the Widening Gyre by rebuilding the thing you want to survive outside of its pull.

Like everything else worth saving from this idiotic period in history, the solution will not come from the top down. It will come from the bottom up. Not by trying to convince the tribalists that they're corrupting or conflating a good thing with their tribal aims, but by forging a new tribe built around the ideas worth saving.