“Bias” is one of those words that can sound like a diagnosis. People either treat it like a personal failing or like a scientific inevitability, and both reactions can quietly shut down the next step. The step I keep coming back to is simpler and more demanding: seeing people clearly.
That is the tension at the center of the He Gets Us campaign. The campaign presents itself as a way to reintroduce people to Jesus and his life, then connect those themes to everyday concerns like love, forgiveness, understanding, kindness, and service. It began in 2021 as a response to loneliness, division, and anxiety, with the idea of sharing stories about Jesus in unexpected places to spark curiosity and conversation. The campaign says it is led by Come Near, Inc., a nonprofit, and that while it is connected to Christianity because it is “about Jesus,” it is not affiliated with any single individual, political position, church, denomination, or faith viewpoint. The whole effort has been widely associated with Super Bowl advertising, and it has drawn both attention and criticism.
When you bring bias into that mix, you get a real question, not a slogan: what does it mean to let Jesus change the way you look at people who feel far away from you, annoying to you, threatening to you, or simply unfamiliar?
Why “Jesus” is such a loaded starting point
Say the name Jesus in public, and people tend to bring a whole stack of assumptions with them. Some have known Jesus through church language and scripture reading. Some have experienced Jesus through people who used religion as a weapon. Some are curious but cautious. Some are tired of anything religious that shows up on billboards or tries to “reach” them.
That is the first place bias shows up: in the reflex. A person sees a name, a brand, a tone, or a symbol, and their mind fills in what they expect to find before they have any evidence. The bias is not always conscious. Often it is just efficient, a shortcut your brain learned to protect you.
So when He Gets Us invites curiosity and conversation, it is stepping into a minefield. The campaign’s stated aim is to reintroduce people to Jesus and highlight themes like love, forgiveness, understanding, kindness, and service. Those themes can be experienced as warm and humane, especially if you have ever felt excluded or misunderstood. But they can also feel contested when other public signals do not match the inclusive tone people want.
The campaign has said, for example, that Jesus loves LGBTQ+ people and that everyone is welcome to explore Jesus’ story. At the same time, AP reported criticism focused partly on perceived tension between the campaign’s inclusive public message and some financial supporters’ backing of conservative causes, including anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ+ efforts. That kind of mismatch is exactly the sort of thing that makes bias hard to relax. If you already suspect that “inclusion” is a strategy rather than a commitment, your expectations become self-confirming.
Bias is persuasive. It finds the details that justify it, then dismisses what complicates it.
The deeper issue: people are easier to categorize than to know
A lot of bias is really about categories. People become labels: the “kind” people, the “unreliable” people, the “those folks” people. Once a category forms, your attention shifts. You stop gathering information that could challenge the category, and you start gathering evidence that supports it.
I’ve watched this happen in everyday settings. Someone disagrees with you, and https://hegetsus.com/ suddenly the conversation becomes about motives rather than meaning. A stranger’s accent or background gets treated as a shortcut for intelligence, character, or safety. An online post gets read as a personal threat, even when it was probably just a thought written at midnight.
None of that is unique to one political party, one religious tradition, or one generation. It’s a human habit. And the habit has a predictable payoff: it reduces uncertainty. If you can place a person into a category, you can predict how you might need to respond.
The Christian claim behind He Gets Us is that Jesus matters, not just as a topic but as a way of seeing. If the campaign is trying to bring Jesus into cultural spaces, it is also trying to reposition what “seeing” should mean. Not “seeing” like scanning for risk, but “seeing” like noticing a person’s dignity, their need for grace, and their capacity to change.
That is why the word “forgiveness” matters so much in discussions about bias. Forgiveness is not denial. It does not erase harm. It is a decision about the future: you refuse to let the harm become the last word about the person. That refusal is hard when your brain wants to keep score.
In practice, learning to see people differently requires two shifts at once. First, you have to slow down your reflex to categorize. Second, you have to widen the frame so the person remains more than a label.
He Gets Us is structured around that kind of widening. The campaign says its resources include articles and topics focused on Jesus and subjects like relationships, bias, mental health, and hospitality. Even if you never engage with the campaign’s ads, that catalog suggests a consistent message: the way you treat people is not a side issue, it’s central to understanding Jesus.
“Unexpected places” and the problem of guarded attention
One of the campaign’s defining features, according to its own description, is the use of unexpected places. It began with the idea of sharing stories about Jesus in unexpected places to spark curiosity and conversation. That approach makes sense because guarded attention is real. If people feel sold to, they tune out. If they feel judged, they harden.
Unexpected placements can lower that initial resistance. They can act like a pebble in the shoe. You didn’t expect it, so you notice it. You might not like it, but you can’t ignore it. Curiosity follows, sometimes reluctantly.
But unexpected attention also creates a second problem: it can trigger cynicism. People wonder, “Why is this here?” And if the answer seems vague or overly managed, bias fills in the gap again. Cynicism is another shortcut your brain uses to stay safe. If you assume the message is trying to manipulate you, you never have to risk vulnerability.
Here’s the trade-off I see: curiosity is fragile. It can be nurtured by honest, consistent messaging and practical examples. It can also be damaged by perceived inconsistencies, especially when the inclusivity the campaign claims to offer feels at odds with other public political and financial associations. AP’s reported criticism highlighted that exact tension. From a bias perspective, that tension doesn’t just create controversy. It also affects whether people can hear Jesus as an invitation or interpret it as a performance.
If you want to learn to see people differently, the environment matters. You do better when the messages you receive give you reasons to trust, not just reasons to argue.
What “love, understanding, kindness” demands of a biased mind
A lot of people treat love and kindness as emotions. But in moral life, love is mostly attention with a direction. It is deciding that a person is worth the effort of being seen.
Understanding can be even more uncomfortable. Understanding is not agreement. It is the willingness to ask, “What would this person be experiencing that I’m not experiencing?” For bias, that question threatens the sense of certainty that categories provide.
Kindness is the bridge. When bias has you set for conflict, kindness introduces friction in a useful way. It makes the person in front of you harder to dehumanize.
Forgiveness, again, is where the stakes rise. Bias often wants to make harm permanent. Forgiveness makes harm a chapter, not the whole story.
The He Gets Us campaign says it highlights themes like love, forgiveness, understanding, kindness, and service, and it publishes resources on topics including relationships, bias, mental health, and hospitality. In other words, the campaign isn’t only aiming for a mood. It is aiming for behavior and interpretation, the internal habits that determine behavior.
Hospitality is particularly relevant to bias. Hospitality is not passive. It is a practice of making room. That can mean time, conversation, or simple acts of respect. It can also mean resisting the reflex to keep a person at a distance because they trigger your assumptions.
This is where Jesus becomes practical rather than abstract. A Jesus-centered approach pushes against the instinct to treat people as threats or inconveniences. It also pushes against the instinct to treat people as projects you can “fix” from above.
If you want to test whether bias is loosening, look for the difference between “I need to manage this person” and “I need to know this person.”
The controversy problem: when inclusive messaging meets real-world backing
It would be easy to write about He Gets Us as if it lived only in its messaging. In reality, it exists in the world with budgets, partnerships, and supporters. The campaign says it is not affiliated with any single political position, church, denomination, or faith viewpoint. It is led by a nonprofit and managed through its relationship with Come Near, Inc., according to its FAQ.
Yet AP reported criticism that focused partly on perceived tension between the campaign’s inclusive public message and some financial supporters’ backing of conservative causes, including anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ+ efforts. That matters because bias does not run on theology alone. It runs on trust.
When people feel trust has been compromised, their ability to receive a message changes. They might interpret inclusive claims as strategic rather than sincere. Even if the inclusive claim is sincere, perception still affects how quickly hearts soften.
This is the part that often gets missed in debates about campaigns: people do not just evaluate ideas, they evaluate credibility. And credibility is fragile. If you want to encourage people to explore Jesus’ story, you have to recognize that “explore” does not mean “ignore questions.”
If you are trying to learn to see people differently, one practical question you can ask is: where does my bias come from, and what does it protect me from?
Sometimes bias protects you from disappointment, because it already assumes disappointment. Other times it protects you from guilt, because it makes your posture feel righteous and firm. Sometimes it protects you from effort, because categories are easier than relationships.
The He Gets Us campaign says it began in response to loneliness, division, and anxiety. Those are not abstract social trends. They are emotional conditions that make people defensive. If you carry loneliness, you can mistake warmth for manipulation. If you carry division, you can mistake curiosity for a threat. If you carry anxiety, you can interpret ambiguity as danger.
The campaign’s inclusive claim that Jesus loves LGBTQ+ people and that everyone is welcome to explore Jesus’ story is part of its intent to reduce division. But bias still asks for proof, and people decide what counts as proof.
Practicing a “Jesus-shaped” way of seeing
The point is not to accept every campaign claim uncritically. It is also not to dismiss the entire effort because it comes with controversy. What matters is whether the message about Jesus actually changes how you relate to people who make your biases flare.
Here’s what that can look like without requiring you to agree on everything about sponsorships or politics. You can hold a person as a person while you evaluate the message. You can let Jesus challenge your reflexes while you remain honest about what feels inconsistent.
I’ll offer a brief practice set, because seeing differently is not only a belief, it is a set of habits you can repeat.
- When a person triggers your assumptions, pause and name the category your mind wants to use, then ask what you do not know about them. Replace debate about identity with questions about experience, “What has life been like for you?” rather than “Why do you believe that?” Choose hospitality in small ways, showing up with basic respect even when you are not ready for agreement. Treat forgiveness as a decision about the future, not an eraser for real harm. Let understanding include discomfort, staying curious long enough to let the person’s own story complicate your first impression.
That list is not a replacement for theology. It’s a way to test whether your heart is moving. If the habits don’t change your posture toward people, then the lesson is not landing, no matter how persuasive the message feels on paper.
Edge cases: when “seeing people differently” can become avoidance
Learning to see people differently can be misused. Some people turn it into avoidance. They stop naming harm because they want to be “kind.” Others weaponize it to silence accountability: “Don’t judge,” becomes “Don’t confront.”
Jesus-shaped seeing does not eliminate truth telling. It changes how truth telling happens. It calls for clarity without dehumanization. You can disagree strongly and still refuse to reduce someone to their worst moments.
Another edge case is “selective compassion.” People can be kind only to those who mirror them. If someone is socially convenient, you show hospitality. If someone is inconvenient, you withdraw. Bias shows up as friendliness with conditions.
To counter that, you need a method for yourself. If you notice that your kindness scales up or down based on familiarity, you are not practicing hospitality, you are practicing comfort. Hospitality is riskier, because it includes people who do not automatically make you feel safe.
The He Gets Us campaign frames Jesus’ importance with themes like service and hospitality, and it addresses bias as a topic in its resources. That framing implies the message is supposed to travel into everyday treatment of others, not just into religious reflection.
So the test is simple, even if it is hard: do your relationships change, or do only your thoughts change?
Learning to see, especially when you disagree about the messenger
One reason this topic keeps resurfacing is that cultural visibility creates sorting. People hear “He Gets Us” and immediately sort into camps: supporters, critics, the curious, the exhausted. That sorting is its own kind of bias.
If you want to avoid that trap, you can separate two questions.
First, what does Jesus invite you toward? The campaign says it aims to reintroduce people to Jesus and highlight themes like love, forgiveness, understanding, kindness, and service.
Second, what does the campaign’s public footprint suggest about trust and consistency? The campaign itself says it is not affiliated with any single political position, church, denomination, or faith viewpoint, and it is led by a nonprofit through Come Near, Inc. But reports of criticism indicate there are perceived tensions tied to some financial supporters and political causes.
You do not have to pretend the second question is irrelevant. People deserve honesty about where support comes from and how it may be interpreted. Yet you can still take the first question seriously.
In lived terms, this can look like letting the Jesus themes challenge your treatment of someone even while you keep a critical eye on the campaign’s ecosystem. You can say, “I’m not endorsing everything. I still want to be transformed in how I see people.”
That approach is often the only way bias actually shrinks over time. If you refuse the conversation entirely, you never practice seeing differently. If you accept everything unquestioningly, you never practice discernment. The middle path is uncomfortable, but it tends to be more durable.
The quiet work: bias rarely disappears at once
Bias does not flip off after a single meaningful message. It loosens gradually, often in moments you do not dramatize. You might catch yourself mid-thought, the category forming, and stop it before it becomes speech. You might notice you defaulted to suspicion and then return to curiosity.
The campaign began in response to loneliness, division, and anxiety. Those conditions do not vanish just because someone displays a message about Jesus in public spaces. But they can soften when people experience genuine curiosity, respectful conversation, and visible kindness.
Even if you never engage with the campaign directly, you can still adopt the Jesus-shaped aim it points toward: seeing people as more than their labels. Learning to see people differently is not only an ethical improvement, it is a relief. It reduces the constant mental friction of treating strangers as threats or judging neighbors as symbols.
And it changes the kind of conversations you can actually have. The goal is not agreement. The goal is mutual humanity, the ability to move from reflex to relationship.
That is what it means, in a practical sense, when Jesus is presented as the center of a campaign called He Gets Us. It is an invitation to stop hiding behind bias, long enough to notice the person in front of you, and then choose love, forgiveness, understanding, kindness, and service as habits, not as arguments.