Who gets dominion over us? A Burkian analysis identifying Jesus in the He Gets Us Campaign

Abstract

In 2024, political scientist Paul Djupe found that 40 percent of American Christian adults believe "God wants Christians to stand atop the '7 mountains of society,' including the government, education, media, and others." Capitalizing on these Christian desires is the Christian Evangelical mass marketing effort, "He Gets Us" (HEGU), which advertises Jesus' narrative to America as a relatable source of values-based practices to endure the current historical moment. It is a privileged instantiation of Christian discourse in the public sphere that provokes questions of 1) Who is the Jesus represented in the campaign, 2) Who is behind it, and 3) What are their motives? In this thesis, I investigate HEGU as a manifestation of a Christian doctrine called Dominionism, which aims in part to control the media landscape in the U.S. I utilize Kenneth Burke's theory of persuasion by identification to examine the campaign's strategic presentation of Jesus as a rhetorical means of moving audiences towards a Christian value system. My analysis looks at a limited set of texts and 13 images used by HEGU related to the loving act of foot washing. This study builds off the work of religious studies scholar Stephen Prothero's 2003 examination of the cultural figure of Jesus throughout American history as a "Rorschach test of ever-changing national sensibilities." I examine how the man from Nazareth is being sold through visual and textual website materials that mirror the marketers' ideological beliefs around social conflict. While HEGU claims to be spreading the authentic word of Jesus, their message privileges the beliefs of the wealthy conservative Christian class. This novel partnership between popular mass marketing and Christian cultural reform politics is a harbinger of future Christianizing media in the public sphere, and in response I suggest a critical need for attending to religious discourse. These discourses shape our students and thus their writing, which demands our attention to those enculturating religious messages.