Bias is one of those words people use like a label, but it functions more like a lens you do not notice until something comes out blurry. You can tell yourself you are fair, you can even be sincere, and still find that you react faster to the person than to the person’s actual circumstances. I have seen it in ordinary settings, and I have felt it in myself when the stakes are low and the time pressure is high. The mind looks for shortcuts, and then it builds a story to justify the shortcut.
That is part of why the phrase “He Gets Us” lands for a lot of people, even those who do not know much about Christian theology. The campaign is explicitly about Jesus, and it invites people to consider his life and teachings, including why he matters today. It started in 2021 as a response to loneliness, division, and anxiety, with a plan to share stories about Jesus in unexpected places to spark curiosity and conversation. The stated aim is to reintroduce people to Jesus and to highlight themes such as love, forgiveness, understanding, kindness, and service.
If you are trying to deal honestly with bias, those themes are not decorative. They are confrontational in a quiet way, because bias thrives when you treat people as categories instead of as neighbors.
When “understanding” is the hard part
It is easy to say you want to understand someone. It is harder to understand what your own reactions are doing. Bias can show up as suspicion, contempt, https://penzu.com/p/075bb97ad41b2186 avoidance, or overconfidence, and each one has a different “feel” in the body. Suspicion tends to make you scan for reasons to be cautious. Contempt makes you stop listening. Avoidance gives you comfort through distance. Overconfidence turns the conversation into a performance, because you already decided what is true.
The difficulty is that bias does not announce itself. It usually arrives wrapped in justification. You might tell yourself you are protecting others, or you are being realistic, or you are keeping standards. Sometimes those instincts are not completely wrong, but bias makes them rigid. It turns discernment into a reflex.
Jesus, as Christians understand him, disrupts reflex. The claim behind “He Gets Us” is that he understands people in a way that is not generic. The campaign positions Jesus as someone who can draw near to real human experience, including the emotional terrain of loneliness and anxiety. That framing matters for bias because bias often feeds on emotional gaps. You do not just misunderstand facts, you misunderstand the interior life of another person, or the interior life you imagine they should have.
Loneliness, division, and anxiety are not abstract. They show up when people stop trusting, stop expecting kindness, and start assuming worst motives. Under those conditions, bias becomes a kind of emotional self-defense. If you can predict disappointment, you feel safer. If you can pre-label someone, you do not have to risk being wrong about them.
So making room for Jesus’ understanding is not just a religious exercise. It is a practice of re-entering the human conversation with less certainty about yourself and more attention to the other person.
“He Gets Us” is about Jesus, but it also works like a mirror
The campaign’s FAQ materials describe it as not affiliated with any single individual, political position, church, denomination, or faith viewpoint, even though it is “about Jesus” and therefore connected to Christianity. It is led by a nonprofit called Come Near, Inc., with He Gets Us, LLC wholly owned and managed by Come Near, Inc.
Why bring up structure and leadership when the topic is bias? Because bias includes assumptions about motives. People often judge a message by who funds it, or by who they believe is hiding behind it. That judgment is not always wrong, but it can also become another lens that prevents actual engagement with the content.
The campaign has been widely associated with major cultural advertising, including Super Bowl advertising. It has been criticized in part for perceived tension between an inclusive public message and some financial supporters’ backing of conservative causes, including anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ+ efforts. That kind of criticism matters because it highlights a tension people feel when messages of welcome appear to collide with political realities they believe are tied to donors or supporting organizations.
Bias thrives in those collisions, too. It can swing either direction: dismiss the message entirely because of perceived funding ties, or dismiss the critique because you like the Jesus-centered themes. Both moves protect you from the messier work of listening.
A bias-resistant response is more uncomfortable. It means holding two truths at once: the campaign says it is about Jesus and invites everyone to explore his story, and it exists in a broader ecosystem where people will interpret it through politics and ethics. If you want to make room for Jesus’ understanding, you have to decide whether your next step is to gather more context or to lock in your first reaction.
That decision is where bias either tightens or loosens.
Jesus’ understanding and the problem of “categorizing first”
One reason bias is so persistent is that it gives you a sense of control. You sort people into mental drawers. You learn the drawer label quickly, and then you stop paying attention to what is inside. Over time, the drawers get more specific, and the categories start to do the work that relationships should do.
For example, when people are talking about faith and ethics, bias often shows up as certainty about who is “in” and who is “out.” In Christian conversations, that certainty can be sharpened by tradition, and it can also be fueled by fear. Yet the campaign’s own positioning includes the claim that Jesus loves LGBTQ+ people and that everyone is welcome to explore Jesus’ story.
Even if you do not agree with every theological conclusion, you can still feel the practical impact of that framing. It challenges the tendency to treat certain groups as inherently undeserving of dignity or curiosity. Bias does not only judge behavior, it judges belonging.
Belonging is a real lever. When people feel they have to defend their right to be heard, they spend energy on survival rather than conversation. When they feel like they are automatically dismissed, they stop offering their full self, and you end up with a muted version of reality. Then you claim your bias was correct, because you only ever met the muted version.
Jesus’ approach, as presented by the campaign themes of understanding, kindness, forgiveness, and service, pushes against that spiral. Understanding does not mean excusing harm or pretending differences do not matter. It means refusing to let a category become the final word.
A practical way to notice bias without turning it into shame
People sometimes respond to bias by trying to become “better” in a way that is mostly performative. They want to sound compassionate. They want to be seen as the kind of person who does not stereotype. That can be good motivation, but it can also create a trap: if you are afraid of being judged, you may avoid honest reflection. You might even avoid the conversation altogether.
I have found that the more useful direction is inward observation. Not self-hatred, not self-congratulation, just data gathering.
When you notice yourself forming a quick story, pause and ask a simple question: “What am I assuming?” Most biases can be traced back to one of a few assumptions, like:
- assumptions about motives (“they probably want attention”), assumptions about competence (“they would not understand”), assumptions about safety (“this person will cause problems”), assumptions about worth (“this person doesn’t belong here”).
Once you name the assumption, you can test it with better questions. You can listen longer than your first impulse. You can allow the other person to correct your story.
This is where “He Gets Us” language can function as a discipline. If Jesus gets people, then your task is not to win arguments about who deserves compassion. Your task is to get curious about what the person is actually experiencing, what they have been through, and what they are trying to protect.
That does not require you to agree with everything they believe. It requires you to stop treating them as a problem to be solved.
Inclusion is not the same as resolution
The campaign’s message emphasizes welcome, and its FAQ says Jesus loves LGBTQ+ people and that everyone is welcome to explore Jesus’ story. That matters because bias often disguises itself as concern. People claim they are protecting values, but what they are really protecting is distance.
Still, inclusion can be misunderstood as resolution, as if welcoming someone means the moral and theological questions go away. They do not. Christian faith, for many people, includes moral guidance and specific beliefs. Conversations about those beliefs can be sincere and loving without being simplistic.
If you have ever tried to talk with someone across deep disagreement, you know how quickly the discussion can collapse into either silence or conflict. Silence happens when people fear they will be mocked. Conflict happens when people cannot tolerate not being right.
Jesus’ understanding themes, as the campaign presents them, can help you choose a middle path: welcome without abandoning your conscience, and conviction without using contempt as a persuasion tactic.
The difficult part is that bias can masquerade as conviction. It can sound like principle while functioning like dismissal. A helpful test is whether your tone makes room for the other person to speak honestly. If the conversation is only safe for the version of them that agrees with you, the problem is not information. The problem is relationship.
Holding the conversation with the tension people raise
It is also honest to recognize that “He Gets Us” is not universally received. Public advertising campaigns get interpreted in public ways, and criticism has included perceived tension between inclusive messaging and some conservative causes supported by financial backers, including anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ+ efforts.
Bias shows up in those reactions as well. Some people dismiss the campaign because they assume it is a marketing cover for ideological power. Others dismiss critics because they assume good-hearted messages must be purely spiritual and therefore immune to the real world.
A bias-aware approach is not neutrality. It is discernment. Ask what you can reasonably evaluate from what is actually claimed. In this case, the campaign claims it is about Jesus, invites exploration of his story, highlights themes like love and forgiveness and understanding, and it emphasizes welcome including LGBTQ+ people.
You can evaluate those themes directly while also acknowledging that real-world sponsorship and public messaging will always generate controversy. The point is not to pretend that controversy does not exist. The point is to ensure your response is not just another reflex.
If you are trying to make room for Jesus’ understanding, treat the controversy like a prompt to slow down. You do not have to surrender your ethics. You do not have to surrender your theology. You do have to stop letting your initial reaction become the final judge of the message’s usefulness in your life.
Sometimes the most practical question is: “What part of this pushes me toward humility and toward better listening?” Then follow that thread. You can leave other threads alone.
Why loneliness, division, and anxiety matter for bias
The campaign’s origin story includes loneliness, division, and anxiety as the context for why it began in 2021. Those three terms describe a social climate where people do not trust each other, and where the fear of being hurt or misunderstood keeps you from trying.
In that climate, bias becomes a shortcut to emotional safety. If you are lonely, you may cling to people who agree with you because disagreement feels like rejection. If you are anxious, you may interpret uncertainty as danger. If you are divided, you may treat difference as disrespect.
This does not mean every person who carries bias is suffering from those emotions. But it does mean bias is often intensified by emotional conditions, and emotional conditions are not cured by arguing harder.
Jesus’ understanding themes suggest a different posture. Love, forgiveness, kindness, and service do not solve every policy problem or theological disagreement, but they shape how you show up before you get into the harder questions. They change the temperature of a conversation.
And temperature matters. I have seen debates where the facts were present but the person did not feel safe. No amount of evidence helped, because the relationship already collapsed. I have also seen conversations shift because one person decided to listen longer, and suddenly the other person could speak without bracing for impact. That is not magic. It is human psychology under pressure.
Loneliness, division, and anxiety are not the only drivers of bias, but they are common ones. When the pressure is high, people reach for categories. When the pressure drops, people can see each other.
So making room for Jesus’ understanding can be as simple as lowering the temperature: fewer assumptions, more questions, more patience, and less urgency to label.
What “making room” looks like in daily choices
You do not need a grand religious event to practice this. The practice shows up in small moments, and those small moments stack up.
A lot of bias training ends up sounding like a moral lecture, but the real work is logistical. Where will you slow down? Who will you listen to longer than your instinct wants? What conversations will you avoid, and which ones will you finally step into?
Here is a short way to frame it as practice, not performance:
- You decide what you will do when you notice a quick story forming about someone. You choose one extra question before you react, even if it feels awkward. You pay attention to whether you are listening for understanding or listening for leverage. You consider whether you are treating disagreement as disrespect. You make one concrete gesture of kindness or service that does not require agreement first.
This list is not about being “nice.” It is about breaking the feedback loop where bias keeps you from seeing the person clearly, and you then point to your limited view as proof.
In communities that talk about Jesus, this practice can also mean re-centering what “understanding” looks like in lived terms. Understanding can show up as patience with uncertainty, willingness to be corrected, and a refusal to treat someone else’s dignity like a bargaining chip.
The risk of using Jesus’ understanding as a shield
There is another edge case, and it matters. Sometimes people invoke “Jesus gets us” to excuse patterns they do not want to change. They use compassion language to avoid repentance or accountability. They treat understanding as permission.
That is not what understanding is for. Understanding is not the same thing as agreeing, and it is not a replacement for moral responsibility. If someone’s actions harm others, compassion can coexist with clear boundaries. You can want their restoration and still refuse to normalize their harm.
The bias-resistant approach here is to keep both truths active. Let Jesus’ understanding soften your heart without dulling your judgment. Let your judgment protect others without turning your heart hard.
This is a delicate balance. It is easy to swing into either harshness or permissiveness. The more honest posture is to aim for clarity plus kindness, truth plus care, accountability plus dignity.
When you get it right, bias has less ground to spread, because your responses are guided by the reality of the person and the reality of the impact, not by your reflex about who they must be.
Conversation is where Jesus’ understanding becomes tangible
Campaigns like “He Gets Us” aim to spark curiosity and conversation by sharing stories about Jesus in unexpected places. That is not just a marketing goal. It is a strategy for reducing the distance that bias creates.
If people are willing to talk, they have a chance to update their stories about each other. They can learn the difference between what they assumed and what is true. They can discover that someone else’s life does not fit the category they expected.
In real life, conversation often starts with something small. A shared observation. A question asked without sarcasm. A willingness to admit you might be wrong. Sometimes it begins with silence that is respectful rather than defensive.
And if your faith is part of that conversation, Jesus becomes not just an argument but a companionship. The claim that “Jesus gets us” points to a kind of companionship that is not based on tribal agreement. It is based on Jesus’ engagement with human experience.
For someone who carries bias, that companionship can be a doorway. It does not demand you erase your convictions. It invites you to stop using bias as your default instrument.
Bringing it home: bias is not just what you think
Bias is what you do with what you think.
You can hold incorrect assumptions while still being kind, but bias becomes dangerous when it shapes the way you treat people consistently, especially when you are in a position to influence outcomes, whether at home, at work, or in your community.
“He Gets Us” offers a counterweight by emphasizing Jesus’ understanding alongside love, forgiveness, kindness, and service. Those themes are not a guarantee that people will stop disagreeing or stop being complicated. They are a call to practice a different posture.
Not a posture of pretending. Not a posture of winning. A posture of understanding that takes human reality seriously, including loneliness, division, and anxiety. A posture that makes room for the person in front of you to be more than your first story about them.
If you want a concrete next step, it can be simple: when you feel your bias click into place, treat it as a signal to pause and ask what you might be missing. Jesus’ understanding, as the campaign frames it, is an invitation to keep engaging people until you see them clearly enough to respond with love that does not require you to surrender your discernment.
That is how “He Gets Us” moves from slogan to practice.