“Bias” is one of those words people use when they want to sound serious, but it can still feel abstract. I’ve watched conversations drift into labels, then into defensiveness, then into silence. Something gets hardened in the process. Even if everyone involved believes they are acting in good faith, the outcome can still be harmful, because bias rarely shows up as a single obvious thought. It shows up as what we expect, what we notice, what we discount, and how quickly we assign motives.
That is why approaches like He Gets Us land for many people. The campaign invites people to consider Jesus, his life, and his teachings, including why he matters today. It also frames its origin as a response to loneliness, division, and anxiety, aiming to share stories about Jesus in unexpected places to spark curiosity and conversation. The organization behind the effort explains it is led by Come Near, Inc., and while it is not affiliated with a single individual, political position, church, denomination, or faith viewpoint, it is still explicitly “about Jesus” and therefore connected to Christianity.
If you are trying to understand bias through Jesus’ teachings, it helps to start with a simple premise: bias is not only about “what we think.” It is about what we practice, repeatedly, even when we believe we are being fair.
Bias is often trained, not chosen
Most people like to imagine bias as an on/off switch. Either you have it, or you don’t. In real life, it’s messier. Bias forms through patterns of exposure, repetition, and reinforcement. It can also form through fear. When you feel unsafe, uncertain, or judged, your mind tries to reduce complexity fast. It chooses shortcuts.
Those shortcuts can be subtle. You might assume competence based on familiarity, or assume threat based on difference. You might listen longer to the person who sounds like you, and interrupt the person who doesn’t. You might decide someone’s credibility before they’ve said anything of substance, based on their job title, accent, background, or the “type” of person you have encountered before in similar situations.
Jesus’ teachings challenge that habit because they keep returning to the https://hegetsus.com/ interior life, the place where motives and judgments begin. In stories about religious leaders, crowds, neighbors, and strangers, the focus often lands on the same question: what kind of person are you becoming when you think you are merely “judging circumstances”?
A lived example: I once worked through a difficult conflict with a colleague where both of us believed we were being reasonable. On paper, our requests were straightforward. In conversation, though, I kept noticing I was waiting for the “real point” behind what they said, as if their words required translation. They seemed to do the same to me. Over time, each of us treated the other’s meaning as suspicious. That is bias in action, even when no one uses a slur or intends harm. We turned interpretation into a courtroom.
Jesus’ approach presses the brakes on that process. It does not assume that people’s first interpretations are reliable. It calls for attention, restraint, and moral clarity that goes beyond first impressions.
What Jesus does with judgment
One of the hardest parts of learning about bias through Jesus is that his teachings do not flatter the desire to be morally superior. The point is not just “be nicer.” It is also not “erase judgment entirely.” Jesus clearly engages the real world of right and wrong, wisdom and foolishness, fruit and harm.
But he also addresses the internal posture that often accompanies judgment. A person can be correct in their conclusions while still being wrong in their spirit. A person can identify a pattern of behavior while ignoring the human complexity underneath. Bias often hides in that gap: the difference between seeing accurately and seeing with a hardened lens.
So the question becomes personal: when I judge, do I treat people as people, or as categories? Do I assume the worst before I ask questions? Do I consider the possibility that my interpretation is limited, not just my knowledge?
In practice, this is where bias turns into harm. If someone is reduced to a category, you stop expecting them to change. You stop expecting them to speak clearly. You stop expecting them to be affected by your words. That is how exclusion becomes easier than understanding.
Jesus’ teachings resist that slide. They repeatedly elevate mercy, attention to the vulnerable, and the kind of love that costs something. Importantly, this love is not only sentimental. It shows up as concrete action, and as a willingness to approach rather than avoid.
“Bias” is also about what love requires
The campaign He Gets Us says it highlights themes such as love, forgiveness, understanding, kindness, and service. Even without taking every moment of a campaign as a theological treatise, those themes align with a central idea in Jesus’ ministry: love is not primarily a feeling. It is a way of seeing and a way of acting.
When love enters the room, the dynamics change. People become harder to stereotype. You notice small truths you would have missed if you had already decided who someone “is.” You pay attention to context. You recognize that your own weakness does not disqualify you from growth, and you stop assuming that other people’s weakness is proof they are beyond help.
This matters for bias because bias often treats difference as danger. Love treats difference as an opportunity to understand. That doesn’t mean every disagreement dissolves. It means the goal shifts from winning to understanding, from sorting to serving, from distancing to engagement.
One edge case I’ve seen repeatedly: people try to correct bias by forcing politeness. They say “everyone is welcome,” but they refuse to listen when the conversation becomes uncomfortable. They keep the relationship at the surface level. That is not love in Jesus’ sense. Jesus’ model repeatedly moves toward the person, not around them.
And there is another edge case: some people use love as permission to ignore harm. Bias is not only interpersonal. It can be institutional, shaped by systems that advantage some people and burden others. If you sanitize everything in the name of kindness, you may prevent necessary accountability. Jesus is not portrayed as doing that. His love calls for truth, repentance, and a transformation strong enough to change behavior.
So the balanced stance looks like this: be humble about your interpretations, be honest about impact, and commit to change, personally and collectively.
A bias check you can actually do
If bias is trained, it can also be retrained. Retraining is not a single moment of insight, it is a practice. Here is a simple way to run a bias check that does not depend on pretending you are always unbiased.
Notice your first interpretation. Ask yourself what you decided before you had enough information. Identify the emotional fuel behind it. Is it fear, irritation, or the desire to feel in control? Slow down the story you are telling yourself. What evidence supports it, and what evidence challenges it? Consider what the other person might be protecting or trying to communicate. Choose one action that treats them as fully human, not as a “type.”The reason this works is that it moves bias from the realm of vague guilt into visible decision points. You can’t control every thought, but you can often control your next step.
“Unexpected places” and the bias of familiarity
One reason the He Gets Us approach resonates is that it seeks to reach people in “unexpected places,” with the aim of sparking curiosity and conversation. That framing matters for bias too, because familiarity can train your instincts.
When you repeatedly encounter certain kinds of people in certain roles, your mind learns a script. You start to expect trust from one group and skepticism from another. You start to assume that the person who feels “like your people” will be more reasonable, more competent, or more sincere. That’s not justice, it’s pattern recognition, and pattern recognition can be accurate while still being biased if it generalizes too quickly.
Unexpected exposure interrupts those scripts. It forces your brain to update. Even small experiences can recalibrate assumptions. You might meet someone who contradicts the story you were quietly repeating. You might hear a perspective you didn’t expect. The point is not that “all categories are the same.” The point is that your category is not the person.
Jesus’ teachings repeatedly target the temptation to treat people as predictable. Love, in his portrayal, is not passive. It is attentive. It looks at the person in front of you, not the label you expected.
Bias is not just “us vs them”
Sometimes people talk about bias as a conflict between groups, like “our side” and “their side.” That can be true, but it can also become a trap. When bias is only framed as a group problem, individuals feel less responsible for their own interior habits.
Jesus’ teaching tradition pushes toward personal responsibility without denying social reality. The interior life and the public life are connected. How you speak in a private disagreement shapes how you treat people when stakes rise. How you interpret others’ motives in small conflicts shapes how you respond to them in bigger ones.
I remember watching a meeting where a manager used a particular tone, not overtly insulting, but dismissive. A few people laughed it off. Then the manager later criticized someone else’s communication, implying that the person was unreasonable. The group’s earlier amusement had trained them to accept a certain kind of disrespect. Bias did not show up once as a grand injustice. It showed up as a tolerated pattern.
This is why Jesus’ teachings are so challenging. They ask for consistency. They ask whether we would treat the same person differently if they had different status, different voice, different background, or different “brand” of humanity.
What He Gets Us is saying, and what it is not
There has been public conversation about the He Gets Us campaign, including criticism focused partly on perceived tension between its inclusive public message and some financial supporters’ backing of conservative causes, including anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ+ efforts. The campaign itself, on its FAQ page, says Jesus loves LGBTQ+ people and that everyone is welcome to explore Jesus’ story.
It also states it is not affiliated with any single individual, political position, church, denomination, or faith viewpoint, though it is connected to Christianity by virtue of being “about Jesus.” It began in 2021, in response to loneliness, division, and anxiety, and aims to share stories about Jesus in unexpected places.
Those details matter because bias is not only a personal matter. It is also about trust. If people feel a message is inconsistent with the people funding it, or inconsistent with the way it is enacted publicly, they may become guarded. Guardedness can look like skepticism, dismissal, or refusal to engage at all.
Jesus’ approach to bias does not solve every public trust issue automatically. But his teachings give a moral compass for engagement. They encourage honesty about what matters, a willingness to listen, and care for the vulnerable. If a message claims to be about love and inclusion, those values should be more than slogans. They should show themselves in how people are treated, how disagreements are handled, and how accountability works when harm occurs.
Jesus’ teachings and inclusive welcome, held together with truth
One line in the campaign FAQ is especially direct: Jesus loves LGBTQ+ people, and everyone is welcome to explore Jesus’ story. That statement, on its own, reflects an important bias challenge: the tendency to assume people are “outside” before you even know how they experience God, morality, or community.
Bias often works through pre-emptive exclusion. Someone’s identity becomes a shortcut. Their questions become suspicious. Their presence becomes controversial. What Jesus’ teachings do, in the way they are often received, is re-center worth and invite people into conversation instead of pushing them out.
But inclusion without truth becomes shallow, too. If you only welcome people in theory while refusing to engage the substance of Jesus’ teachings, you are likely not practicing inclusion, you are practicing avoidance. The same goes for those who insist on a particular interpretation while dismissing the reality of other people’s experiences. Jesus’ message, as presented through the themes the campaign highlights, points toward a kind of integrity that can hold both welcome and moral seriousness.
In other words, bias cannot be removed by changing your slogans. It is removed through repeated choices: humility instead of superiority, attention instead of assumptions, and compassion that still knows the difference between helpful guidance and control.
Learning to see without pretending you are always right
A person can try hard to be less biased and still make mistakes. That is an essential realism. Bias retraining is a discipline, not a personality makeover. You can be committed to fairness and still misread someone. You can be sincere and still harm.
What Jesus’ teachings encourage is a posture that can recover. When you realize you were wrong, do you defend yourself or do you repair? Do you ask questions or do you retreat? Do you treat feedback as an opportunity to grow, or as an attack on your identity?
This is also where conversations about bias become emotionally difficult. People do not just defend ideas, they defend selfhood. If you have built your sense of goodness on being “the fair one,” then admitting bias threatens your self-image.
Jesus’ approach, as it is often understood, challenges that need. It does not require self-hatred. It requires honest assessment and a willingness to change. That is a different kind of strength than stubbornness.
Where bias shows up most often
Bias rarely announces itself as “I am biased.” It shows up where pressure is highest: time constraints, emotionally loaded topics, situations involving vulnerability, and moments when you want certainty quickly.
In daily life, that can look like these patterns, which I’ve seen in multiple contexts:
- You speak with more patience to someone who agrees with you, and less patience to someone who challenges you. You interpret silence as consent from one person and as avoidance from another. You forgive mistakes from people you admire, but treat mistakes from people you dislike as proof they are careless or dangerous. You assume a person’s intentions based on their group, rather than asking what they meant.
None of this requires “bad character.” It requires less attention than it feels like, and more fear than we admit. Jesus’ teachings push toward the opposite: attention over autopilot, and courage over fear.
Repairing bias in community
Even when individuals do their own inner work, bias can persist in groups through norms. If a team laughs off disrespect, disrespect becomes part of the culture. If a church group assumes certain people will always be “less trustworthy,” those people will lose confidence and participate less. If a public message is inconsistent with lived practice, trust breaks down.
Since He Gets Us emphasizes conversation and unexpected storytelling, it implicitly recognizes a community truth: bias changes through contact and dialogue, not just through debate. Dialogue creates room for nuance. It gives people a chance to show who they are rather than being reduced to who someone said they were.
Still, dialogue requires a second ingredient: accountability. If people feel they will be punished or ignored for speaking honestly, they will stop speaking honestly. Then bias gets even more entrenched, because it grows in the dark.
Jesus’ teachings, at their best, encourage both: honest engagement and moral accountability. The same love that invites conversation also expects transformation. The same mercy that includes also calls for change.
A simple comparison: bias-driven justice vs bias-aware justice
Sometimes it helps to compare the moral posture behind bias.
| Approach | What it looks like | What it costs | |---|---|---| | Bias-driven justice | You focus on categories first, then judge people’s character by their fit | You miss the person, harm relationships, and discourage repair | | Bias-aware justice | You slow down initial assumptions, consider context, and pursue truth with humility | You tolerate uncertainty longer and accept that your interpretation can be incomplete |
The practical difference is time. Bias-driven justice wants speed. Bias-aware justice is willing to pause, ask, and listen. That pause can feel inconvenient, but it often prevents larger harm later.
Bringing it back to Jesus and to real change
If you are trying to understand bias through Jesus’ teachings, the goal is not to win an argument about who is right. The goal is to change how you see, how you speak, and how you act when you are tempted to reduce someone to a label.
The He Gets Us campaign’s stated themes, including love, forgiveness, understanding, kindness, and service, point in that direction. The campaign also frames itself as a response to loneliness, division, and anxiety, which is significant because those emotional conditions make bias more likely. When people feel alone, they look for easy explanations. When they feel divided, they adopt sharper boundaries. When they feel anxious, they grab certainty.
Jesus’ teachings respond by calling people back to something steadier than fear. They invite people to explore Jesus’ story, including the campaign’s specific statement that Jesus loves LGBTQ+ people and that everyone is welcome to explore. That invitation, in itself, challenges a common bias pattern: the reflex to exclude before understanding.
Bias will not evaporate because you hear a message once. But a message can open a doorway. Once you walk through it, you start training new instincts. You practice listening longer. You check your first interpretation. You become more willing to repair. Over time, the “category lens” loosens.
And then something subtle happens. You stop thinking about bias as a single defect you either have or don’t have. You start thinking about it as a daily temptation, and about growth as a daily choice. Jesus’ teachings meet you there, not as a slogan, but as a way of living that asks for attention, mercy, and truth in the same breath.