Fresh off a new reveal about its not-so 'nonprofit,’ American Reformer Criticizes ‘He Gets Us’ – After Taking $110K from the Foundation that Launched It

It’s been a very awkward week for the Woke Right leaders over at American Reformer, and their reaction to a new “He Gets Us” Super Bowl ad just made it even more awkward.

During the Super Bowl broadcast on Sunday, the oft-criticized campaign aired another commercial aimed at drawing viewers to, as it says, “rediscover the love story of Jesus.”

This year’s “What is Greatness?” ad featured, among other images, a still of a man hosing down a wall of graffiti that said, “Go Back,” and another of two men embracing at an event with rainbow Gay Pride objects in the background, with one of the men in a John 3:16 hat. The ending tagline? “Jesus showed us what greatness really is.”

American Reformer co-founder Nate Fischer and American Reformer initiative head William Wolfe both reacted to the ad online.

“He Gets Us seems designed to alienate the biggest group flocking to churches in recent years (young men),” Fischer posted on X last evening. He later added a poll in one of his posts, saying, “You must choose one,” with the choices of “I’m With Her” or “He Gets Us.” Today, Fischer posted another follow-up: “Super Bowl takeaway: Most of the world has moved on from woke. Most except the NFL and ‘He Gets Us’ evangelicals.”

American Reformer’s William Wolfe, who is the executive director of American Reformer’s “assumed name” initiative The Center for Baptist Leadership (more on that in a minute), reposted another comment: “He Gets Us is running anti-Trump, pro-illegal ads .. very inappropriate!”

What these American Reformer leaders failed to mention, however, was the fact that American Reformer took a $110,000 grant in 2022 from the Servant Foundation, the very group that devised and launched “He Gets Us” three years ago.

It’s right there, in black and white, as grant-recipient organization No. 76 on the Servant Foundation’s 2022 990 Form, Schedule I. The donation also is confirmed in a DataRepublican.com flow chart, which tracks the path of American Reformer’s grants.

Last year, Fischer also criticized the 2024 “He Gets Us” Super Bowl ad, called “Foot Washing,” in an article at American Reformer. After lamenting the Wokeness on display in the ad, Fischer wrote: “He Gets Us epitomizes an approach that is pervasive today in institutionalized evangelicalism. If the goal is to attract people to Christianity, it will fail. If the goal is to bend Christianity to support the interests of the regime, it is well-designed. American Christians need a different approach. This is why American Reformer exists.”

To be fair, I generally agree with Fischer about the particular weaknesses of the “He Gets Us” ad in 2024 (and I didn’t like the other ones very much, either, including the one that aired last night), but mostly because the gospel of Jesus Christ is nowhere to be found. Yet a search for any American Reformer commentary on the campaign prior to Fischer’s 2024 remarks did not immediately yield any articles, even though American Reformer was up and running. Just the same, Wolfe recently blasted Christianity Today’s Russell Moore online for affirming the same “Jesus was a refugee” line that “He Gets Us” pushed in an ad called “Refugee,” which aired during the 2023 Super Bowl.

The problem I really have with Fischer’s article is the hypocrisy and lack of relevant self-disclosure. It’s worded as though American Reformer is totally uncompromised on the matter of the “He Gets Us” ads when, in fact, the organization took a substantial amount of money from the very organization that launched the initiative in the first place. But American Reformer never discloses this. It seems to me that that is an ethical necessity for an organization that seeks to influence and shape the actions of other Christians.

So why, then, was American Reformer willing to publish an anti-“He Gets Us” commentary in 2024? One significant correlation of note is that as of 2024, the Servant Foundation was no longer affiliated with “He Gets Us,” having handed over the reins of the initiative at that point to a newly formed nonprofit group, called Come Near. Readers may wonder: Was American Reformer’s editorial decision at all impacted by the fact that the Servant Foundation was no longer running “He Gets Us” in 2024? Then why not just say so? It wasn’t wrong to take the grant, but just be honest about it.

Moreover, this all comes right on the heels of another, much worse American Reformer scandal that occurred last week.

On Thursday, Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary professor Matthew Millsap posted a document online from the Texas Secretary of State’s office, showing that The Center for Baptist Leadership – launched by American Reformer last year, with the aim of exerting increased control over the Southern Baptist Convention – isn’t exactly what it has been claiming to be.

Though the CBL website states that “The Center for Baptist Leadership is a national nonprofit,” the state document debunks that claim, revealing that CBL is just an “assumed name under which” American Reformer operates.

As Millsap put it: “The reason The Center for Baptist Leadership does not have a separate Employee Identification Number (EIN) from American Reformer is because it *is* American Reformer. They are legally one and the same entity. All donations to The Center for Baptist Leadership are donations to American Reformer.”

Why is that a big deal? First of all, it’s rather shocking that an ostensibly “Baptist” organization that’s working hard to gain control over America’s biggest evangelical denomination is making a false claim about its legal status on its website. Also, per the IRS, CBL must have its own subordinate EIN, even if it is operating legally under American Reformer’s EIN. As of this writing, American Reformer has not publicly revealed what CBL’s subordinate EIN is – or even if it exists at all.

Second, donors who thought they were giving money to an upstanding “Baptist” renewal group may not be too happy to learn that they were actually donating to American Reformer, an extremist Woke Right site that has been embroiled in multiple controversies since its launch. The biggest of them likely occurred in December 2024, when New Discourses’ James Lindsay submitted a hoax article to American Reformer that was just a retooled version of the Communist Manifesto, complete with a fake “Marcus Carlson” byline.

The point of the hoax was to see if American Reformer would affirm the Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels arguments for communism if the altered manifesto instead became a Woke Right critique of liberalism. Embarrassingly (but rather predictably), American Reformer bit. Not only did the site publish the hoax piece, but it hailed the essay as a “powerful article.”

And American Reformer’s troubling track record just keeps getting longer (remember its ridiculous “The Constitution is Not Holy Writ” article, which I critiqued in May?).

Critic Blake Callens recently argued there are many more reasons American Reformer is an organization to be avoided (I highly recommend that you read his whole article, here):

“ … they have run multiple articles promoting the political philosophy of an unrepentant Nazi party member, its Editor-in-Chief published a manifesto on supposedly Christian ‘fortress building’ that included the philosophy of a Nietzschean positive eugenicist (who has since publicly advocated for negative eugenics, including abortion to prevent miscegenation), and they ran an essay from Stephen Wolfe claiming that true hospitality is deporting the ethnic other. Their sister business, New Founding, where the secret society lodge president and Chairman of the journal is CEO and the journal’s Executive Director is Managing Partner, started another business with a literal Nazi pornographer. .. As for the ‘Executive Director’ of ‘The Center for Baptist Leadership’ himself, among other things, he once compared a multicultural worship service to grooming gangs and has tweeted what clearly appears to be well-known neo-Nazi code-phrases.”

As of this writing, the American Reformer team is working hard to ignore the “not-so national nonprofit” scandal, undoubtedly in the hopes that it will go away. But it shouldn’t go away.

The integrity of a nonprofit organization, especially one that is working hard to influence and direct conservative Christians and influence their churches, is absolutely nonnegotiable. The leaders of American Reformer and its “assumed name,” The Center for Baptist Leadership, have no business regularly decrying the lack of transparency in the SBC, as they do, while eschewing transparency themselves.

And when the organization took more than $100,000 from a foundation on the one hand, but only formally criticized that foundation’s well-known initiative after control of “He Gets Us” changed hands (coincidentally or otherwise), that’s something that it should disclose and openly explain. If you’re going to make a habit of insisting on the need for transparency in others, it’s vital that you first show them how it’s done.