Christ and Propaganda: Introduction

We are All Propagandized

We are all propagandized and always have been.

And to a greater degree than ever, we are all propagandists.

To assume otherwise is to posit omniscience, especially about political questions, that is not given nor capable for humans. We require information sources and all of them to some measure are slanted for they all come from a standpoint. We are propagandized.

And when we repeated what we’ve heard, we do so with a view to changing another person’s perspective. We are propagandists.

Here I take a comprehensive view of propaganda as motivated or persuasive information-giving that is bigger than probably most people would take. But I think we are all propagandized more than we want to admit, and we all participate in propaganda like it or not.

I find it difficult to land on any other word which captures the concept of motivated speech seeking specific responses based on selective information. We might say “influence” or “convincing” but that concept captures the idea of power and relationship in a different way, and the word is more flexible. I might say my cat influenced me or convinced me to get another cat so they would have something to do, but I would not say his boredom was a form of propaganda because he had no desire to compel my response. On the other hand, his constant meowing, kneading my lap, and rustling his chin against mine are propaganda designed to get treats out of me.

The immediate response might be: “I am not a propagandist! How dare you?” But by expanding our understanding of propaganda and looking more broadly at how it works in our lives, even if I am overstating or miscategorizing different methods of communication I am at the same time trying to push us to see how universal propaganda is in the 21st Century. I am also hoping we can all reevaluate just how much we incorporate falsehood into our speech on account of our desire to see an intended outcome. We are, on a mass scale, acting like the child who blames the broken lampstand on the dog, seeking an outcome (don’t punish me) using selected (dis)information (the dog breaks stuff!) across ever-expanding channels (talking, shouting, drawing a picture of the dog knocking over the vase, using AI to make a video of a dog knocking over a vase).

Importantly, the universality of an experience does not determine its value. We do not say that “all have sinned” means that sin doesn’t matter. We do not do this - ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ - to evil because it is so pervasive. Nor do we pretend that showers do not matter just because everyone takes one. That sort of nihilism is not given to Christians especially, who cling to the light of the world in the midst of deep darkness.

Rather, we need to examine how propaganda impacts all of us and evaluate the morality of our own propagandization.

Definition:

Gaining an Intended Response through the Dissemination of Selective (Dis)Information Across Expanding Information Channels

Let’s break that down:

1. An intended response from an audience

2. Information and / or lies selected and disseminated to motivate that response

3. Increasing engagement across different information / entertainment channels

Let’s examine these in turn.

Intended Response

The intended response can be vague or not immediate; indeed, most propaganda today is not designed for you to go do something right now but for you to be whipped up into a constant state of bother that you are ready to act when the time has come.

Consider the constant propaganda about slavery prior to the Civil War. The intended response was not immediate: rarely could people vote directly on the question of slavery. Rather, the propaganda machines had to operate at full tilt to maintain an inhumane system lest the consciences of participants be pricked enough to battle against it. For the Christian, this meant maintaining a veneer of blessing over the entire institution, showing it to be God’s will for the good of all mankind, including the enslaved:

We would remind those who deprecate and sympathize with negro slavery, that his slavery here relieves him from a far more cruel, slavery in Africa, or from idolatry and cannibalism, and every brutal vice and crime that can disgrace humanity; and that it christianizes, protects, supports and civilizes him; that it governs him far better than free laborers at the North are governed.

Other propaganda is more direct in its intended outcome, like wartime recruitment ads:

A frequent form of propaganda in church narthexes is the church voter guide:

Each of these forms of propaganda - art, argumentation, a printed guidebook - were designed to compel some sort of outcome from their intended audience. They were not printed from a disinterested place of, say, just giving information, nor were they printed for the express purposes of Christian worship (although the people making this propaganda might say they did it as an act of worship - something we will discuss more in future posts). This was information given to drive behavior.

Selective Information

Since it is not given merely to inform but to prod response, propaganda is selective about the information or lies it presents. Don’t miss that: propaganda is not necessarily lies. It may well be a mountain of truth, but truth that is chosen specifically to elicit the desired response.

In our day, much propaganda is based on the idea of ‘the news’ as a constant injection of factual information with meaning or organization. Jacques Ellul traced this in his book Propaganda which, if you read anything on the subject, read Ellul’s book.

To the extent that propaganda is based on current news, it cannot permit time for thought or reflection. A man caught up in the news must remain on the surface of the event; he is carried along in the current, and can at no time take a respite to judge and appreciate; he can never stop to reflect. There is never any awareness -- of himself, of his condition, of his society -- for the man who lives by current events. Such a man never stops to investigate any one point, any more than he will tie together a series of news events.

So the idea of selective information can take many shapes, being careful about:

• Content of the information conveyed

• The commentary provided (or not) around the information

• The volume of information delivered

• The personalities delivering the information

This last one is critical in our video-based age. Personality connects to the information content of propaganda because the ‘news’ is delivered by people with whom you are expected to develop a personal relationship. You are not reading a story in the papers by a journalists whose name you probably do not recognize. Instead, you are likely now to hear from an influencer or talking head whose relationship with you grounds the information. You are on their team, you care about them and you assume they care about you. The selectivity of the information is not just what is being said, but who is saying it to you.

I put “personality” under selective information instead of the next category dealing with multiple channels because the information you know about the person speaking is part of that selective information being conveyed. That is, a particular personality is not as much of a different channel of info as he/she is part of the information ecosphere you are already a part of. The news media is a channel of information, but the particular person you listen to (Maddow, Hannity, etc) is actually a bit of data that is incorporated into the propaganda itself because you receive the information in a way that is informed by the speaker.

Colin Powell, a well known and trusted US leader, delivering ‘proof’ of WMDs in Iraq in 2003, a moment he later admitted was a colossal failure

Information no longer operates - maybe never operated - in an open fact-finding world but rather in pools of propaganda surrounded by clusters of propagandists. The allegiance-forming nature of propaganda shapes us as individuals, families, churches, etc, created dividing lines when none would otherwise naturally exist. I will return to the idea of propaganda and allegiance later.

Comprehensive Engagement

Propaganda flows like electricity or maple syrup through any available channels. Ben Franklin mastered early ‘fake news’ by pumping out stories of questionable origin alongside true stories as well as artistic media. A good propagandistic newspaper had it all: art, humor, sports, news, you name it. The more comprehensively a certain outcome could be pursued by every available channel, the more effective the propaganda.

These days multi-channel propaganda flows from online private chat groups to facebook posts, tiktoks, conferences, journals, newspapers, TV, movies, you name it. The bigger the resources and desired action, the frothier the the propaganda at every level. Take for example how Sinclair Media has been called out for passing along stories to their subsidiaries to be spoken at the same time with the exact same script, making for creepy montages

Astute followers of political media will note how certain ideas go ‘viral’ on multiple channels almost immediately, especially in the wake of negative news. The Haitian pet-eating hoax, for example, started with far right actors seeding disinformation through government speeches and on message boards then spread to fringe influencers, mainstream conservative talking heads, and finally all the way to the Presidential debate. The greater the need for a given action - in this case, a vote for President - the more channels will be leveraged to spread the propaganda. On the liberal side, the movement toward accepting gay marriage operated through many channels, including at universities, in political speeches, and most notably through television and movies.

When Joe Biden endorsed gay marriage in May, he cited Will & Grace as the single-most important driving force in transforming public opinion on the subject

The frequent homosexual kisses had been mostly unseen on public media previously and quickly became normalized.

Propaganda is a Broad Category

Propaganda is how pretty much every institution and person in the world disseminates information and seeks to compel a response. When the propaganda is for money, we call that sales and advertising. When it is for conversion, we call that evangelizing. This sort of “different names for the same thing” is how we categorize eating, which in abundance is gluttony, or sex, which we call fornication, prostitution, cheating, etc depending on context. And in the same world, propaganda for the purpose of having someone fall in love with you is romance.

One of my favorite counter-arguments I find online from marketers saying that marketing and propaganda are different is “advertising is intended to be transparent and truthful about the products or services being promoted.” But immediately we sense this is a statement intended to make us feel better about marketing and being marketed to. We are supposed to be comfortable with advertising because it is “truthful.” Break it out:

Intended response: Accept marketing as a good thing

Selective (dis)information: Marketing is truthful

Multiple channels: You can google right now to find AI slop all over the internet discerning marketing and advertising from propaganda without many examples

But let’s evaluate this propaganda. Has marketing been truthful?

HA!

The tobacco propaganda machine was perhaps the most powerful, profitable, persuasive, and damaging private enterprise in the 20th Century. Even this cursory glance at “marketing” reveals the core propagandistic nature. Selective information given by selective expert (a doctor with a lamp on his head!) for an intended outcome: go have a smoke!

It might seem jarring to call so much of how we communicate some form of propaganda, but I find that categorizing institutional and personal speech as oftentimes bein propagandistic in nature is a helpful check on our assumption that we are just ‘telling the truth’ or simply conveying information. We are not so simple, you and I; we are never merely conveying information when we communicate. We have desired outcomes in our lives and relationships. The extent to which we utilize different channels of information is often dependent on our resources, and the extent to which we use lies or truth depends on our moral center, but we are often propagandizing more than we ever will admit or realize.

Differentiations

How do we clarify propaganda vs other forms of conveying information?

The answer is not clear cut, and this definition of propaganda and the subsequent posts on here is not designed to re-shape the way we talk about every method of communication, but I do think propaganda is far more pervasive than most Christians have acknowledged so I do not mind the blurring of lines between some of these categories. Let’s look at a few that I hope to come back to in later posts:

1. Education - All education is shaped to produce an outcome, and admitting that the ‘war over education’ has always been going on and will always go on is helpful, in my opinion. Those who say education is about teaching students to think independently or think critically, for example, will always be at odd with those who, say, in a religious context say that education is about forming a young person into a morally upright worshipper or a Joshua Generation culture warrior. There is always and will always be different intended outcomes that different people will say is “best,” and so to some great extent we can acknowledge that all education is propaganda and, often, contains significant different forms of propaganda. Arguments about what America is, for example, and the ideals that shape the nation are propaganda. Why do we say the pledge of allegiance, for example, when our founders would not have even known what that is? On the other hand, there are forms of education which are less propagandistic, although they still are passed along with a desired outcome of some kind. Learning multiplication tables, for example, or how to read. The lines are soft and often blurred, but the venn diagram between education and propaganda has significant overlap.

2. Argument - Is all argumentation propaganda? Depends on the motive, I would say. Argument that is intended to learn by the process of discovery is not inherently propagandistic as it is exploration. (The best grade I ever got on a political science test happened after an all-night argument between my roommate and I about a subject on the test!) Argument that is designed to compel a response, like the arguments above by pro-slavery polemicists, are definitely propagandistic. I think it is helpful to think of argument as a manner of speech that can be employed as propaganda or not.

3. Preaching - Is all preaching propaganda? Yes. Who preaches without an intended response? What preacher does not select the information given? Who preaches except as the herald of a Kingdom not our own? There is no neutral speech from the Kingdom of God, and an assumption of ‘neutrality’ posits the preacher and audience as little gods with their own divinity-level moral calculators.

4. Speech - a strong counter-argument to my expansionist view of propaganda is that it seems like all speech is propaganda. To a certain extent that might be true! We all speak for a purpose, and have some sort of outcome desired. When I tell my wife the day is hot, for example, I am likely wishing that it was colder outside. But is that propaganda? I think the three keys in the definition help differentiate all speech from propagandistic speech:

   1. Am I trying to compel a response?

      1. Much speech has little reason; that is, we say things just to say them without intention for response.

   2. Am I leveraging information - true or false - to gain that response?

      1. Lots of talk is just blabber, relational connection, or the simple conveyance of information in a context that does not require compulsion. Ordering a steak off the menu is just that. Worshipping God in song is simply that, unless of course you are doing it toward another person to compel their response to God in that moment. The direction and motivation determines the category.

   3. Am I willing to elevate my efforts across different channels

      1. A poem about a flower may have an intended response (pay me for my poetry, smile, ponder life, etc) but it is not propagandistic unless it is part of a broader influence movement.

Obviously there are other categories with significant overlap. Entertainment, religion in general, coaching, you name it: all contain propagandistic elements or are themselves a form of propaganda. Again, I would be open to any pushback that says “this is too broad of a definition,” but I find it helpful to remove the moral judgement that propaganda is always bad and instead identify that propaganda is motivated speech, and just how often our speech is motivated and even manipulative in nature.

Propaganda Is Not Inherently Good or Bad

Propaganda is not, on its face, a negative thing, despite the negative connotations of the word. I find that loosening the bounds of propaganda away from an inherent assumption of evil intention or manipulation helps us to more honestly identify and evaluate the way propaganda works. It also helps us to run our propaganda machines through ethical tests I hope to unpack in the future, asking questions like

• Was this propaganda for the glory of God or some other intended outcome?

• Does this propaganda include lies or leave out information that would protect people from harm?

• Does the mechanism of propaganda being employed denigrate the humanity of the listener by seeking to trick them or force an unnatural emotional response?

The moral determination of propaganda is no different than something like eating, exercize, or sex. What is it used for? Who is doing it? How is it happening? What is the content? Etc. Ultimately, propaganda faces the 1 Corinthians 10:31 test:

So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God

This comprehensive evaluation asks if the method, content, goals, and impact of an action are for the Glory of God or not. If not, the action cannot be called good.

Definitely propaganda, but is it bad?

So let’s hold up the concept of propaganda to the light of Scripture and the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit in our lives and see just how deeply we are affected by the movements of fact and fiction by those clamoring for our responses.

Key Points

1. Propaganda Gaining an Intended Response through the Dissemination of Selective (Dis)Information Across Expanding Information Channels

2. Propaganda is not in itself good or bad: the morality of propaganda is determined by end, means, motive, and impact

3. Recognizing just how much of our lives is shaped by propaganda allows us to reconsider our beliefs and carefully examine how we propagandize others

Questions for Consideration

1. Do you agree with my definition of propaganda?

2. Do you think that propaganda is as pervasive as I do?

3. How do you see propaganda at work in your life?

4. To what extent do you participate in spreading propaganda?