Row House Forum: The Power of Religious Propaganda with Scott M Coley, PhD

Here’s his own synopsis of the talk:

Ideology is a belief system that is oriented around social or political objectives rather than forming true beliefs. It is facilitated by propaganda that manipulates political or religious ideals in order to preempt dissent and silence perspectives that threaten an ideology’s legitimacy.

Importantly, ideology and propaganda are mutually reinforcing: propaganda discourages us from questioning the legitimacy of social and intellectual patterns into which we’ve been enculturated; and those patterns, in turn, prevent us from recognizing propaganda for what it is.
I argue that American evangelicalism’s social and intellectual scandals play off of one another in a kind of feedback loop: social practices shape beliefs about politics and which authorities are legitimate; and those beliefs, in turn, shape social practices.

I also argue that much of what has come to be known as evangelical “deconstruction” is in fact a process of decoding propaganda that’s embedded in the ideology of the religious right.
By way of illustration and proof of concept, I’ll apply this thesis to a handful of examples (e.g. creation science, illegitimate appeals to biblical authority or sufficiency, Christian colorblindness).