Ministers of Propaganda: A Review
Ministers of Propaganda: Truth, Power, and the Ideology of the Religious Right
By Scott M. Coley, lecturer in philosophy at Mount St. Mary’s University. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2024.
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There is a growing body of scholarly work today exploring the problems plaguing white American evangelicalism. A handful stand above the rest and, in my opinion, Ministers of Propaganda by Scott Coley is at the same high level as Jesus and John Wayne by Kristin Kobes Du Mez and The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind by Mark Noll. What Du Mez does for recent evangelical history, Coley does for philosophy and political ethics. He not only exhibits the more fully fleshed out dangers of the anti-intellectualism Noll warned about nearly 30 years ago, but also shows how propaganda keeps those dangers entrenched.
Ministers of Propaganda then does not claim all evangelicals are bad or evil, which is usually one of the main, disingenuous criticisms that evangelical leaders throw at such works without seriously engaging them. On the contrary, I think Coley effectively makes the case that evangelicals transforming and propagandizing theology in service to authoritarianism is bad for evangelicalism, which then has negative consequences for American culture more broadly.
My goal here is not to provide an overview of this book (just go buy it) so much as it is to speak to its truth from a somewhat different perspective. Coley does an excellent job showing how propaganda works in the upper echelons of American evangelicalism and how it filters down to local churches. As a former evangelical who is still a Christian and has lived in the American South my whole life, I have seen up close at the local level most all of what Coley covers in this book. As such, I want to focus on three areas that I found helpful:
How propaganda works in evangelical spaces.
The role of “creation science” in the evangelical culture wars.
An underlying theme I did not expect to find: hope.
Let’s dive in.
Understanding evangelical propaganda, and what it does
Propaganda comes in many forms, but what makes Ministers of Propaganda especially enlightening is Coley deftly showing how evangelical leaders use a specific kind of propaganda: rhetoric that appropriates an ideal in order to perpetuate intellectual and social practices that wind up contradicting the ideal itself.
I encourage you to read that a few times so it can sink in. This is one of those things that once you see it in American evangelical culture, it becomes impossible to unsee. There are two areas in particular I want to hone in on as they are frequently experienced: evangelical claims about being biblical and common sense appeals. With regards to the first, Coley writes:
“A recurring theme throughout the book will be legitimizing narratives that draw on the resources of religion–specifically, Christian theology as it is practiced within the power centers of American evangelicalism. Because regard for the authority of Scripture is core to evangelical identity, legitimizing narratives that claim biblical provenance are especially potent. Thus evangelicalism's intellectual marketplace is inundated with a theological practice that I will call the hermeneutics of legitimization. (Hermeneutics is the study of interpretation, especially methods for interpreting sacred texts like the Bible.)
The hermeneutics of legitimization is an approach to biblical interpretation that consistently produces moral justifications for social practices and institutional arrangements that benefit oneself. In addition to biblical prooftexting, two habits of mind are essential to the hermeneutics of legitimization. The first is a practice that I'll call motivated literalism, which is a tendency to interpret Scripture literally, but only when it doesn't undermine one's material interests…The second habit of mind that's essential to the hermeneutics of legitimization is the theological paradigm of authority and submission. According to this paradigm, ‘Who has authority and who must submit?’ is one of the principal questions that Bible sets out to answer, and it should be front of mind as we seek to understand and apply Scripture. Predictably, evangelicals who embrace this paradigm –who believe that instituting human hierarchies of authority and submission is one of Scripture's overriding concerns– believe the Bible to be littered with prooftexts that confirm the moral legitimacy of institutions that preserve the power and privilege of evangelicals like themselves. As we'll see, the hermeneutics of legitimization renders Scripture both useful for legitimizing and useless for critiquing the social practices and political objectives of American evangelicals—especially evangelical leaders. (9)
Those last few sentences especially are akin to a guided missile hitting the problem dead center. American evangelical theology is very convenient for the lifestyle and cultural norms evangelicals benefit from and desire to impose on others. The language used of biblical values is problematic because of how deeply rooted it is in the practice of prooftexting, which is finding a specific verse or set of verses in Scripture to prove a theological doctrine, belief, or principle as being true, sometimes in an absolute sense.
The problem here is that prooftexting, in practice, redacts from the larger story being told in the Bible. It goes in search of one or a few verses to back a presupposition while eviscerating the broader and near contexts of those verses, allowing whatever that thing is to then be treated as being biblical and needing to be imposed on everyone else. Put another way: the Bible can mean whatever white evangelicals want it to mean in ways that reinforce their cultural desires. Anyone who disagrees is wrong, perhaps even sinful or a threat. It’s a short jump from prooftexting to straight up authoritarianism, something Jesus and the New Testament writers clearly have issues with in their broader story.
I no longer identify as evangelical but am still around evangelicals frequently —both because of where I live and by choice— although I avoid the culture-warring ones these days. Even then, I regularly hear some version of how important it is to be biblical. Meanwhile, weeks and months often go by in which I never hear some form of we need to be Christlike. This is an important distinction. At best, it hints at a deep, inner struggle for evangelicals to put the crucified and resurrected Jesus at the center of faith instead of a specific interpretation of the Bible and rigid belief in how that interpretation should manage our daily lives.
That said, I have a lot of empathy for evangelicals who are sincerely struggling in this way. This used to be a problem for me, and I still have the occasional knee-jerk reaction to place a bible verse that supports one of my views over and above the person of Jesus. So, I get it. Virtually every time I see this happen now, it is with a person who is coming out of a more fundamentalist version of American evangelicalism they are trying to break free of. They are often still very evangelical and wish to remain so, just in a more global sense.
Still, this has real implications for how people move through the world and treat others, especially when one genuinely believes this is how the Bible is to be treated. It also paves the way for the kind of propaganda Coley describes. He points out that “in the hands of ecclesial authorities who’ve insulated themselves from expert critique, sacred texts become a vehicle for legitimizing all manner of ungodliness, injustice, and abuse, in the name of an Authority that is transcendent and therefore unavailable for interrogation” (pp. 192-193).
While some may consider that harsh, I think Coley is being incredibly generous with white evangelical leaders who traffic in this kind of propaganda, at least closer to the local level. The picture that emerges is not one of a dark room in the church basement with shadowy figures plotting to trick and harm people; on the contrary, many evangelical leaders in local churches participate in this seemingly unawares. That’s just one sign of how effective this propaganda can be.
The upper echelons of American evangelicalism should be a different story, but I’m not sure it always is. I don’t work in academia, but I talk to professors and graduate students as part of my day job somewhat regularly. My limited time spent at the university level in this way made Coley’s point about ecclesial authorities jump out. Some of the leading propagandists in American evangelical culture have PhDs and Masters degrees and, because they do, it seems to me they really should know better than to behave the way they do, pushing this kind of propaganda while calling it “common sense” along the way.
When Coley writes “in the hands of ecclesial authorities who’ve insulated themselves from expert critique” it seems he’s referencing the institutions and associations behind this dynamic he writes about earlier:
"Thus, under the guise of subjecting human reason to biblical scrutiny, American evangelicals have transformed Christian theology into a nomadic culture war machine: seminary officials, celebrity preachers, and parachurch influencers roam from place to place, offering 'biblical' pronouncements on a range of technical subjects –without regard for disciplinary boundaries, scholarly convention, or indeed their own intellectual heritage–toppling centuries of accumulated knowledge in their haste to legitimize the social, political, and economic impulses of American conservatism." (132)
White evangelical elites who do this —such as John Piper, Kevin DeYoung, Al Mohler, John MacArthur, etc.— aren’t flying solo. They are the products of and leaders in an array of institutions, networks, and platforms that exist primarily to strengthen and disseminate the propaganda Coley describes. The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, Desiring God, Acts 29, and The Gospel Coalition are just a few of the well-known ones. White evangelicals have even created their own “peer-reviewed journals” because they know their arguments will be rejected from serious, actual academic peer-reviewed journals rooted in reality and fact.
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While mild disagreements certainly exist inside elite evangelical spaces like these, adherence to rigid gender hierarchy is often the deciding factor in who is “orthodox” or not and, subsequently, who is allowed to be part of these institutions, networks, and platforms, even more so than views on the nature of God and atonement. Real critique that does manage to emerge on the inside is often cast out before it can truly make a stand. And, until very recently, outside critique had virtually no ways of clawing into these white evangelical spaces. These are just some of the kinds of elite insulations Coley references.
But insulation built on propaganda doesn’t just keep what you think is bad out, it also keeps you locked into an echo chamber. All it takes is the passage of time for views to become more extreme as moderating forces dwindle away and the propagandist falls prey to their own propaganda more and more. Ten years ago, I knew some complementarian men who were genuinely kind, truly capable of listening, and had a real heart for helping others. Most of those men are unrecognizable today and I am no longer able to talk to them because of it. They followed the increasing extremism, rising emotional fragility, and intensifying phallus worship of the evangelical leaders and organizations listed above —as well as sometimes moved toward even more dangerous ones, such as Doug Wilson— with predictable results.
For the average person in the average white evangelical church, when all the chips are down being faithful seems to have little to do with following Jesus and pursuing his call for repentance and repair. Being faithful really means being compliant, especially when a leader’s “manner of ungodliness, injustice, and abuse, in the name of an Authority that is transcendent and therefore unavailable for interrogation” (193) becomes apparent.
“Creation Science and the Culture War Machine” (109)
Many of the legitimate critiques of American evangelicalism today rightfully hone in on issues of gender and whiteness, which Coley definitively handles in Ministers of Propaganda as well. What I did not expect to see so heavily in this book is the creation science movement and, more specifically, how much the beliefs in that subculture undergird broader evangelical culture warring and deepening authoritarianism. He writes:
“The rise of the creation science movement in the latter half of the twentieth century was predicated on its remarkable success in persuading evangelicals that old-earth creationism is a capitulation to modern science and a rejection of Scripture. As we'll see, the enthusiasm with which evangelicals embraced this notion is inseparable from the social anxieties that galvanized the religious right of the 1960s and '70s.” (85)
I’ve met evangelicals who vehemently argued that their Young Earth Creationist beliefs are the traditional interpretation of the Bible, that this is how Christians have always believed. Back in my evangelical days, I never understood why my believing in God as Creator —despite doubting a literal seven-day creation several thousand years ago— wasn’t good enough for Young Earth Creationists. If anything, my belief in God as Creator was perceived as more of a threat than the views of militant atheists!
What made this feel even more odd is that I arrived at my beliefs in large part by doing the very thing Young Earth Creationists demanded I do: read the Bible literally. Like many who have done that, I noticed not one, but two different creation stories in Genesis that don’t line up, as well as severely different images of the Creator depicted within them. And let me tell you from experience: hell hath no fury like a Young Earth Creationist who has had this pointed out to them.
Coley goes on to make the case that Young Earth Creationism as we have it today is actually very new, not ancient. I’m not going to rehash the debates here, both because Coley does a fine job and because I’ve touched on this myself. Again, what was eye-opening for me in reading Ministers of Propaganda are the direct links between Young Earth Creationism and the evangelical culture war machine, which explains most of my past experiences. Coley writes:
“At the core of this identity is opposition to the enemies of God: atheists, secularists, humanists, secular humanists, Marxists, cultural Marxists, feminists, nihilists, and so on. The front line in this battle is the struggle between young-earth creationism and evolution-the latter being the gateway to all the social ills that have plagued American culture for the last fifty years or more. In keeping with The Assumption, the old-earth interpretation of Genesis is a dangerous concession to the enemy-a slippery slope that leads inexorably to compromising what young-earthers regard as the ‘biblical worldview.’” (126)
After sharing some examples of this, Coley continues:
“A few sentences later, Mohler goes well out of his way to mention that a prominent advocate of old-earth creationism, Francis Collins, served in the Obama administration. (Collins is a born-again Christian who published a book on apologetics in 2006. Christopher Hitchens described Collins as ‘one of the most devout believers I've ever met.’) Mohler doesn't elaborate on the relevance of Collins's service as director of the National Institutes of Health under President Obama to the subject at hand-namely, the question of how we should understand the opening chapters of Genesis.
Even for seasoned creation science professionals like Henry Morris and Ken Ham, creation science is about more than just science and Scripture. Morris blames the popularity of evolutionary theory for everything from the proliferation of ‘premarital sex, adultery, divorce, and homosexuality’ to ‘unrestrained pornography...prostitution, both male and female,’ and ‘the modern drug crisis (rock music, peer pressure, organized crime, etc.).’ And according to Ham, evolution is to blame for the war on Christmas. Thus, at least in the eyes of creation scientists, the fight against evolution is a proxy battle in the war over who gets to define America and its values. The choice is stark and the stakes are almost too high to be believed.” (129-130)
I admit this has been a blind spot for me. To be sure, I’ve personally heard plenty of evangelicals attach Young Earth Creationist beliefs to their views on morality and gender hierarchy. I can recall at least one time when I explicitly asked for the connection to be explained. The answer I got was a frustrated word salad that confused me further; indeed, even a more seasoned Young Earth Creationist probably would have face-palmed if they heard what I did. So I received it as disparate ideologies, even though the links are there.
But perhaps that shows just how effective Young Earth Creation science propaganda has been: even some adherents can’t fully explain the ideological connections between some of their beliefs, yet still buy into them lock, stock, and barrel.
What, then, are the end results of the creation science movement, both individually and institutionally? Coley writes:
“Over roughly three generations, this nomadic culture war machine has conditioned evangelicals to trust the untutored common sense of enterprising ministers over the carefully reasoned, peer-reviewed arguments of ‘secular’ experts. Whether the subject is the antiquity of the earth, the reality of climate change, epidemiology, the existence and prevalence of systemic racism, the violence of financial capitalism, the history of American imperialism, mass incarceration, civil rights, women's liberation, or any number of other subjects, the moment that evangelicals sense a threat to the established order or their status therein, they turn to ambitious ministers who furnish ‘biblical’ reasons to embrace unreality. The predictable result is a system of belief rooted not in wisdom or truth but in a patchwork of myths alleging the moral and intellectual legitimacy of evangelical norms despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
The religious right's allergy to ‘secular’ expertise is thus a product of the tension between these fictional legitimizing narratives and facts that call those narratives into question. Similarly, the religious right's increasingly open hostility to liberal democracy reflects white evangelical efforts to preserve their status within the established order amid a popular reckoning with the racist and misogynistic axioms on which that order rests. The fondness for unreality and authoritarian politics that has come to define the religious right is the culmination of a decades-long feedback loop between evangelical social preferences and the legitimizing narratives that flow from the pulpits and power centers of the evangelical culture war machine.” (135)
The roaming “seminary officials, celebrity preachers, and parachurch influencers” (132) Coley describes certainly play a starring role, but it can be the local church where this gets really depressing. As truth and reality close in on the average white evangelical in the pew, they often to go to their local pastor for advice about their anxieties, including on subjects their pastor is not an expert on and should not be expected to be.
This is more or less the dream for the culture-warring pastor on a power trip and further lubricates the propaganda machinery. But a healthier, still culturally conservative evangelical pastor who is honest and says I don’t know can face blowback for not having a ready answer for everything. Or, he becomes increasingly ignored by some congregants who turn to truly extreme evangelical voices who support their presuppositions more strongly. At that point, it’s only a matter of time before congregants become more extreme themselves, and that extremism is turned back on their pastor and begins to wreak havoc in their church.
Occasionally I’m asked how many angry comments I must receive from evangelical pastors for some of the things I write. I only get a handful of unhinged responses in a given year and they are rarely from evangelical pastors. The messages I do get from pastors voice respectful disagreement. But usually they are reaching out because something I wrote spoke to a bad experience they had, and they share grim stories of congregants radicalizing away from them after finding a more extreme evangelical voice. This is but one example of white evangelicals “turning to ambitious ministers who furnish ‘biblical’ reasons to embrace unreality” that Coley is describing. Even if your conservative evangelical pastor won’t sign off on the unreality you are living in, there are plenty out there who very much will.
Coley shows time and again that white evangelical propaganda leads to one unreality after another being embraced, including very dangerous ones, the kind of which end up contradicting and even destroying the stated ideals of a church and evangelical institutions and networks.
Closing Thoughts
Large parts of Ministers of Propaganda were outright eerie to read because of how identical they were to some of my experiences. What I compare in my life to this book barely grazes the surface of such connections. Bad and confusing experiences that I haven’t thought of for years came roaring back as I turned the pages. I’ve come to terms with the fact that I once bought into some of this propaganda, but reading Coley’s work helped me understand why fully uprooting it out of my life has taken so long and been so difficult.
W. Edwards Deming once said "A bad system will beat a good person every time." I used to dwell on that during my twilight days in American evangelicalism, and I found myself doing so again in this book. When this is the way a system is designed —and propaganda is feature, cause, and correlation to its continued existence— the resulting rotten fruits of nationalism, extreme individualism, misogyny, racism, and greed should come as no surprise. But it genuinely felt like a surprise back then when I began seeing these things for what they are, as well as my complicity in them.
It’s a lot to deconstruct. Coley describes deconstruction as “essentially an effort to decode propaganda that’s embedded in the ideology of the religious right.” (3) That’s one of the most precise descriptions of the evangelical deconstruction phenomena, one that explains why so many white evangelical leaders go into rage mode when they face the most minor questions and critiques. For some, it’s a sign they are victims of their own propaganda. For others, it’s their seeing that the propaganda is not as effective as it once was, even if they still don’t recognize it as propaganda.
But perhaps in the alarm of the propagandists we can recognize the faint outlines of what redemption could look like, which brings us to something I did not expect to find in Ministers of Propaganda: real hope.
Coley is mute on if he thinks American evangelicalism can be salvaged. I personally don’t think it can be, at least in the white American context. But people in the fold very much can escape this subculture to chase Jesus. I did, and so have many others. Some can even become truly evangelical along the way if they wish. That, to me, is the hope.
As I entered the final chapter, I found myself wishing Coley’s work had been available years ago when I began my own journey out of this subculture to find Jesus and true faith in community. It was always going to be hard and painful; some days it still is. Part of me feels I will always have a limp, that I’ll never be able to fully let my guard down in church settings. But, at least back then, I would have had an approach to cut through the propaganda faster. There are countless evangelicals who now find themselves where I once was, confused and not knowing what to do next. Nothing can make the journey they are about to take easy, but Ministers of Propaganda truly is a gift to them.
Coley’s work is also a reminder to those of us who are further along that our pasts still echo in our present, providing us a sharper lens to better discern and resist such propaganda, and in so doing more strongly denounce our past as we try to chart a better path forward.
For the Christian, I think practical reasoning doesn’t begin with self-serving assumptions about what the Bible is. I think practical reasoning should begin with discerning the specific walls God is tearing down in this world. The freedom that comes with that perfect love calls us to true renunciation on our part, one that further weakens our own attachments to the worldly powers God is actively breaking.
And if we’ve learned anything these past several years, it’s that white American evangelicalism is a worldly power. The end of our hopes, then, is not to be found in perfection —or, much less, the culmination of our own efforts to hasten the fall of this power— but in knowing God himself is working to bring white American evangelicalism to an end. Yet we are still called to participate in this great work. Or, in Coley’s words:
“On some level, the antidote to Christo-authoritarianism lies in the recognition that there is objective truth about what people deserve and what we owe each other, and our participation in politics should aim to bring about public institutions that conform to that truth. Notably, the matter of whether a given social arrangement suits my personal preferences or aligns with my self-interest is largely irrelevant. So we can resist the forces of ideology and motivated reasoning by actively interrogating the legitimacy of social arrangements that work to our own benefit, which is precisely what Christ calls us to do.
When we are no longer concerned with legitimizing the established order, we are free to abandon theological narratives that the religious right uses to legitimize that order –along with any antagonism toward expertise that poses a threat to those theological narratives. Thus the antidote to Christo-authoritarianism is the pursuit of justice over and against the pursuit of social arrangements that reinforce my own power and privilege.” (211-212)
If God really is making all things new, then Ministers of Propaganda is certainly part of that redemptive work.
About Me
I explore faith and church culture in the American South from my hometown of Memphis, TN. I’m an institutionalist who believes the means are just as important as the ends. Everything here is an expression of my faith and love for the Church.
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