Long Before Fox News There Was the Fifth Century Christian Church

Propaganda isn’t just lying and distorting to achieve a political end, it’s also the art of telling people what they want to hear. The fifth century Christian church was a divided and embattled institution trying to survive against schisms within its own polity and a deeply entrenched pagan rival that still held the sympathies of the public. To triumph it had to resort to unscrupulous measures, which meant exploiting the worst instincts of its followers by telling them they were blameless, and others were entirely at fault.

Ginning Up Fear and Anger

Centuries before Edward Bernays defined the techniques for manipulating the opinions of the masses in 1928, techniques employed to full effect by the Nazi’s in the following decade, the early Christian Church was using the same methods to set itself apart as the answer to the problems besetting the Roman Empire.

At the heart of propaganda, as defined by Bernays, lies the attempt by an information source or institution to bypass the critical thinking skills of the audience by appealing to strong emotions like fear and anger. In a world where crisis follows crisis, and the future is uncertain, this is easy. “Things are worse than you think they are.” “You don’t know the half of it.” “They’re hiding the truth from you in order to gain an advantage.” “You should be afraid, very afraid.”

If some churches today still resort to this sort of shameless fearmongering, perhaps they can be forgiven. After all, they are just carrying forward a long tradition that began in the fifth century.

Persecuted, Exiled, and Killed: Diverting Attention From Your Own Failings by Identifying  Scapegoats.

Prior to the fourth century, in the decades before Christianity was legalized and spread across the Roman world, it was a religion of peace, tolerance, and reassurance, echoing the teachings of Jesus Christ. But, with the advent of an organized religious institution wielding significant political power, the Church changed, becoming territorial, paranoid, and mean.

First, it had to deal with disputes within its own polity. One of the first was the Donatist Schism (311 AD), a dispute over whether to embrace Christians who had renounced their faith during the persecutions. The Donatists, ignoring Christ’s command to forgive, refused to give the sacrament to lapsed Christians. The larger Church retaliated by deeming the Donatist’s heretics, setting off a prolonged period of heretical condemnation and excommunication. Before long, the Church was using this cynical approach to rid itself of anyone who disagreed with it. No less than sixteen heresies were defined in the fourth and fifth centuries alone. The victims were flabbergasted.

Deemed heretics, they were reviled from the pulpit, persecuted, exiled, and often killed. As time went on, some of these groups became scapegoats for a wide variety of social ills. As the Roman Empire disintegrated and the social order came apart, the Church became adept at blaming others as a way of deflecting responsibility from itself. Before long, the Us versus Them mentality became a central part of its long-term political playbook.

Controlling the Messaging

Not only did the Church feel threatened by dissidents in its midst, but it still had to deal with the remnants of the pagan religions it had come to supplant. Christianity’s transition from a small, persecuted sect to an empire-wide religious powerhouse was astonishingly quick. A mere twenty-three years elapsed from the Diocletian persecutions in 303 AD to the establishment of the Nicene Creed in 325 AD, ushering in the era of a powerful, politically influential Christian Church. Yet the pagan religion it replaced never really went away but went underground, waiting for the false promises the Church was making to turn sour and people to grow disillusioned. But the pagans underestimated the power of the pulpit.

The gathering of the congregation at mass on a weekly basis was an innovation in worship the pagans hadn’t seen coming and couldn’t counter, for it allowed the Church to control the messaging. In a time before the printing press and the widespread dissemination of information the institution that could reach the most people in a single setting had a distinct advantage. The Church used its reach to vilify its enemies, diminishing the influence of the pagans and silencing them.

Nevertheless, the pagans did enjoy one last glimmer of relevance. The Sack of Rome by the Goths in 410 AD called into question the promise made by many a priest and bishop that if the people would only convert and accept the true God, the Romans would be protected by God’s grace. They were not. Very quickly many Romans began to question their conversion, fearing they were being punished by the old Olympian gods who they had abandoned. Enter Augustine.

Us Versus Them

In answer to all the grumbling, Augustine of Hippo wrote The City of God in 426 AD, the single most influential theological tract in all of Christianity outside of the Bible. In it he declared that Christianity was not responsible for the Sack of Rome but instead responsible for Rome's success because even if the Roman Empire was doomed, the City of God, the City of Heaven, would prevail. By neatly severing the fate of the Empire from the fate of the Church and its followers, he reestablished the Us versus Them narrative that promised a glorious triumph for true believers and doom for the doubters. And by separating out the pious as special and laying the blame on others for all that had gone wrong, Augustine tapped into a powerful vein of propaganda that shifted blame away from one group of people to a deeply despised other. 

It was a seminal example of telling people what they want to hear, and one that is still with us today in our hyper-partisan news bubbles. No one is responsible because it is always someone else’s fault. As a recipe for the erosion and collapse of a society nothing could be more effective than this deliberate divisiveness. Civilizations rise when people come together. Civilizations fall when they are driven apart.

The Church could sense the end was coming. The Roman Empire was headed for a fall. The next order of business was to get on top of it and reap the benefits.

Loyalty Tests

In 426 AD, the same year The City of God was published, Augustine and other influential theologians finalized the inclusion of the Book of Revelation in the biblical canon. Prior to this, that darkest and most pessimistic of all New Testament books did not act as a bleak counterweight to the positive message of the rest of the scriptures. Not surprisingly, given the climate of the times, writings that dealt with the end of the world and the coming of a new and better age were all the rage. Revelation was but one of them, but one that worked well for the narrative being constructed by the fifth century Church.

The Book of Revelation sets up a dichotomy between those who will be saved and those who will perish, those who will sit in the grace and glory of God, and those doomed to eternal suffering, between an elite group of the pious select, and everyone else. Us versus Them. The blameless and the guilty. And Augustine took it a step further: a loyalty test, which came to be known as justification through faith, the assertion that God’s grace is earned first and foremost through faith, even more than through moral behavior or obedience to divine law. To put it another way, you must be a sincere and devout Christian first, if you expect to escape the wrath of God on Judgment Day.

Propaganda as a Weapon

As the Roman Empire disintegrated, the barbarians came rushing in, and a century of slaughter, plagues, and starvation ensued. Yet the Christian Church survived and thrived by using this cynical message of salvation that relied on divisiveness and scapegoating to weed out anyone who might challenge its power. The Church’s shameless appeal to fear and anger became more pronounced as things got worse, and its use of end of the world rhetoric became more widespread and influential. Even though the Church didn’t have a name for what it was doing, it was using the tools of propaganda to bend the people to its will.

Scholars have sometimes remarked on the surprising ability of the fifth Church to wield such unchallenged power when it had no army, no fortresses, and no military presence of any kind. The one weapon it did have, however, was propaganda, and it used it to weaken and destroy its enemies. 

Propaganda is a sword, an instrument of violence liable to hurt as many people as it defends. While it may succeed in elevating a single authoritarian ruler, it will not bring a society together in shared sacrifice to achieve something greater. Its power is to divide, not to unify. It is the furthest thing imaginable from Christ's message of tolerance and forgiveness, and it should be rejected by anyone who calls himself a Christian. All too often, however, it is embraced instead.