The Bible, Propaganda?

Speak­ing of The New Chris­tians, Tony Jones said some­thing else that caught my attention:

“The Bible is pro­pa­ganda.… Pro­pa­ganda has a point and a pur­pose.… It doesn’t claim to be objec­tive. It’s try­ing to con­vince some­one of some­thing. It’s try­ing to get peo­ple to join a cause, to join a move­ment. Isn’t that exactly what the Bible is?.… It is a liv­ing, breath­ing doc­u­ment that makes a claim on its read­ers’ lives. It’s like the pam­phlets sur­rep­ti­tiously printed by Paul Revere and his com­pa­tri­ots in 1776 — pro­pa­ganda in that sense. It’s God’s man­i­festo, Jesus’ Lit­tle Red Book“¹

Depend­ing on what one means by pro­pa­ganda, yes and no. If by pro­pa­ganda one means sim­ply ‘to prop­a­gate infor­ma­tion’ with the mod­i­fi­ca­tion ‘as accu­rately as pos­si­ble’ then yes, the Bible is and so are many other things, such as school text books, cer­tain his­tory books, med­i­cine bot­tle labels, instruc­tions, etc. If one means pro­pa­ganda in the more tra­di­tional sense, the attempt to bring peo­ple to a cause through a mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tion, then no, I don’t think that’s exactly what the Bible is. While it’s prob­a­bly true that the Bible, like pro­pa­ganda, does not claim to be objec­tive (and I don’t see any rea­son why it should claim to be), there is at least one sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence between pro­pa­ganda and the Bible and that dif­fer­ence, is com­mit­ment to the truth.

Pro­pa­ganda is the attempt to sway a group of peo­ple towards a cause through the use of pre­sent­ing facts selec­tively. Nec­es­sar­ily, pro­pa­ganda com­mits lies of omis­sion. Pro­pa­ganda is also usu­ally pre­sented in such a way that it makes issues ‘black and white,’ cre­ates false dilem­mas and dichotomies. Appeals to emo­tions and author­i­ties. It is usu­ally mis­rep­re­sents that which it speaks against. Pro­pa­ganda is not con­cerned with the truth, but with grow­ing sup­port for a cause. Are we pre­pared to say that the bible pur­ports to be the truth through the spread­ing of lies  for the sake of grow­ing sup­port? Or that its cen­tral mes­sage might have sig­nif­i­cant omis­sions which may change its mes­sage entirely? The bible isn’t merely the best alter­na­tive, it is the only way, whereas every­thing else is a lesser alter­na­tive. It fits per­fectly well within the emer­gent view of Scrip­ture, but only if one is will­ing to under­mine, com­pletely, the unique mes­sage of Christianity.Re-creating it as equal with all world religions.

Part of the prob­lem stems from the word objec­tive as con­tem­po­rary soci­ety under­stands it, it’s a dirty word and unlike what many peo­ple will say, it’s not nec­es­sar­ily a bad thing. ‘Bias’ is oth­er­wise known as epis­temic objec­tiv­ity, of which we have two sorts: psy­cho­log­i­cal objec­tiv­ity and ratio­nal objec­tiv­ity.  Psy­cho­log­i­cal objec­tiv­ity is defined as “detach­ment, the absence of bias, a lack of com­mit­ment either way on a topic“². Most often, peo­ple dis­play psy­cho­log­i­cal objec­tiv­ity towards those things for which they do not care, or know noth­ing or lit­tle about. How­ever, this isn’t always a vir­tu­ous things, “as one devel­ops thought­ful, intel­li­gent con­vic­tions about a topic, it would be wrong to remain ‘unbi­ased,’ that is, uncom­mit­ted regard­ing it.… Should one remain ‘unbi­ased’ that can­cer is a dis­ease, that rape is wrong, that the New Tes­ta­ment was writ­ten in the first cen­tury, that there is design in the uni­verse, if one has dis­cov­ered good rea­sons for each belief? No, one should not”.³ The inter­est­ing thing about psy­cho­log­i­cal objec­tiv­ity is that most peo­ple are not psy­cho­log­i­cal objec­tive about many of the things they believe. How­ever, even while this is the case it mat­ters very lit­tle for it is ratio­nal objec­tiv­ity that is impor­tant. When we speak of being objec­tive or unbi­ased, we are speak­ing of ratio­nal objec­tiv­ity.

Defined, ratio­nal objec­tiv­ity is “the state of hav­ing accu­rate epis­temic access to the thing itself. This entails that if one has ratio­nal objec­tiv­ity regard­ing some topic, then one can dis­cern the dif­fer­ence between gen­uinely good and bad reasons/evidence for a belief about that topic and one can hold that belief for gen­uinely good reasons/evidence.“⁴ We must keep in mind that bias does “does not stand between a know­ing sub­ject and an inten­tional object, nor does it elim­i­nate a person’s abil­ity to assess the rea­sons for some­thing.… If bias made ratio­nal objec­tiv­ity impos­si­ble, then no teacher–including the post­mod­ernist herself–could respon­si­bly teach any view the teacher believed on any sub­ject!“⁵

Return­ing to Jones, I must dis­agree (which I think is obvi­ous, by now). Some­one made the com­ment that Jones quote was provoca­tive, and I won’t dis­agree there. How­ever it often tends to be the case that provoca­tive for the sake of provoca­tive is shal­low. Within a post­mod­ern under­stand­ing of Chris­tian­ity, there’s prob­a­bly very lit­tle wrong with what Jones has said. How­ever this is no redeem­ing fac­tor con­sid­er­ing the issues that cur­rently plague emer­gent Chris­tian­ity, most sig­nif­i­cant, the prob­lem of truth.

Related posts:

1. The Bible and Homo­sex­u­al­ity: Introduction
2. Amne­sia, the bible and the Iliad