Scott Coley is a Christian philosopher who published Ministers of Propaganda: Truth, Power, and the Ideology of the Religious Right. Lots of people are excited about it: it’s abuzz on Twitter, several popular Christian academics have endorsed it, and Eerdmans is publishing it—nothing to sneeze at!
I think people are excited because, as he has said in a recent podcast, it gives voice to the Christians who have de-constructed their faith or are at least very concerned about the pervasive influence of ideologies like Christian Nationalism. Coley, for example, boldly claims that “much of what’s described as evangelical deconstruction is essentially an effort to decode propaganda that’s embedded in the ideology of the religious right.” If you’ve de-constructed, that’s probably a relieving thing to hear.
Nonetheless, I’m pretty much fundamentally opposed to the existence of this book. It is the sort of work that exacerbates the already very bad polarization we see among Christians, and your soul would be much better off reading something else. You can see this quickly in the way Coley treats people on the religious right. He starts with a bang:
In the decades since Mark Noll published The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, evangelical anti-intellectualism has only grown more pronounced: white evangelicals are overrepresented among skeptics of public health officials and scientific experts; and white evangelicals are more likely than other Americans to embrace conspiracy theories that threaten public health and weaken our nation’s democratic institutions.
I think this is a ridiculous way of representing “anti-intellectualism.” Even public health officials should concede that their mishaps have rightly earned them some public distrust (Do I need to recount them?) This is a very bad predicament, but you cannot just start off a book calling people anti-intellectual for rationally responding to the various ways public officials have failed them. (Read Freddie DeBoer’s “COVID Still Makes Everybody A Little Bit Crazy” for a balanced discussion of how tons of people on both sides of the issue have been pretty irrational about public health).
He does stuff like this a good amount of the book; it’s like he can’t help himself, or he’s forgotten he’s writing a book and not a Twitter dunk. Here is how he describes Creationists:
Moreover, the creation science industry has proven to be a model for alternative evangelical gatekeeping institutions with their own “experts” and “peer-reviewed journals” that legitimize the aims of cultural conservatism.
In my view, Creationism is false, but plenty of gifted philosophers believe it. J.P. Moreland, for example, is a widely celebrated Christian philosopher who has defended the view for a while now. He’s even got a popular edited interdisciplinary book that critiques theistic evolution, the natural alternative to creationism (for Christians, at least). But no, instead of recognizing their view is somewhat plausible, Coley goes for dunks by condescendingly scare-quoting their attempts at defending their views. To Coley, those publicly defending the view comprise a “nomadic culture war machine” propagating “the untutored common sense of enterprising ministers over the carefully reasoned, peer-reviewed arguments of ‘secular’ experts.” I don’t know how you can get more uncharitable than that.
(Note: To reiterate, I think Creationism is false, given the scientific evidence we have. My point is that when writing an academic book that canvasses various issues you disagree with, it seems bad to treat them like the author does. That’s all! I’m not here to shill for Big YEC.)
I note this for two reasons: First, again, it’s good evidence that this is a book that is not good for your soul. But second, it’s a tragic flaw of Coley’s work (and his public Twitter persona—if he’s not promoting this book, he’s going for dunks or retweeting other dunks). He actually seems to have some good things to say to those on the other side of the aisle. Coley is also an excellent writer—I didn’t have to work hard to understand what he was saying. Still, he couches his views in such clear contempt for those on the religious right that it’s hard for anyone to pay attention to them.
But this is a minor critique.
In short, the real problem with the book is that it’s only helpful if you’ve already rejected every position Coley treats in it—Creationism, Complementarianism, Christian Nationalism, etc. But if these positions are still live options for you, then nothing about the book is helpful. If you’re interested in assessing any of the issues Coley discusses, you would do better simply considering those issues on their own merits instead of engaging in the sort of cynical psychologizing that Coley does in this book. But if you want a book that more or less re-affirms your views, this is your book!
Of course, Coley has consciously written the book this way. You can see in the way he describes the process of spreading ideologies that he’s only interested in views he already assumes are false:
Ideology begins with some form of social hierarchy that requires moral justification…That justification comes in the form of a legitimizing narrative: a story meant to explain the moral legitimacy of the social hierarchy in question. Legitimizing narratives are facilitated by motivated reasoning, which inclines us to accept even poor, unreasonable justifications for social arrangements that we prefer…Finally, propaganda insulates our legitimizing narratives from arguments against the established hierarchy by manipulating and appropriating the ideals on which opposing arguments are based.
In principle, I don’t think this process rules out social hierarchies that are, in fact, good. But my impression from Coley’s book is that people propagandize to defend hierarchies that we already know are false: chattel slavery, men’s authority over women, etc.
For example, this process does not describe what happens when people defend the plain fact that parents should have authority over their children. It would be strange to say that people who defend this hierarchy against child liberationists are engaging in propaganda, even if their legitimizing narrative is poor and motivated. After all, hierarchies like the parent-child one are so natural and plain to most people that it’s challenging to defend it, much, in the same way, it is challenging to give an extended argument for something obvious like the fact that we exist and there is an external world. Given that the hierarchy is hard to defend, it would be unsurprising if people reasoned poorly about it in ways similar to how Coley describes propagandists for other unjust hierarchies. Yet, it would be strange to consider the former dynamic as propaganda.
So, if Coley is only covering unjust hierarchies that he more or less already takes as a given are unjust, what’s the point of the book? If you don’t already reject the views he considers outright, you have nothing to gain from the book. You will object when Coley says a proponent of your view is engaging in propaganda to cajole the masses into believing a view and reaffirming an unjust social practice. But if you do already reject the views Coley considers, then there is also not much for you here either. (I doubt Coley would object to a pastor briefly pausing in their sermon to say “women’s ordination/complementarianism/etc. clearly follows from Scripture if you are sensitive to basic virtues like justice” on the grounds they are engaging in propaganda).
I suppose it’s somewhat interesting to see that prominent evangelicals engage in propaganda to defend false views, but if you already think those views are false, is this exactly news to you? Ask anyone you know who was a part of the deconstruction movement among Evangelicals: Did you know that many people believed X-view that you reject because prominent evangelicals were propagandizing X? I don’t think anyone would look at you with utter shock. I guess this book charts such propaganda, which helps people who deconstructed know that they are not crazy and that they were, in fact, correct when they detected such propaganda in the evangelical world. But did this group of people need an entire book about this? Isn’t it just very obvious to them?
Coley’s book, then, is not helpful for anyone. It’s not helpful for those who accept the hierarchies because he rejects them out of hand, but it’s also not helpful for those who reject the hierarchies because it defends something that is plainly obvious to them. The book is also not helpful for anyone, regardless of where they stand on the hierarchies, because it’s full of cynical and dismissive engagement with defenses of those hierarchies.
To see this, we can consider his treatment of Complementarianism.
Complementarianism is “the view that Scripture prescribes gender hierarchy.” Evangelicals normally contrast Complementarianism with a view called Egalitarianism, which is "the view that Scripture prescribes gender equality.” I’m not here to sort this debate; it’s vexing, and I think anyone who says Scripture obviously points in one direction or the other is mistaken. That’s one central thesis of Coley’s book.
Many prominent Evangelical leaders have said that Scripture plainly teaches Complementarianism is true and that an affirmation of Egalitarianism clearly undermines what Scripture plainly teaches. For example, Coley cites J. Ligon Duncan’s “Why “Together for the Gospel” Embraces Complementarianism” (2008). Coley introduces the text as one that “prominent complementarians recite with the cadence and frequency of a ritual incantation…” (Again, this doesn’t seem like the sort of thing you’d say about a view you have not already rejected out of hand!) In the passage, Duncan does not do much to argue for Complementarianism; he cites a few passages of Scripture and says that those passages plainly teach the view and that dissenters are not paying due respect to the authority of the Bible.
Coley’s complaint is deeply ironic: “Rather than engaging egalitarians in good faith—as spiritual and intellectual equals who sincerely disagree—Duncan’s reasoning simply assumes, without argument, that egalitarians are wrong.” That’s interesting; this book has no place where Coley treats his opponents as intellectual equals who sincerely disagree—see the minor critique above for examples. Moreover, because the plausibility of Coley’s project pretty much requires the hierarchies he considers are false, he is essentially doing the same thing! So, I have no idea what to do with this critique because this entire book exemplifies it.
Also, this particular critique of this particular text is not good. He continues:
[Duncan’s] appeal to the clarity of Scripture is hopelessly question-begging. The notion that egalitarianism is inconsistent with the clarity of Scripture presupposes that Scripture clearly mandates gender hierarchy. But that’s precisely the point at issue in the debate… So unless I’ve already accepted the argument’s conclusion that I should reject egalitarianism, I have no reason to accept its premise that egalitarianism is at odds with the clarity of Scripture. But that’s not how arguing works. An argument doesn’t ask us to assume its conclusion in order to find its reasoning persuasive—it compels us to accept its conclusion with persuasive reasoning.
All of this is true—it’s bad to engage in question-begging if you’re trying to give a good argument for a view. But this only matters for Duncan if the article was supposed to be a good argument for the view. If you briefly consult the article, however, I think it’s fairly straightforward that Duncan was not trying to offer a robust argument for the view—he was just giving reasons why his organization affirms it and why they chose to include it in their mission statement. After all, the part where he offers four different reasons in favor of the view only constitutes 906 words. Does that seem like the sort of word count anyone would contribute to robustly developing four different arguments? Or might it be that Duncan was giving a concise summary of various arguments that could be defended further in the right context?
Coley continues by criticizing what Duncan does with the prooftexts:
Note the way that this reasoning conflates the contents of a few decontextualized Bible verses with the import of the entire Bible. This is a tacit acknowledgment that the debate around gender doesn’t really turn on complementarian prooftexts. The point at issue isn’t whether we can locate a few Bible verses that seem to support patriarchy—it’s fairly obvious that we can. The point, rather, is whether the Bible as a whole counsels us to pursue gender hierarchy or gender parity.
Again, there is nothing wrong with this. If you want to know God’s will about Complementarianism, you ought to consider the entire Bible rather than a few prooftexts. But from Duncan’s proof-texting, it does not follow that he disagrees with this. Sure, if you read the entire Bible, there are plausible readings where the Bible is moving in a trajectory toward the total liberation of women from all hierarchies—see William Webb’s Slaves, Women, and Homosexuality for a compelling discussion of that view. I have no doubt Duncan is aware of these discussions.
But if someone reads a set of texts as decisively telling against a view, that matters and is worth pointing to. After all, if you think the Bible is going in a different trajectory, would you not also have to cite texts that tell a different story from a Complementarian one? So what’s the issue here?
Additionally, Duncan’s article does not seem to aim at addressing those alternative ways of reading Scripture in-depth; he is just trying to summarize his organization’s position on Complementarianism, and part of that position is that there is no good alternative reading to their own. In a short statement, he’s not going to chart out a discussion about how the entire Bible, taken as a whole, narratively goes in one trajectory over the other. Some texts should do this, but concise statements on an organization’s behalf normally don’t.
The better way to deal with ideas you do not like is to consider them on their merits. If you are wondering whether Complementarianism/Young-Earth Creationism/etc. is true, you should investigate those issues. Read your Bible, consult commentaries and prominent thinkers in the Christian tradition, talk with friends in your church about what they think, etc. Ask questions about the issues. This is a much more fruitful way of engaging with views, one that is good for your soul. But this book exemplifies the wrong way to engage with such ideas: read your opponents cynically and don’t give them any credit for their views or why they hold them.
Nick are you a Christian?
One thing I have been mulling over is how none of the authors or sociologists in this sphere have said much at all about Gaza. Coley hasn't spoken on it at all. At the very least, I find it curious and, perhaps, a source of insight, that these experts in the intersection of faith, politics, and nationalism aren't speaking into this crisis that has direct American involvement.