Agitprop is a term that melds “agitation” and “propoganda,” and was coined in the early Soviet Union. Communication was designed not to inform people, but to move them toward a desired political outcome.
In an interview, JD Vance was confronted for sharing the false story that Haitians were eating people’s pets, and he defended his actions by saying that it was important to get people to take action to eliminate the cultural threat posed by immigrants, even if it was based on misinformation. The outcome was not to inform, but to whip up anti-immigrant sentiment.
Agitprop reduces complex situations to emotionally compelling narratives. It’s hard to motivate people without keeping the narratives simple and emotionally charged. People lose interest if it’s not immediately clear what the point is. Agitprop tells us who the villains are, who the heroes are, and paints a world of victims and oppressors, patriots and traitors, insiders and outsiders, and believers and enemies. People prefer moral clarity to uncertainty and ambiguity.
Agitprop builds group identity by letting people believe:
- We are the good people.
- We know what’s really happening.
- Others are deceived or malicious.
Agitprop may be used by anyone who wants to drive a specific behavior:
- voting
- donating
- protesting
- enlisting
- boycotting
- reporting on enemies
- demonstrating loyalty
Success is measured by the behavioral or attitudinal change of the group, not by whether the information is true or not. And agitprop doesn’t have to lie to be effective. Instead, it can:
- emphasize some facts over others
- omit parts of the story
- choose emotionally charged but outlying examples
- repeat memorable stories
- frame events in a particular way
If you’ve ever watched side by side news coverage of the same story by two different outlets (that have a different political spin), you will probably have seen this. Agitprop is especially pervasive today due to social media, podcasts, memes, YouTube or TikTok content, and partisan news. You can identify it by its hallmarks:
- Strong emotional language
- Clear heroes & villains
- Little or no acknowledgement of uncertainty
- Appeals to identity rather than evidence
- Repeated, familiar slogans
- Heavy reliance on anecdotes without the context of data
- Calls for immediate action
- Dismissal of opposing views as illegitimate or evil rather than mistaken
If more than one of these is present, you may be looking at agitprop. When my mother-in-law died, we noticed that she was receiving multiple texts per day requesting donations and calling her to action RIGHT NOW to stop Trump. The same types of messages were being received in similar amounts by other seniors who had clicked other links than she did.
When you look at that description, though, you might also recognize that agitprop isn’t just a political thing. The LDS church used Bonneville Communication’s “Heartsell” as a method to create emotional content to compel and convert people to the faith. It was described as
“…a very special process… to stimulate response… It is not just to reach the mind but to touch the heart and make people want to respond.”
The missionary program also uses emotional pleas to invite behavioral change that orients someone positively toward the church: prayer, reading scriptures, church attendance, identifying feelings of peace or inspiration as evidence of the church’s truthfulness
A key difference between these approaches and agitprop is that they are designed to inspire individual conversion not to mobilize groups of people to take action. There is overlap in that conversion to the church also includes tithing donations, some communal efforts and expanded political influence of the church, but these are not the direct aims of Heartsell or missionary work. So why is there so much overlap?
All successful communal movements (religions, corporations, political groups) involve the same psychological tools:
- A compelling narrative “This is how the world works.”
- An emotional experience “This feels meaningful and important.”
- A social community “These are my people.”
The distinguishing factors are
- The accuracy of the claims made
- How open they are to questioning and criticism
- How disconfirming evidence is handled
- Whether participants can freely leave
- Whether persuasion respects personal autonomy
If you look at the political groups, you can walk through each of these 5 questions to determine for yourself how trustworthy they are and whether or not they are groups you would want to join. When it comes to the church, individuals make those same types of evaluations.
- Do you see the church using agitprop? What about during Prop 8 and other anti-LGBTQ efforts?
- When you look at the three psychological tools, how does the LDS church stack up to you (compelling narrative, emotional experience, social community)?
- It’s easy enough to be skeptical of the opposing argument’s agitprop. Are you skeptical of agitprop that confirm your pre-existing beliefs? Can you think of an example?
Discuss.
Wheat & Tares 
No, I wouldn’t use the word agitprop in connection with the church — the original and historical uses of the word don’t fit. I might use words like marketing, advertising, persuasion.
ji, for a more general term, how about “emotional manipulation”?
One thing we run into all the time — without really noticing — is the soundtracks they play in stores (to get you to shop a little more energetically) and restaurants (to get you to eat, eat quick, then get out so we can put another customer at your table). When was the last time you were in a store *without* a soundtrack playing? Or a truly quiet restaurant? What a relaxing experience that would be.
Then notice how the Church uses soundtracks to emotionally manipulate the audience. In videos. In hymns. It’s not to get people riled up, like agitprop. It’s to soothe and render the listener more open (vulnerable?) to the accompanying narrative or message. There is nothing particularly nefarious about the practice — it’s no different than how stores think carefully about the soundtracks they play to support their goal (sell more stuff). But it does highlight the extent to which LDS messaging strategy relies on emotional tools rather than rational persuasion or even spiritual engagement. [And it has not always been this way, only for the last forty years or so.]
“Families Are Forever”
I notice in my own Facebook feed that I get conflicting agitprop from my different interests. When you get the propaganda from both sides, you can start to see the distortions and blind spots. For example, right now I have been getting both very happy announcements and other very angry announcements about killing 90% of Bears Ears and Staircase national monuments. I appreciate nature, and that means I like to both get out and enjoy it and want to protect it from wanton destruction. So, my hobby of ATVing is oh so happy about “trail access.” Those posts show our Utah politicians as heroes. On the other hand, my love of nature and not wanting it destroyed by mining, over grazing, and trampling by hoards of people and my love of our National Parks is leading to some very upset posts where those same Utah politicians are horrid villains who want to sell the land to the highest bidder. It would be funny it is wasn’t so disgusting. Neither side is willing to admit there is a balance between public access and protecting it from human destruction. They forget we *had* some trail access in their zeal to keep the trails open and that opening it up to mining or the current over grazing from cattle will also close the trails as well as destroying the fragile desert environment. Rather than working together for the balance needed, they make enemies and rile people up. I mean, let’s be honest, sometimes places need to be protected from too much human activity like ATVing. If we want our grandchildren to be able to enjoy ATVing in the desert, we have to make sure we don’t destroy that very desert. We just should not kill the very things we love by abusing them. Neither should we hide them away in a protective box.
Messaging from church leaders feels more like a response to fear. I don’t believe fear is intentionally being used to manipulate members; in nearly every case I think the church leader worldview is colored by actual fears that they genuinely feel. I think there’s a lot of overlap between fear and anger, they’re both survival mechanisms. I’ll spare everyone the Yoda quote.
I’m not commenting on whether those fears are justified or valid, only that much of the messaging is rooted in fear.
The accuracy of the claims made – “It’s not a lie if you believe it.” -George Costanza. It’s impossible for me to know whether someone is speaking in good faith. In the political realm I think most of it is performative and in bad faith. In church I think most of it is in good faith. Again, not commenting on whether the claims are valid. I just can’t get a good pulse on motivations.
How open they are to questioning and criticism – In the context of church? That book is sealed. The sealed portion. I cannot read it. In reality church leaders are going to get criticism, nowadays even criticism from active membership (hurray progress!). They still don’t like it and will coach members to not engage in it. The squeaky wheel gets the grease and church leaders prefer that the wheels of progress be rusted to the point where they don’t move at all.
How disconfirming evidence is handled – We know the answer to this one too, don’t we? It’s anti-Mormon (it isn’t). It was never taught (it was). Don’t take counsel from it whatever you do. It depends upon what the meaning of the word “principal ancestors” is.
Whether participants can freely leave – Members of the church certainly are free to leave. Most do. I’m in a limbo state with church attendance right now so my comment reflects that experience. Church culture is weird in that the messaging appears to be, “Please come back but don’t let the dividing curtain hit you on the butt on your way out.”
Whether persuasion respects personal autonomy – Personal autonomy for a church where I don’t even get to decide which ward I attend. Personal autonomy in a church that respects no boundaries. Personal autonomy in a church where they tell every ward worldwide what they’ll be fasting for and what lesson they’re going to have on fifth Sunday. Personal autonomy in the church is an absolute joke. Everything is correlated to the nth degree.
I would be very interested in the input of anyone who was personally involved in Prop 8 efforts in CA. That was an expressly political activity, one that many church members did not align with initially, but one in which the church held meetings to persuade / coerce members to take personal actions in the community to oppose gay marriage–phone trees, door knocking, some really time intensive politicking. That’s a pretty big ask for anyone. While it worked, it also kind of backfired, or that’s what it looks like to me. It didn’t paint the church in a very favorable light, except among other right wing groups. I didn’t live in CA, so I don’t know what tactics were used in the meetings, although I do know some people who were so turned off by the whole thing that they left the church. A few years later, there was a Prop 102 in AZ trying to accomplish the same thing (at the state level as with CA), and there was no grassroots effort that I could see. I only saw one church member (the bishop) who put a Prop 102 sign in his yard, and naive me thought “Oh, how embarrassing for him. I bet they pushed him to do that because he’s in leadership.” I was wrong about that, as later he turned out to be a very staunch Trump supporter and probably held very bigoted views about LGBTQ people. I never assumed that of anyone until they revealed it to be so. He made a lot of problematic comments across a gamut of topics over the years. But he also was a big fan of Mountain Meadows Massacre and read other complex Mormon histories.
In my ward in Utah, the Bishop called some people out of the congregation to attend a “special” meeting after the sacrament meeting that same day. I was not called upon. I found out later it was because of Prop 8 and being part of phone banks to call people in CA about voting no. I don’t know if it happened or not but two families in our ward immediately left the church, and later another family, and my own family.
Hawkgrrrl
I was personally involved in Prop 8 campaign (much,much less less than Prop 22. In fact, my wife who use to be political, was asked to head up the local No on 8 campaign. She declined for personal reasons and we instead got local idiots.)
Mostly I put up a No on 8 sign in our yard. Several times, as it keep being stolen by fine honest Christians.
Now I knew my parents were going to vote yes and donate money, but hoped not. They had done so for Prop 22. A Yes on 22 sign was prominently on their front yard. When they went on vacation, and I came over to water the plants, it would rankle me to walk past it. It still rankles me. But if they were entitled to their viewpoints, than damn it so was I. And I and my long term fiancee campaigned hard.
So years later, when the Church was at it again voiding out my civil rights and reducing my marriage to nothing, can’t say I was happy. So I knew the sign and donation were coming. But when on a phone call with my parents, when I expressed concern about my mothers cold, she proudly told me it was from going out in the rain to campaign for 8.(like it was a badge of honor) That was it, I was done. I hung up the phone mid-sentence. (To give my Dad credit, he was in the background going– No,no,no. Don’t say that.) I cut off all contact and mailed in my resignation papers.
So that’s my Prop 8 story.
I was in northern CA during prop 8. My family and others in the ward were asked to host strategy meetings in our homes; members were also called in by ward and stake leaders and asked to donate; there were sign-ups for protests, which were enthusiastically supported by most members of my ward, and lawn signs were also available for anyone who wanted them.
I was against prop 8 and my husband was for it, so we did none of the above. The deal was that if he donated for it, I would donate the same amount against it, and the same idea applied to yard signs or any other politicking.
There were frequent talks and prayers in church about how people who didn’t support it should lose their temple recommends and/or were risking their eternal salvation. Groups in the ward were constantly organizing and protesting was a big social activity. Since it wasn’t a secret that I opposed it, we were thankfully left out of the loop on a lot of these things, but there was a social cost for both of us (which pained my husband, but I was already on my way out at that point).
An acquaintance whose husband was a stake president also mentioned that non-supporters should lose their temple recommends. She told me that the pressure on stake presidents was intense; there was a phone call from upper church leadership telling them that prop 8 HAD to pass.
I wasn’t on the inside of this by any stretch, but I cannot overstate how strongly it was pushed by the church. It was truly appalling.