Term ‘lifted’ from the title Congregatio de propaganda fide (now the APF – Association for the Propagation of the Faith), a committee of the Roman Church responsible for foreign missions and the dissemination of the faith. It was set up in 1622. When literature is propaganda and when it is not is a much debated issue.
If an author sets out to make a case for a particular religious, social or political point of view, through the medium of a play or a novel, for example, and he is seen to be doing this, and perhaps in the process he sacrifices verisimilitude by contriving character and situation to suit his thesis, then it might be said that the result is a work of propaganda. If what he has to say is worth reading or listening to long after the issue which provoked the propaganda is dead, then his art has transcended the contingent needs of the
propagandist.
Basically propaganda is devoted to the spreading of a particular idea or belief. Much pamphlet literature and journalism has precisely this
purpose. It is partial. Pamphleteering in the 18th c., for instance, was openly propagandist. Later, notable polemicists like H. G. Wells, Bernard Shaw,
Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton wrote a lot of propaganda to support and promulgate their political, social and religious beliefs. Though proselyt-
izing is forbidden to the layman, Belloc and Chesterton came very near it at times. Ibsen might fairly be described as propagandist in some of his plays;
so might Galsworthy. And Brecht certainly was. There have also been a number of plays presented to spread the doctrines of Moral Re-Armament.
Many writers in the Communist bloc have been overtly propagandist in aid of socialism, in novels, as well as in plays and verse.
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