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CHURCH CREEDS & MANUFACTURED CONSENT

How do we justify a connection between Manufactured Consent and Church?Creeds?Perhaps it's best to begin this discussion by explaining what manufactured consent means.The Origins and Development of the PhraseManufactured ConsentThe phrase"manufactured consent" has its roots not in the late twentieth century, but in the early decades of the twentieth century. Its first significant use appears in Walter Lippmann’s[i] influential workPublic Opinion(1922).[ii] Writing in the aftermath of World War I and in the midst of the rapid expansion of mass media, Lippmann observed that modern societies had grown too complex for the average citizen to grasp in detail. Vast numbers of political decisions, international relations, and economic realities were filtered through institutions and experts long before they ever reached the general public. In this environment, he argued, the public’s consent to political authority could not be based on direct knowledge but had to be “manufactured” through mediated symbols, narratives, and simplifications.For Lippmann, the idea of manufacturing consent was not necessarily pejorative. He considered it a pragmatic necessity for democratic governance in an age of newspapers, telegraphs, and bureaucratic states. Without such simplification and mediation, public opinion would remain incoherent and unstable. In his formulation, elites, journalists, and policymakers inevitably played a role in shaping how ordinary people understood the world. Thus, the “manufacture of consent” described the unavoidable process by which leaders and institutions organized information to secure the appearance of public agreement.By the mid-twentieth century, however, this concept began to attract more critical interpretations. Scholars and social critics increasingly questioned whether the manufacture of consent was a neutral necessity or a subtle form of manipulation. This debate reached its fullest expression in Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky’sManufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media(1988

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