How did "propaganda" go from a church word to a weapon of mass persuasion?

It started as a neutral church word and was soured by what governments did with persuasion in the twentieth century. Propaganda comes from the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, the Congregation for Propagating the Faith, a Catholic Church body created in 1622. In Latin it simply meant the things to be spread. Historically it was a neutral term for any material that promotes certain opinions, ideologies or concepts, and only from the twentieth century did it become associated with manipulation.

Persuasion for a cause is much older than the word. Ramesses II reframed the Battle of Kadesh, in fact a stalemate, as a divine personal victory. Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I was the first ruler to use the power of the printing press for propaganda. But the first large-scale and organised government propaganda came with the First World War in 1914. In the United States, the Committee on Public Information, led by the journalist George Creel, was created in 1917 to rally support for the war, and it recruited about 75,000 volunteers, the Four Minute Men, to speak at social events.

That is when the word turned sour. Harold Lasswell observed that it fell out of favour because of public suspicion of how it had been used in the war. Then, in Nazi Germany, a Ministry of Propaganda under Joseph Goebbels controlled the press, books, film, music and radio.

Today propaganda often selectively presents facts, or uses loaded language to produce an emotional rather than a rational response. Knowing that helps you spot it, whoever is speaking.