Pathways to Public Relations

Histories of Practice and Profession

Burton St. John III, Margot Opdycke Lamme, Jacquie L'Etang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135107048
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Over the centuries, scholars have studied how individuals, institutions and groups have used various rhetorical stances to persuade others to pay attention to, believe in, and adopt a course of action. The emergence of public relations as an identifiable and discrete occupation in the early 20th century led scholars to describe this new iteration of persuasion as a unique, more systematized, and technical form of wielding influence, resulting in an overemphasis on practice, frequently couched within an American historical context.

This volume responds to such approaches by expanding the framework for understanding public relations history, investigating broad, conceptual questions concerning the ways in which public relations rose as a practice and a field within different cultures and countries at different times in history.

With its unique cultural and contextual emphasis, Pathways to Public Relations shifts the paradigm of public relations history away from traditional methodologies and assumptions, and provides a new and unique entry point into this complicated arena.

Part I Public relations history and faith

1 The strategic heart The nearly mutual embrace of religion and public relations

Robert Brown

DOI: 10.4324/9780203074183-1

Man’s condition is the result of a series of transformations.

(J. B. Bury)

Public relations is, and to a significant extent has historically been, what I have called in examining the Catholic Reformation the propagation of awe (Brown, 2004). What follows, then, is an extended reflection on the ways in which public relations, religion, and spirituality have shown interdependence in the course of their respective development, as well as a similar, if little-noted orientation toward an increasing liberalization of perspective. Broadly speaking, and by and large, both public relations and religion can be seen as having progressed toward inclusiveness. The narrative of American religious and spiritual history offers much evidence that, as man’s condition has (as Bury noted above) revealed many transformations, the role of public relations has been far broader and deeper than a publicity tool. Conversely, religion and spirituality are baked into public relations. These historical movements may account, in part, for the continuity of the ways in which religion and public relations have sought to partner with each other over the centuries.

The thesis of this chapter is not to reframe public relations as “religious” or “spiritual,” but to demonstrate how the nature and the practice of each has helped to shape the other. The chapter focuses on this mutual shaping throughout American history, but that interpenetration extends well before and beyond America. In fact, the ancient and continuing association of religion and public relations has received scant attention in the scholarly literature. Outside the scope of public relations scholarship, public relations and religion are not mentioned in the same breath, except perhaps by public relations’ many critics as antonyms. In this chapter, my purpose is to examine the ways in which the American historical religious and spiritual narrative can be illuminated by considering it in public relations terms.

I arrived at the intersection of religion and public relations when I began researching the influence of Saint Paul in the first century ce, and of the power of Catholic Reformation popes in the seventeenth century. Grunig and Hunt (1984) observed that the spread of Christianity in the first century by the apostles Peter and Paul was “one of the great public relations accomplishments in history” (p. 15). But the consensus about the modern origins of public relations points to the dubious influence of P. T. Barnum, the entrepreneur of circuses and freak shows who is known for having said that there’s a sucker born every minute. Grunig and Hunt’s account, which influenced a generation of textbooks, used Barnum as a straw man for the uncritically progressivist thesis that public relations “evolved” from Barnum in the nineteenth century to professionalism and ethics in the twentieth (1984). For example, in The Essentials of Public Relations, Wilcox, Ault, Agee and Cameron (2000, p. 25) explained the “functions” of public relations as “evolving” from its beginning with Barnum’s invention of the “pseudoevent.” Grunig (1992) then further extended the progressive view of public relations development by pointing to public relations as evolving into “symmetrical” practices as excellent “symmetrical communication systems” for organizations (p. 16). However, it is highly unlikely that the idea of symmetry was intended to comprise or encompass religion or spirituality; Grunig’s is a managerial, quantitative, and secular perspective, not a religious one.

Symmetry has enjoyed the status of a dominant theory. Challenges, however, have not been infrequent; and when reconsidered critically and historically, another dimension of Grunig’s concept—the idea that public relations has “evolved”—has also been called into question (Brown, 2010; Lamme and Russell, 2010). The tent of public relations has always been capacious enough for a cornucopia of practices, some more ethical and excellent than others. One of symmetry theory’s central flaws is its focus on the managerial, organizational, and corporate side of public relations, which has marginalized (if not excluded) other contexts, especially religion and spirituality. Against historical realities and common sense, symmetry theory elevated the corporate social responsibility programs of industrial corporations over such foundational works of moral influence as the Sermon on the Mount, the Homerically inspired rhetorical analysis of Aristotle, the poetry of Paul’s I Corinthians 13, the divine aesthetics of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, the ecstasy of Bernini’s sculpture of Saint Teresa, and even the theatrical appeal of Barnum’s mermaids, midgets, and jumbo elephants.

Whither religion amid modern public relations’ culture of managerialism and quantitative research? Conceptually speaking, religion and spirituality enter the space of public relations when the field’s scholarly perspective opens to include art, awe, inspiration, passion, poetry, magic, miracle, and music. The origins, inspirations, and models of public relations must be understood to include the ethical presence of Aristotle and religious influence of Saint Paul as well as the charlatanism of Barnum and the marketing calculations of corporate social responsibility. With rare exceptions (Marchand, 1998; Tilson, 2011), public relations scholars have been uninterested in religion and spirituality, perhaps because they appear to fall outside the conventional conceptions of the field as a behavioral science that focuses on the management of communication. But those perspectives ignore the reality that public relations cannot be abstracted from the larger, broader, cultural, and historical conversation in which religion and spirituality have played a major role.

The idea of public relations changes considerably when examined unconventionally from a cultural, historical, and spiritual perspective. In The Promotion of Devotion, Tilson (2011) conceptualizes public relations as a covenant not only between human beings and God, but between individuals and the celebrities and shrines that, in secular societies, forge covenantal bonds, fill concert halls and football stadiums, and generate pilgrimages, TV ratings, print impressions, and innumerable Facebook likes and Twitter followers. Public relations and religion have been effectively shaping each other long before modernity, he argues. Public relations is both Barnum’s circus and St. Paul’s Cathedral. For Tilson, religion is “covered in a layer of promotion” (p. 2). To connect religion and spirituality with public relations is to embrace its interdisciplinarity and its pluralistic inclusiveness, he says.

The scholarly and practitioner ambition to position public relations almost exclusively in managerial, technological, scientific, modern, and ethical frameworks can be traced to the “pioneers,” perhaps especially to Bernays. Ever mindful of the powers of perception and of language, he emphasized the neutrality of the term public relations counsel. Bernays’ wordsmithing was intended to effect a transformation and transcendence of his practice. But not only have such strategies failed to do what they were intended to do; they have also managed to obscure the universally appealing qualities of enthusiasm, drama, and theatricality. By attempting to subsume propaganda into the more-clinical term “public relations,” Bernays helped to obscure, whether intentionally or not, the religious and spiritual dimensions of public relations. Nor has Bernays’ wordsmithing persuaded the popular mind or critics of public relations that the practice was something entirely different than propaganda (L’Etang and Pieczka, 2006).

What the conceptual broadening and inclusiveness of public relations permits is not only to open the door to religion and spirituality; it also helps us understand the role of religion and spirituality in shaping the conflicted and dramatic history of the American conversation. A broader, post-organizational, and post-symmetrical conceptualization of public relations shines a light on both the awesome and the ordinary. It is in religious and spiritual experience—in the theater of religious conversion and spiritual enthusiasm—that the passionate nature of public relations can be restored to both its historical and contemporary conceptualizations.

The Great Awakening: outward manifestations of an inward drama

The religious revival of the 1740s was nothing if not theatrical, one of the attributes of messianic religion and much of public relations. Tracy (1842), an early and influential historian of the Awakening, described sermons as eliciting a powerful display of emotion: “Persons sometimes involuntarily ‘cry out’, fall down faint, or go into convulsions,” he said (p. 221). By some accounts, the Great Awakening began with the arrival in the American colonies from England of George Whitefield (also known as “Whitfield”), a preacher with legendary powers of eloquence powerful enough to unleash emotional outbursts from revival event throngs of up to 30,000 sinners, according to newspaper accounts from the Connecticut Valley southward to Philadelphia and Georgia (Lambert, 2001).

Lambert (2001) traced the period of the Great Awakening from smaller and disparate “awakenings” in the mid-1730s to broader and “interconnected” revivals in the 1740s (p. 6). Emblematic of this development was Jonathan Edwards. Despite (or because of) the effect of his sermons on his fainting, wailing audiences, Edwards was, in fact, suspicious of the legitimacy of operatic emotionalism as a true test of conversion; he fell out of favor with his congregation and was forced out. Lambert (2001) noted the public relations intensity of the revivals in his book Inventing the Great Awakening. The emotional outbursts and the swelling of the crowds into the tens of thousands made for much publicity, a historical fact fundamental to Lambert’s thesis that the Great Awakening was, as his title suggests, “invented.” It is a term with a whiff of disapproval of a sort common to critics of public relations like Boorstin (1992), who dismissed public relations as something merely made up and vaporous rather than real and credible.

On one level, however, Lambert’s “invention thesis” resonates with Tilson’s (2011) examination of the covenantal nature of public relations; Tilson found emotionalism and publicity in the devotion (Tilson’s term) paid to pop culture and media idols such as John F. Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, Martin Luther King, Princess Diana, and Michael Jackson. Contextualized by the funerals, concerts, posters, and publicity of public relations, their assassinations, homicides, and suicides are lifted to the religious and spiritual space of legend, hagiography, and martyrdom. It is a process that converges the profane, popular, and trendy with the sacred, mystical, and eternal. This coalescence of profane and sacred spaces recalls the historian Mircea Eliade’s (1987) descriptions of “primitive” cultures. The difference, however, is that Eliade discovered that the sacred was emphatically distinct from the profane, whereas Tilson found that the sacred and the profane converge in the public adoration of saints and celebrities.

Invented or not, the Awakening courted its own convergence of spaces. Contrary to historians who have framed the Awakening as essentially American, Miller (1952) saw the Great Awakening as “only incidentally American” (p. 143). He saw the movement’s explosive expression as reflective of the dissatisfaction of individuals on both sides of the Atlantic with the emotionally unsatisfying, rationalistic, and scientific culture of the Enlightenment. Miller (1952) observed that “between about 1740 and 1760 practically all of Western Europe was swept by some kind of religious enthusiasm” (p. 143). Lambert (2001) had yet another historiographical perspective. He viewed the revivalism as not one single great awakening in America, but numerous awakenings that have appeared episodically throughout American history. From a public relations perspective, Lambert offered an agenda-setting interpretation with elements of media cultivation in which “revivalists fashioned the awakening” (p. 7). He noted that revivalists engaged in a variety of what can be seen as strategic public relations practices:

Preaching “searching” or evangelistic sermons aimed at getting people to acknowledge their sinful condition and turn to God whose Grace alone could save them from eternal damnation.

Conducting services almost daily for weeks and getting guest-speaker evangelists to preach some of their sermons in a series of what could be called rock star cameos.

Involvin...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Foreword
• Foreword
• Introduction Realizing new pathways to public relations history
• Part I Public relations history and faith
• Part II Public relations history and politics/government
• Part III Public relations history and reform
• Part IV Public relations history and the profession
• Index