Reagan recruited evangelical leaders to win public support for the Contras

Evidence

Such opposition proved inconvenient when it came to the Reagan administration’s attempt to secure congressional support to intervene on the Contras’ behalf. When Congress refused to comply, instead prohibiting the use of any funds “for the purpose of overthrowing the government of Nicaragua,” Reagan turned to his evangelical allies for help in winning over the public. Inviting religious groups to special White House foreign policy seminars, administration officials peddled stories of the horrors perpetrated by Marxist guerrillas, framing the conflict as one between revolutionaries and Christians and urging religious organizations to assist them through lobbying and letter writing. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 264

Categorization

• XREF: Directly illustrates the consumer-cultural/political apparatus the reader wants to explain: the state used evangelical media networks as a propaganda channel.
• SEED: Angle: the Reagan administration’s instrumentalization of evangelical media as state propaganda — how a religious consumer culture became a foreign-policy broadcast arm.