Propaganda in the Classical Sense
Throughout history, cults of all sizes and shapes have created exciting dramas to spread their doctrines to the uninitiated. Many of the same elements we see in comic books, paperback SF and fantasy novels and Hollywood movies were first introduced in these stories, not as entertainment per se, but as literal propaganda, meaning as messages designed to 'propagate the faith'.
In antiquity, pagan cults would put on lavish theatrical productions, reenacting the passions of their favorite gods. If you were in a major metropolitan area during the Hellenistic or Roman era, you could attend any number festivals in which the stories of Isis and Osiris, Demeter and Persephone, Adonis and Aphrodite, Cybele and Attis or several lesser-known stories would be used in what basically boiled down to recruitment drives.
Street performers and vendors selling refreshments, icons and amulets would cluster around outside, adding to the carnival atmosphere. Kind of like the Dragon*Con of their day.
In the early Christian era, these dramas took the form of Passion Plays and hagiographies, or the biographies of the Saints. These stories were often so outrageous that the Vatican itself disowned many of them a long time ago. A lot of them are also simply appropriations of well-known figures from pagan mythology.
With the rise of Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry during the Enlightenment you had novels such as Francis Bacon's The New Atlantis and Johann Andreae's The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz, both meant to make the complicated theories of their respective fraternities accessible to the unitiated.
Fast forward to the 19th Century, with the incredible explosion of occultism and Spiritualism that followed in the wake of the Industrial Revolution and the American Civil War. You had superstar novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton, whose own passion for Rosicrucian ideals lead to Zanoni. Ironically, his novel Vril, The Coming Race, would inspire a cult all its own, not to mention thousands of imitators.
Aleister Crowley wrote the novel Moonchild to try to make his thorny magickal writings more palatable for the casual reader (accent on the "try"). Similarly, occultist (and Theosophist) Dion Fortune would find success with a series of occult detective stories which explored her own positive magickal ideals. Sax Rohmer was best known for his Fu Manchu novels but also wrote a number of books propagating his own magickal theories.
The most notorious bit of backwash from the pulp/occult crossover was ultimately Scientology, dreamed up by former pulp writer L. Ron Hubbard when he realized he was still being paid the same penny a word he was when he entered the racket.
Besides his "best-seller" Dianetics, Hubbard would advertise his cult with a sci-fi novel entitled Battlefield Earth. Following L Ron's death, celebrity Scientologist John Travolta would use his post-Pulp Fiction clout to stage a big budget adaption of the novel, which would go down in Hollywood's ledger book as one of the worst movies ever made.
Although the parallels are invisible to outsiders, many Mormons believe that Glen A. Larson generously leavened the 70s version Battlestar Galactica (which is credited as a Leslie Stevens creation by its original director) with LDS doctrine.*
In the 1990s, the Christian Dominionist cult would rack up amazing numbers in the bookstores (well, the book section in Wal*Mart, at least) with Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins' Left Behind novels, based on the Dispensationalist concept of the Rapture. These novels were little more than political propaganda, but struck a nerve with the then ascendant religious right. As of this writing, a feature film is the works with Nicholas Cage in the lead.
More recently, the Objectivist cult has produced three feature films based on Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, explicitly to spread Rand's philosophies. Unfortunately, the producers got a stark lesson in the reality of the Holy Marketplace that maybe those philosophies didn't prepare them for.
These are just a handful of examples. There have been any number of books, comics, films and plays created by sects, cults, churches, movements over the years, so much so that cataloging them would fill a blog on their own.
Think about this when you turn on your TV tonight. Cults aren't always theological, they're just as often political these days. Or 'scientific'. With the kind of big salaries we used to see receding from the mass media, people go into documentary film-making especially to propagate their own beliefs, or better yet, the beliefs they've been trained to believe are their own.
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