RELIGIOUS SOCIAL ADVERTISING AGAINST SECULARISATION OF SOCIETY. THE POLISH EXAMPLE

Nowadays, man has been transformed from animal rationale and animal symbolicum into homo videns, and this state of affairs determines the tools at the disposal of religious institutions to carry out the work of new evangelisation, to contest global secularisation, or to point out the correct moral solutions from a Christian point of view to the problems of today's civilisation. Religious advertising is just such a new tool of information and persuasion. It is one of the elements of communication aimed at promoting values, ideas, services and shaping attitudes and behaviours appropriate to a given religion. It contains certain elements of the sacrum and aims to make recipients aware of their spiritual needs, arouse the desire to satisfy them and indicate the attractiveness of Christianity. It is supposed to create appropriate preferences, show the beauty and positive image of the sender and the "product" that faith provides. A specific type of advertising is a billboard campaign. Poland is the most Catholic country in Europe. At the same time, it ranks first in terms of the rate of secularisation among young people. In Poland, at the turn of 2020/2021, we had an anti-abortion billboard campaign, which was the result of the long-standing policy of the conservative ruling camp against various forms of contemporary secularisation and global secular ideologies. The campaign proved to be controversial and ineffective. The aim of this article is to describe the specifics of social advertising in the context of the issues discussed on the example of the Polish anti-abortion campaign.