There is nothing wrong with beautiful churches (nor any kind of beautiful building, including beautiful jails and beautiful garbage dumps), nor with beautiful music (although if the only motive is being beautiful, the music quickly gets boring), nor beautiful anything.  Nor is there anything wrong with well put-together speeches and rallies and rituals and so on.  The thing to remember is that there is a thin line between persuasion and indoctrination -- when it comes to bringing people around to our point of view, reason is really the only justifiable method.  The rest is fine as entertainment but essentially corrupt as persuasion.

Advertising is probably the worst offender here -- TV is the boob tube for good reason -- it is designed for boobs -- people who are persuaded by cute babies and puppies and stirring music and hyperbole and little play-acts and so on (and pseudo-scientific claims).

Religion also engages in this sort of persuasion, as well as the propaganda techniques known as stacking the deck (failure to mention problems with one's argument) and bandwagon (making one's views seem heretical and even evil).

And of course there are politicians -- with flags and bunting in the background and bands playing patriotic music and the husband and wife and darling family all there smiling.  Ugh it makes me ill that this sort of thing actually gets votes, but nothing like the literature and advertising they put out -- especially the "negative" ads that imply ugly things about the opponent just shy of slander, it being well known that people tend to lose interest in a candidate attacked that way and even though they may not vote for the person producing the garbage they may not vote at all, and that is what the garbage hauler intends anyway.   Of course the fact that such things work has soured me on democracy as a method of government anyway.