In More on Plagiarism, R. R. Reno admits that he feels repentant for reproving Paul Griffiths for thinking people saw knowledge as a possession and therefore saw plagiarism as stealing instead of lying. He might be more surprised to find out how many people think it’s not lying either.
Many years ago I was added to the listserve for a group of Evangelical pastors, though not a pastor myself, and one day one of them asked the group about using stories or quotes in sermons without telling their people they were using them, that is, presenting the stories as their own stories and the quotes as their own creation. As it happens, he asked me directly.
I think I said doing so was stealing and lying, but in any case I said it was wrong, and also pointless, since the congregation is not going to think less of the preacher because he says, “As John Smith says.” The story or the insight is the thing their people want, and they’ll remember who delivered it to them, no matter what the original source.
To my shock (I was younger then), the majority of pastors who responded disagreed, and said that telling a story as if it were your own and using a substantial quote as if you’d written it were perfectly all right. They said this emphatically. Several wrote about me as H. L. Mencken spoke of Puritans. They were really narked.
The highlight came when the dean of a seminary jumped in and condemned me for being so judgmental and urged his fellow preachers to use other peoples’ material as if it were their own. Not just approved their doing so, but urged them to do it. If I remember right, he cheerfully admitted doing so himself.
He and a few others tried to argue that preaching was a performance and just as an actor can speak Shakespeare’s lines, so a preacher can speak someone else’s. Which was purest nonsense, as I tried to point out, since the playgoers know they’re hearing Shakespeare’s words but the people in the pew do not know they’re hearing John Smith’s.
A few pastors, and the dean, also tried to argue that preaching was all about the Kingdom, and that they had to use others’ words and pretend those words were theirs in order to reach people. They never made clear the logic of this, despite requests. A couple suggested I preferred my own principles to the salvation of souls (which is one of the Evangelical bully’s favorite lines).
In the end, I think, these pastors wanted the ease of stealing other peoples’ stories and the praise they’d get for other peoples’ words. Their arguments were so bad and so angry that when it was all over, I could only think that they were used to stealing and lying, and that they didn’t like to be told they were stealing and lying.
The fellow who asked the question wrote me privately to thank me, and said that he agreed, and that he could never lie to his people in that way because he loved them.
August 12th, 2010 | 8:07 am
I remember a number of years ago, our church was in the middle of searching for a senior pastor. We had one pastor who seemed fantastic, and we were preparing to have him come and candidate.
But one of our elders kept listening to one of the pastor’s previous sermons, as something wasn’t sitting well with him. After a few quick Google searches, the elder found out that almost all of the sermon–much of it completely word for word–was lifted from a John Ortberg book (“The Life You’ve Always Wanted,” I think). Needless to say, once the elder asked the pastor about this, the pastor–quite sheepishly–withdrew his candidacy.
Perhaps there is an assumption that, since we’re in Christian ministry, using another’s work without any credit given falls somehow under copyright’s “fair use.” But according to what you’re saying, David, it’s not as much about “fair use” as it is about pastors using another’s work as if it were their own. How people can justify that, I don’t know.
August 12th, 2010 | 11:13 am
I’m an Anglican minister with a related story. Let me simply preface it by saying that I share the view of Mr. Mills, and it runs deep. In university and then in seminary, what I’ll call the “classical” view of plagiarism was instilled in me: do not use another’s words without attribution. I still uphold that original, expository preaching is vital to authenticity in ministry.
Due to circumstances too involved to mention here, recently I have been receiving invitations to preach overseas (mostly in Israel and the Philippines, where my wife is from). Last year I accepted an invitation to preach in a large Baptist congregation, a very large one where I found myself preaching to more souls than I ever had before.
The Tuesday or Wednesday before my sermon, while I was preparing and writing it, the Baptist pastor came to the house to visit. I was sweating it, thrown off by how to simplify my delivery for this congregation not my own. The Asian pastor noticed this and became very curious. “Rev’d Daniel, why are you so upset?” he said. I told him I was preparing the sermon. He told me something that shocked me. “I never prepare like that.” Then he informed me that he’s never prepared an original sermon: he simply searches for a topical sermon on the Internet and then passes it off as his own, sometimes word for word. I was stunned. He told me almost all of the pastors in his convention do the same. The way he said this too me was so matter-of-fact as to be almost an afterthought. By his expression, I noted that he seemed to be mildy amused by the hangups of white Westerners sweating over writing original material.
Lately, back here Stateside, I’ve also observed the emerging trend of college students mistaking familiarity with Google searches for “research” and the breakdown of plagiarism codes in US universities because we are inundated with a culture that questions copyright and engages in a brisk “remix” and download culture where the societal approbation of expansion of “fair use” continues apace, but that’s another post.
August 12th, 2010 | 11:47 am
Get ready people. You haven’t seen nothin’ yet. My wife teaches sixth grade social studies. She tells her students over and over and over and over that plagerism is not acceptable and will be penalized. Still, without exception, when she is grading papers she comes across a paper that looks like it was written by someone with a PhD. She googles a few lines of text and finds the source and gives the kid a zero on the assigment.
August 12th, 2010 | 12:26 pm
Steve: Fair use would be fair, if only preachers would tell their people that they’re using other peoples’ material, in the same way a scholar footnotes his quotes. The preacher can easily say, “I love this quote from Horace P. Snackfood” or “My friend Percy told me about the time his sister painted him green and brought him to show and tell as a talking frog,” and so on. The people will enjoy the quote or story and get the point, and be grateful to him for bringing it to them. He wins, in the crassest terms of keeping his people happy.
I don’t understand why pastors of the sort I dealt with won’t do this — unless they want to take the credit, which is the conclusion to which this conversation I described led me. It’s not like a hungry man stealing food, it’s like a man stealing a Ferrarri to impress his neighbors.
August 12th, 2010 | 1:01 pm
There’s another problem with preacher’s simply lifting sermons and/or shorter material and declaiming it from the pulpit — it’s a dereliction of the spiritual duties of a pastor’s calling. God has called that preacher to speak to those people using the gifts given to that preacher and illuminated by the ministry of the Holy Spirit to and through that preacher. So while everything that can be said about plagiarism applies to a preacher that does that, there’s a double whammy here for preaching.
That said, it’s not all that surprising (although it’s hideously depressing) that a lot of ministers have this part of their moral compass completely magnetized. For years it’s been way too common for preachers to fill up their sermons with the insights of others — there are volumes upon volumes published for the express purpose of providing sermon insights and illustrations. With that kind of non-originality in the bulk of preaching being par for the course, it only takes a small bit of temptation to make a man shrug the shoulders and say “So I don’t mention a name? The point is the same!” It gets to the point where it seems like a tedious detail that the congregation “won’t care about anyway.”
August 12th, 2010 | 1:51 pm
This is a longstanding issue, and was dealt with extensively in the eighteenth century, in which cribbing sermons was standard practice and only just beginning to become controversial; myself, I think Laurence Sterne showed very well that the plagiarism criticism applied to sermons tends both to misunderstand the function of sermons (we tend to think nothing of published sermons, or to think that they are simply like other books, but one of the major original rationales for publishing sermons was to help improve the quality of sermons everywhere, by being borrowed from) and to collapse into general incoherence if examined too closely (even setting aside the fact that they tend often to involve plagiarisms themselves), but it seems the debate goes through cycles, in part because opinions about originality in sermons go through cycles: in one generation, as with Daniel above, the notion is that originality plays a key role in authentic teaching of the gospel; a few generations later it will be seen as in most cases a guaranteed source of self-centered junk rather than the actual gospel.
August 12th, 2010 | 3:08 pm
“a few generations later it will be seen as in most cases a guaranteed source of self-centered junk rather than the actual gospel.”
To see that as a “guaranteed” condition is to lack faith in the ministry of the Spirit through the called and ordained ministry. “The abuse of a thing does not negate” and all that.
August 12th, 2010 | 4:32 pm
First, I think this is a part of a larger assault on reality. Twenty years ago a friend of mine heard a para church speaker tell a story in the first person that on another occasion he had heard the ministry founder tell in the first person. He asked him about it and was told that the speakers of that organization decided to pool their stories, so to speak, because they were more powerful when told in the first person. So, in effect, perception trumped reality. We’ve been going down that slippery slope for some time I am afraid in more than just sermons.
Second, I think it says something about pastors who are not willing or able to do the hard work of encountering the Word or hearing from the Giver of the Word. Congregations often value a performance over an authentic word from God.
Third, a sermon isn’t a term paper and lots of attributions can be tedious to the congregation unless it is a church that is very academically oriented. So preachers do need to communicate when they are using someone else’s words which can be creatively done with broad statement’s of attribution and gratitude especially if someone had relied heavily on one source for a sermon or series of sermons (for me that was the case with Willard’s Divine Conspiracy when I preached through the Sermon on the Mount).
Lastly, where else is that acceptable? Not in literature. Not in politics. Not in entertainment. So why should the creative act of the sermon be any different.
August 12th, 2010 | 5:08 pm
It’s not new. In George MacDonald’s Thomas Wingfield, Curate, the title character inherited a whole set of sermons. One day, on being questioned, he went through them with a fine-toothed comb and concluded he only really agreed with one of them.
When a parishioner pointed out that it was from Jeremy Taylor, the novel really got started.
August 12th, 2010 | 7:27 pm
i once heard a “minister” preach a sermon at a wedding in which he told a story about “hiking in the mountains and seeing two hawks playing in the wind.” [paraphrase]
i couldn’t believe my ears. this “minister” had lifted an entire passage verbatim from mike mason’s “the mystery of marriage” and passed it off as his own.
during the ensuing reception, i found myself standing next to this “minister” as we urinated into our respective urinals. i wanted to confront him but wondered what the most loving act would be….
some days i wish i had.
August 12th, 2010 | 8:17 pm
Lastly, where else is that acceptable? Not in literature. Not in politics. Not in entertainment. So why should the creative act of the sermon be any different.
I’m not sure how well this argument works; borrowing without attribution seems to me to be quite common in both literature and politics. People still read the Biographia Litteraria, despite the unattributed Schelling, nobody gets worked up about ideas that Dante lifts from Boethius without explicitly mentioning the source, and the only time anyone gets worked up about plagiarism in political speeches is when they want to suggest that a candidate is more stupid than they might seem. And there are plenty of areas where direct copying is not considered a problem, e.g., areas where formalities are important; nobody complains about whether their contract is a slight adaptation of some unmentioned prior contract — they care whether it does what the contract is supposed to do.
The problem with telling stories not one’s own as if they were one’s own is not that the stories are from someone else but that they are not one’s own — i.e., the problem is that there is actual lying going on. But the lying and the copying are distinct things in such cases.
August 12th, 2010 | 11:19 pm
I absolutely agree with the pastor in this article who was uncomfortable with presenting assimilated material as his own. And I most certainly think that presenting an incident that one read about, or heard about, as one’s own is despicable. That’s lying, flat-out. When I hear one of my pastors use a personal example in a sermon, the power of it is that I know it’s true.
From the perspective of listening in the pews… the pastors (priests) at our church do use attributions, loosely (as in, “CS Lewis wrote that…” or “as Trey Anastasio says in this song…”, not formal page-number and book-title citations) and it’s not intrusive at all. In fact, it’s helpful, because then I can go look up something by the author mentioned (I’m the parish librarian, so I do know that people in the pews do occasionally ask about books they’ve heard the priests mention from the pulpit).
It seems like omitting all attribution is a form of intellectual and spiritual laziness that’s given justification by referring to the weakness of the congregation, when in fact the congregation is quite likely perfectly able to handle hearing reference to other books, authors, etc.
That said, I do think there’s a small category of work that can’t be readily given attribution.
What about jokes? or the category of “there’s a story about this guy who…” No one ever knows where they came from originally; one could not tell a joke if one needed to provide attribution. I’d say that’s the exception that proves the rule, though.
August 13th, 2010 | 1:32 pm
Just four comments from a lay seminary professor (a receiver rather than a giver of sermons) on this very interesting discussion.
1. Using homiletic material published for the purpose of enhancing preaching is fine if this is a known and accepted practice, as it was in the Reformation era and at other periods. If the people know that you regularly preach or borrow from the Anglican Homilies or Luther’s Postils or “Precious Pulpit Peonies,” if that’s part of the culture, OK. But passing off someone else’s words as your own is still lying.
2. I fear that the real reason for lots of this borrowing is precisely the pressure of an ecclesial culture that views the preacher as a performer, even an entertainer, who needs to be original, rather than as a hander-on of ancient wisdom. In that case, honesty would defeat the purpose. It’s actually very difficult, except for the extremely glib, to be consistently entertaining week after week, so the temptation to borrow and pretend becomes greater. We would be better off if people in the churches would actually respect a preacher for openly reading or paraphrasing a sermon of John Chrysostom or Augustine on an “off” week. “Wow, Pastor really knows the Tradition!” Yeah, I know, in my dreams.
3. If what preachers are cribbing is mostly cute stories, then “outlawing” the practice would likely benefit Christian preaching in all sorts of ways. Even though homiletics professors discourage this sort of thing, on the ground, the assumption that three “meaningful” anecdotes and a sentiment constitute a sermon is killing American preaching. Better three points and a poem than two jokes, one sentimental anecdote, and something that fuzzily resembles a point if you don’t think about it much.
4. In my teaching, I don’t allow students to let even a properly sourced and referenced quotation to carry a point all by itself. I require them to say something in their own words summing up the quotation or explaining its relevance. That’s because dropping chunks of thematically relevant quotation into a composition can be an excuse for not thinking through the point or idea for oneself. In other words, being able to quote something relevant to an issue is not the same thing as understanding the issue, getting inside it. A sermon is not a theology-class paper, but I still don’t want to hear sermons from preachers who haven’t worked through what they are presenting for themselves.
August 24th, 2010 | 10:15 am
This discussion floors me. I’m a lay person who has done some preaching. And I’ve written every sermon myself. I’m pretty sure other lay preachers at my church have also written their sermons, judging by the fact that none of us are all that polished. Obviously, I expect a somewhat higher level of writing and theological understanding when the pastors preach. Pastors I have known have talked about struggling with passages while they are writing their sermons.
I would consider lifting sermons or whole passages from other sources lying and stealing. But more than that, if I found this out about a pastor, I would question what else about that pastor that I couldn’t trust as being authentic. Is that pastor also just parroting words about faith?
In an art group I belong to on-line, we’ve had discussions about copyright and what is legal and what isn’t. People like to copy other people’s work and patterns so that they don’t have to PAY for them. That is stealing. Copying a sermon is like not paying with TIME and THOUGHT to write one’s own sermon.
Beyond that, it seems that there is almost total ignorance and lack of teaching about copyright laws and principle. We have copy machines in libraries and we have the web and web searches, making this easier than ever.
Beyond that, if a pastor did write a sermon and later found that another pastor told parts or the whole thing, how would the writer feel?
I’ve faced that situation myself. I’m an amateur photographer. I posted photos that I took during a trip to another country on line for other members of our tour group to see later. I’ve found my photos on two other websites being used for fund raising purposes. I not only felt that my work was stolen, but that the person was using my work because they were being lazy. My photos are no longer available to the public.
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