You may have heard about the recent resignation of Harvard President Claudine Gay due to plagiarism allegations alongside many other scandals. Plagiarism is a huge deal in the schools and the broader academic community, but also outside of schools. Most of us have learned that plagiarism is wrong. It’s so wrong, in fact, that you can lose your job over it as the president of a school.
But is plagiarism really wrong? Or is it just wrong if you’re writing an essay?
When Harvard President Claudine Gay accused of plagiarism, all of those essays were in the past. So why’s it matter? Harvard along with Gay’s many detractors didn’t carte about the essays. They saw the plagiarism as a character flaw unbefitting of a president of an institution.
So, the secular world sees plagiarism as a bad thing. What about the Christian world?
A few years back during the first and only term of Southern Baptist Convention president Ed Litton, he was accused of massive amounts of plagiarism. Multiple sermons were discovered by people on the internet that were point-by-point copied from other pastors’ sermons. While plagiarized sermons were actively being discovered, Litton’s church removed around 120 of his sermons, possibly containing some amount of plagiarized content. No disciplinary action was taken against Litton, and it still hasn’t to this day.
This was brought to the public eye once again because of the action Harvard took against Claudine Gay. If the secular world cares about a handful of plagiarized essays, why doesn’t the largest protestant denomination in the world, the Southern Baptist Convention, care about their president committing theft and lying from the pulpit in the form of 120 plagiarized sermons.
Before continuing, I want to note that there’s nothing wrong with using content from another pastor in your sermons in and of itself. Every thought and idea we have is some combination of ideas that we’ve picked up through our lives. There’s nothing new under the sun, after all. But there’s a big difference between plagiarism and simply using someone else’s material uncited. I’ll get more into this later.
But suffice it to say, what Ed Litton did is a clear and massive pastoral issue. A pastor’s Biblical responsibility is to be a minister of the Word to his congregation. Not to be a minister of someone else’s words to their own congregation. This demonstrates a laziness and a lack of shepherding that should be considered disqualifying.
Not only did Litton steal other sermons point-by-point, but he even chose to share stories that other pastors shared from their own experience, and acted like those stories happened to him. Even if we discount Litton’s obvious plagiarism, like Litton’s defenders try to do, this is outright lying from the pulpit.
Afterwards, the next president of the SBC, Bart Barber was confronted with this, and he responded by arguing that plagiarism isn’t actually always a problem.
Bart seems to simply define plagiarism as “using someone else’s material uncited.” He argues in this thread that Sunday School teachers going through a curriculum without citing every line they read is a form of plagiarism that’s totally acceptable. So what’s the big deal with what Ed Litton did?
But this is a huge straw man. This isn’t what plagiarism is at all. No one would be crazy enough to believe that every person on earth is a plagiarist for recycling ideas. As I said earlier, if every one of our ideas is just a combination of other ideas we’ve picked up through our lives, then everything we ever say, under Bart’s definition, is plagiarism. But no one thinks this. Plagiarism is something else.
Let’s consider what plagiarism actually is:
Plagiarism is stealing someone’s work and lying that it’s your own.
This makes Bart’s already rickety argument completely collapse. But he continues his straw man to defend his elite colleague by claiming that the Word of God itself is plagiarized under his definition.
So, to recap, the president of the SBC is going so far as to claim that the Bible is plagiarized, and therefore (using the proper definition of plagiarism), that it is a product of lying and theft. That doesn’t sound like the Word of God to me. These are the lengths that evangelical elites are willing to go to in order to defend the reputation of their friends – destroying the very Word of God.
These people are undoubtedly highly concerned with appearing to the world as a good witness. I think this is the primary motivation for this behavior, and many other sad stories like it. And this in particular is a clear case demonstrating that when we are more concerned with being attractive to the world than being faithful to God, we destroy the credibility of the Word of God itself.
Aiming to appease the world over God always means you do neither.
We either admit sin is sin, and attack it as such. Or we pull the rug out from under ourselves, removing the very foundation we are standing on.
