pastor as plagiarist
Via Dark Christianity:
Steve Sjogren at pastors.com writes: Don’t be original, be effective!
I would like to submit this article as evidence of one reason people like me, who pride themselves on critical thought, are driven away from Christianity.
Sjogren addresses the question of how much material not his own (I’d say his/her own here, normally, but in this context I’m pretty confident Sjogren doesn’t have women in mind) a pastor can incorporate into a sermon. Sjogren’s conclusion is that you can plagiarize all you want, because we’re talking about the good of the Kingdom.
His conclusion doesn’t surprise me, because if your goal is to reel in as many fish as possible, why would you be worried about matters of intellectual property rights? These pastors are fighting a war, and that war is fought from the pulpit. In times of war you do whatever it takes to win. If that means preaching, word-for-word a vintage Billy Graham sermon every single week, as Dr. Cho, pastor of Yoido Church in Korea (incidentally the largest church in the world) does, so be it.
Evangelical Christianity is not interested in exploration or interrogation of big ideas. That is what all religions attempt to address — the big ideas, the ideas that are beyond our grasp, but we try to understand them anyway, because we’re human. The questions of existence, good, evil, life, and death. Evangelical is interested in staying on message, in making the sale. Evangelical Christianity sells a product, and when you’re selling a product, you find the best way to sell it and you don’t fix what ain’t broke. Why would Dr. Cho risk a drop in his sales if he can guarantee increasing returns with a tried-and-true pitch?
When evangelical Christianity is selling a product, this approach makes perfect sense. Heaven forbid that a pastor actually exegete or illuminate scripture in a new way.
Plagiarism is using someone else’s words or ideas and claiming them as your own. That’s the academic definition, anyway, and by that definition, pastors like Rick Warren who listen to “two or three sermon tapes a day” and incorporate whatever ideas they like into their sermons are plagiarists.
The thing is, for many, a good sermon should include ideas and words from other sources. Those include the Bible, commentary texts and other books, and for the really hip and with-it pastors, cultural references. And most pastors with academic backgrounds will duly credit their sources.
But if there are indeed, as Sjogren says, many who don’t — well, that doesn’t inspire much confidence from the rest of the world, does it? The rest of us who have been taught that plagiarism, claiming someone else’s ideas as your own, is wrong. You don’t have to have a university or journalism-school background to have internalized those values; you (should have) learned that in junior high or high school, at least.
When it comes to Sjogren’s claim that originality is a form of pride, I wonder. All these pastors who forsake originality, and therefore pride, by preaching sermons they did not write — when their audience members come up to them after the service, shake their hands and say, “Excellent message, Pastor!,” do they divulge the origin of the sermon (Billy Graham, 1974; Bill Hybels, 1993)?
In the end, Sjogren’s stance on this issue reinforces the perceptions of folks like me, who believe that most Christians and churches have no interest in thoughtfully investigating their beliefs, their scriptures, their logic, their philosophy, their religion. Not, at least, when there’s a sale to be made.