I was amused this morning by an article from Tulsa World (no expense is spared in order to bring you the best stories) about a moral dilemma hitting not just Catholic priests, but clergy and preachers from all denominations. Unusually the potential scandal has nothing to do with money, strip clubs, prostitutes, choir boys, or bullying. Instead, the growing awareness of a looming moral quagmire centres on something much stranger and closer to home - the act of preaching.
A new book entitled “To Plagiarize or Not To Plagiarize?” is issuing a new reminder about a basic commandment to Polish priests (although it has a relevance to a much wider audience). The commandment which has been forgotten is: Thou Shalt Not Steal! In this case, the theft concerns not goods, but words. Apparently some priests (as well as famous preachers from other denominations) have admitted to stealing either parts of sermons, or whole sermons, from books or the Internet. The risk of copyright infringement and the danger of being sued means that preachers are being encouraged to be much more ‘honest’ and open about their original sources.
Two things in particular about this story struck me as being particularly bizarre. The first is that my reading of it suggests that the impetus for change has come not so much from a sense of moral outrage (”We are being dishonest here!”) but from fear of litigation.
The second thing that I found really troubling about it was my own self-blindness. Before abandoning my own faith I was a preacher for over 35 years, as well as holding down academic posts in schools, colleges, and universities. During that time I would regularly look out for plagiarism in student essays and condemn such practice while, at the same time, be quite happily plagiarizing the work of others to use in my own sermons. I strongly suspect that I was not the only Christian preacher to follow such practices. I know of others who often downloaded sermons from the Internet or who borrowed sermons or sermon outlines from the many books, magazines, and websites offering them and kept their sources secret.
After reflecting on my former hypocritical practice and blindness, and about why there is probably more a fear of litigation than a real sense of mea-culpa in the divine community, I concluded that the immoral practice has probably been condoned for the following reasons.
- There is probably a sense that the end justifies the means and that god would wink at such an offence. If people are helped by the material, what does it matter how the material was prepared. Preachers, after all, are above the law!
- Many preachers face horrendous pressures to produce the goods. If you are a full-time pastor you are probably expected to produce at least three sermons a week, often more, week in, week out, to the same congregation. You soon dry up. Under such pressure, the temptation to steal ideas (in the sense of using them and not acknowledging their source) and make yourself look good is considerable.
- There is a sense in which it is encouraged. There are so many resources around that there is a sense that the practice has been officially sanctioned and must be ok. Many denominations, in an attempt to improve the quality of the preaching within their churches, often produce sermon material to be lifted.
- There is a strong sense of mutual back-scratching. Many preachers now routinely publish their sermons on the Internet. Because they make them available for others to use (and are happy for them to do so) they have no qualms about using the material of others in an unacknowledged way. (I once had part of one of my own sermons preached back to me!)
- There is not necessarily a strong sense of academic practice in parts of the divine community. How can I put this nicely? Not everybody who enters a pulpit to teach the faithful has had a serious academic training in a main-stream, secular university - in fact, I suspect that the majority haven’t. For many the concept of ‘plagiarism’ is probably similar to a deviant sexual practice that they don’t need to worry too much about.
- The sermon in spoken form doesn’t lend itself to acknowledging sources easily. If you write things down, it is much easier to acknowledge sources in footnotes or bibliography. In speaking, such constant referring and listing every source would interrupt the flow and the ‘power’ of the delivery.
It would be interesting to know more about plagiarism in the blogging community. Some of us are careful to acknowledge our sources, but for others who, under the pressure to produce, hide their stolen words, presumably the same threat of litigation applies.
As I was reading your post I was thinking how much producing sermons was just like producing blog posts except with more pressure and a little less leeway over what you can say I guess.
Plagiarism is a real problem in Universities these days and we deal with cases on an almost daily basis.
I have spotted blogposts that have been stolen from elsewhere but have not done it myself. Although it is often the case that something I read somewhere triggers me to write something of my own. But for me it is the process of writing that is important so what I write comes out of my head straight onto the page and I do not generally link to anything at all.
I feel with regard to sermons or blogposts that whilst it is dishonest to steal someone else’s work, it is fine to borrow chunks/ideas and not cite the source. People who give sermons or write blogs do so knowing that their work is not really protected - you have that disadvantage but stacked against that you have a lot of freedom over what you say and the ease of getting your message across.
Mind you I would feel peeved if I saw someone had stolen one of my blogposts and produced it as their own. But I’m not sure I would actually do anything about it other than leave a comment to say that I had spotted it.
Excellent blog.
This highlights one important thing for me. The way academic learning can be compared to ministerial training, or not. You have had the priveledge to be in both worlds, yet it did not occur to you that perhaps certain standards such as non- plagiarism should apply when it comes to the subject of copyright and protecting others’ work.
Does this suggest that ministerial training should come under the eye of universities and not just the church?
Yes, there is a conflict here because a church profession can be viewed as more of a vocational calling rather than having to prove oneself academically? However, ministers in training ,especially in main stream denominations,eg,Cof E, Methodists etc, have to pass assigments and academic pieces of work for “dog-collar dom.”
I think my own answer to such a question is any profession should aim to be educated to the highest standard. Nursing can be seen as a totally caring profession, which in essence it is, yet I support the idea of every registered nurse to be educated to the highest possible academic standard, and preferably if possible, to degree level. This gives this profession the clout and standing of other positions, eg, teaching.
Perhaps, the same should be said for the clergy. I think this speaks about credibility in any vocation where you are working with society, often dealing with potentially vulnerable and needy people. Clergy should therefore have many skills, including a thinking mind. We need the best people trained for this job. Ok, some would say that last statment is questionable; Jesus did not have a degree but then Jesus lived in very different times to us and if he had lived now he might well have.
The bottom line here is this word credibility. After all why bother with clergy training if we could all go out and do it? Pieces of paper saying we are qualified and have passed something has to have meaning and standing if they are to be worth anything.
Ministerial training needs a further look after reading this blog, in my mind. And as I stated to you earlier this evening this gives me a lot of food for thought about writing my own blog concerning the accountability of the church in general and the congregation it ministers too.
The narrower your subject matter, the more difficult it is to avoid accusations of plagiarism, whether these are justified or not. If preachers believe that they are preaching “the truth”, then how can there be plagiarism? There is surely only one truth, not many, and only a limited number of ways to tell it.
Why teachers (I used to be one) are concerned about student plagiarism is obviously because if a student plagiarises, that means he hasn’t done the work himself and therefore probably hasn’t learnt the material. If an author plagiarises, that’s quite different: he is ripping off someone else’s work for profit. So the two things are different.
If a preacher hears his own sermon preached back at him and takes offence (I don’t say you did), then isn’t he incurring the sin of pride: putting his performance above the message he is giving? Maybe instead he should be glad that his words are helping a wider audience than he thought.
All this of course ignores the ridiculousness of the activity of preaching anyway, spinning fantastic nonsense for consumption by the gullible. When deceivers squabble, that is surely something to be laughed at rather than be concerned about.
Good post. Like you, I have had both academic and teaching careers. As an academic, I was very strict about plagiarism. As a preacher, I wrote all of my own sermons and almost never used the “canned” illustrations available in books, online, etc. Now that I’m middle-aged, have read a lot and have heard more sermons than I care to count, I have two reactions when I hear preachers using illustrations that I’ve heard or read before. If they tell the story as one they’ve read or heard somewhere, I just smile (”I know where you got that one from”).
On the other hand, if they tell the story as if it happened to them personally or to a friend of theirs, I get annoyed, especially when they tell it nearly verbatim. When preachers tell a canned story as something that happened to them personally, it immediately diminishes their stature in my eyes because I’ve caught them in a blatant lie.
I recognize that attribution is difficult in a spoken sermon but there are ways to deal with this. If the church issues a printed bulletin, an acknowledgment can be printed somewhere in there. If a church uses multimedia screens, an attribution can be provided there. Attribution is easier now than it was when church services were completely oral and aural.
As for blog materials, if someone asks me, either in a comment or an email, if they can repost something I wrote, I say yes, and just ask them to either cite me or my blog by name or link back to my blog. I’ve never googled to see if anyone is using my stuff without permission. If they were, I’d probably comment on their blog or email them to let them know I caught them, ask for acknowledgment and inform them that all they need to do in the future is ask and acknowledge. Since my blog is not a source of income, I don’t know whether I’d take legal action. Perhaps that would depend on the scale of the theft.
Interesting issue all around. Thanks for posting this.
Because our ability to communicate depends so heavily on the use of words, it is hard to comprehend a possibility of ownership in regard to words. Unlike other creativel expression, the “brushstroke” of an author may be very hard to discern or recognize. It is understandable how the attitude that all words are free for the taking might be considered the norm.
Having said that, it also seems symptomatic of our individual avoidance of pondering ethical subtleties. Most people never object about such “theft: until it is perpetrated against their own sense of ownership. Legally, it is defined as theft. There is ample provision for “fair usage” built into copyright law for review and for educational purposes. Sermons would probably fall within this venue of use if legally challenged, as long as proper attribution is acknowledged.
The Internet has made all sorts of information more accessible. But in a very haphazard, slip shod manner. Often no sources are cited, making the value of such information questionable at best. Reposting such information often merely reproduces outright falsehoods as well as simple errors in spelling. We are developing a copy & paste mentality, which does not necessitate the imposition of actual thought at any point within the process. With a little conscious “editing”, the intention and meaning of a particular piece of writing can be reversed.
This provides a greater opportunity for deliberate misinformation. There are sites now, whose primary objective is to expose Internet hoaxes where information has been deliberately formatted in an academic or authoritarian tone to make the information appear more responsible. More than one newspaper has actually printed such hoaxes as “verified” fact.
All of this “common practice” towards appropriation of ideas, compounds the difficulty of formulating reasoned thinking independently. It that sense it is theft perpetrated against us all.
Any position, such as teacher or minister, which casts itself as a potential source of knowledge and direction, or presents itself as a model for emulation, has a greater responsibility to demonstrate the principles being espoused as knowledge. It is an incumbent responsibility to understand what you convey, to practice what you preach.
[...] years of Christian church and secular life. However, some recent writing from a fellow blogger athinkingman has made me question the strength, and rigour of ministerial training, in relation to pastoral [...]