Pastoral Plagiarism

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.