Due to the nature of my work and personal life I often come across plagiarism, usually because I am the one responsible for documenting and responding to it. Yesterday it came to my attention in two ways. I found the substance of a pastor’s Sunday sermon point-for-point in a commentary, and Melania Trump is accused of copying parts of her speech from Michelle Obama. One article about the Trump situation lists all the accusations of plagiarism against the current crop of politicians, and I found a news article about a college professor who committed massive amounts of plagiarism. He had a very lucrative contract teaching police officers how to do their jobs.
Academics will tell you that the main reason students plagiarize is to save time, so they encourage students to start their work well in advance of due dates. I estimate that about half of the students in my classes who plagiarize are not rushed, they are intellectually lazy and, of course, dishonest.
Just to get a definition out of the way, I’m not referring to a botched citation format. I am using the term plagiarism to mean deliberately representing the ideas or work of another as your own, or at the very least knowing they are not your own and failing to give credit where it is due.
The first thing that comes to my mind when realizing our politicians are comfortable stealing the work of others is what that tells us about the taxes we can expect. The next is that these people do not have a lot to offer us. They are either not smart enough, not ambitious enough, or not visionary enough to craft their own messages. They are not secure enough to let others get some of the credit for their speech. And they certainly are not highly scrupulous or careful of details.
Now we come to the case of the pastor. Following the practice of forensic lexicology, I determined that his sermon material was not original. A quick search on the Internet took me to his source, where I found that with the exception of adding one example from a movie and one from his personal life (or was that really someone else’s story, too?) he was paraphrasing every point, examples included, from a commentary on Paul’s letter to the church at Philippi. There are three problems with this.
First, the work in question is copyright protected. Yes, I checked. It would have been bad enough if this was a book of sermons for sale but it was not.
Second, this is a symptom of a spiritual problem. I have suspected for some time that most of his sermons were not original. Since the preaching duties rotate at our church, he only has to preach about twenty sermons per year. As lead pastor, I expect him to be a man close to God. He should be learning and growing every day, and have things that he wants to convey to his congregation. If he cannot do this a handful of times per year I wonder about his faith.
Third, there is deception involved. Because the actual authors referred to the original language texts, cultural situations, and related quotes from church history, this message created the appearance of great scholarship where there was none. To get ready for the sermon series, the pastor also had some members of the congregation produce a study guide to the book of Philippians. This is a great aid, to be sure, but it implies that there has been some massive study underway, when in reality this man only needed to recite a few pages from someone else’s book.
So much for “Provide things honest in the sight of all men”. (Romans 12:17)
