Hemant Mehta looks at a recent brouhaha involving sermon plagiarism. This case involves a pastor who very clearly is repeating bits taken from another pastor at another church, stealing his anecdotes and retelling them in his own sermons as things that happened to him.
He seems, in other words, more like a joke thief than an academic fraud. The stuff this pastor has been stealing is usually in the category of “humorous illustration,” never in the category of theological or expository or hortatory insight. While most of the stuff he borrows comes from other pastors, he also likes to sprinkle in some Jim Gaffigan lines (which is odd since this is the kind of Protestant church that seems to regard Catholics as not really Christian).
This has always been a thing, but the nature of that thing has always been disputed because sermons are viewed very differently by many of the different people preaching them and hearing them.
“Pulpit glurge” has always circulated in churches, with lots of preachers presenting those tall tales and old stories as personal experiences. Long before the internet, there were print newsletters for pastors that provided “real-life” anecdotes that could be used in sermons, presented as true stories that happened that week to the pastors reciting them. Often this was not perceived as dishonest by most of the people involved — the newsletter publishers, the pastors, their congregations. It was just part of show business.
Some of the “sermon illustrations” from those newsletters were just variations of old jokes that have long been in the public domain because they were stolen from their anonymous writers so long ago. Some of those old jokes and stories only work when they’re told in the first person, and that’s sometimes more of a storytelling/performance convention than a form of deception. The congregation, like any audience, is expected to understand that I’m not really claiming that a panhandler really came up to me and said he hadn’t had a bite in days, etc.
I’m reminded of the scene from the first season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, when a would-be comic gets up at an open mic night and just recites a whole Bob Newhart routine. The guy thinks that’s fair game — no different from any musician performing a song they didn’t write themselves. Cover bands and symphony orchestras aren’t regarded as “plagiarists,” right? But then they don’t usually claim — or allow others to assume — that they songs they’re performing are all original compositions.
In defense of that character on Mrs. Maisel, he was, at least, stealing the good stuff — those button-down routines from Newhart were impeccably crafted classics. But they were also routines that you could only do as Newhart, or as imitation Newhart, complete with the stammering and the blinking and the slow-burn deadpan persona built in to the lines. It’s difficult to pass something off as your own when you have to pretend to be somebody else to perform it.
I think Hemant is right when he describes what Pastor Josh Whitlow is doing as plagiarism — as a form of lazy, dishonest theft:
There are also videos where both men talk about having panic attacks, buying two cups of lemonade from a neighborhood lemonade stand, almost stepping into a fake cab, and having the same thoughts during a traffic jam. Whitlow always tells the story after Hodges, sometimes months later and sometimes years later. Whitlow also steals a joke from comedian Jim Gaffigan, bigotry from hate-preacher Mark Driscoll, and other sermons from well-known pastors Andy Stanley and Robert Morris.
In no world is any of this an accident.
And it’s not like it happened during a particular stretch of time when Whitlow was busy; it’s been going on for years. This is just how the guy does sermons now. He finds what other people have said, then steals it for himself without giving any due credit, even when they involve personal anecdotes.
But I would also guess that the response from Whitlow and much of his congregation would be “What’s the big deal?”
In their view, this is what sermons are and how they work. To them, it’s a performance, and part of that performance and the expectations for that performance is that the performer will just grab stuff from everywhere and throw in whatever works — whatever is amusing or memorable or blandly edifying. Tossing around words like “plagiarism” or “bearing false witness” just seems, to them, to be a category error made by those of us who have a different set of unwritten rules for such performances.
And besides, Whitlow might argue, none of the stuff he’s taken from Pastor Chris Hodges was original to Hodges either. He imitates Hodges’ performance of those old jokes and stock illustrations and pulpit glurge, but it’s not like Hodges wrote or lived any of those anecdotes either.
I read Hemant’s post shortly after reading this one from Mark Evanier about the late performer Will B. Able, who had a long, strange show-biz career in a touring burlesque company. None of the stuff performed by that burlesque/vaudeville nostalgia troupe was original material. (There’s a fascinating aside in that post in which Evanier discusses how early HBO leaned into stand-up comedy specials as a way to avoid having to deal with the Writer’s Guild — which adds some layers here to the matter of joke-thieving and/or plagiarism.) Josh Whitlow’s approach to preaching has more than a little bit in common with The Will B. Able Baggy Pants & Company Burlesque show.
Part of the reason I view someone like Whitlow as more of a joke-thief than a plagiarist is because to plagiarize a sermon you first need to be a pastor writing sermons and that doesn’t seem to be the best description of what guys like Whitlow and Hodges are doing. They’re wanna-be comics who cobble together a loose 20 minutes once a week for an audience primed to expect a few laughs, a lot of flattery, and a sprinkling of extra flattery disguised as moral instruction.
That’s a popular act, but I’m reluctant to describe it as a “sermon.”
Look, I’ve heard plenty of very funny sermons, and I’ve heard some terrific stand-up sets where the comic was preaching so hard you weren’t sure whether to laugh or to wave a hankie and shout amen. A good sermon — or a good comedy set — can make people laugh and think and feel and change. But neither Whitlow’s stolen routines nor the Sunday-morning sets he’s stealing from strike me as good sermons, if they’re sermons at all. Or as good stand-up.
I suspect it’s that element of flattery that causes these acts to fail on both counts. It’s cheap. And cheapening. Flattery sometimes seems to succeed in the moment, but it leaves a lingering aftertaste for the audience and/or congregation.
Whether or not we regard what Whitlow is doing as formally “plagiarism,” it’s clear he’s at least violating the first rule of plagiarism: If you’re gonna steal, steal the good stuff.
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