The baffling persistence of plagiarism in the internet era

Plagiarism.
(Image credit: Illustrated | iStock)

Shortly after the Southern Baptist Convention's prickly gathering in Nashville last month, a video circulated on Twitter showing the SBC's newly elected president, Alabama pastor Ed Litton, giving a sermon with striking similarities to a sermon previously delivered by the denomination's prior president, North Carolina pastor J.D. Greear.

Litton's critics quickly alleged plagiarism, dubbing the controversy "sermongate." In the days since, more videos have appeared with close turns of phrase. Statements from Litton and Greear agreed that the initial clip showed Litton borrowing content with Greear's private permission — but Litton's "church removed sermons from 2017 through 2019 from its website and YouTube," New York Times religion journalist Ruth Graham reports, "attributing the deletions to both a website redesign and a response to people 'going through sermons in an attempt to discredit and malign our pastor.'" That explanation seems suspect at best.

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.