Kerby Anderson

Does plagiarism matter to Christians? That is a question Dr. Warren Throckmorton asks in a recent column. I had him and Mary DeMuth on the Point of View radio talk show to discuss some of the problems that have surfaced in Christian publishing.

In the secular world, plagiarism is a big deal. In his article, he documents cases where people have lost their jobs or received severe sanctions both in the newsroom and in the academy. And if a professor catches a student engaged in plagiarism, we know that student faces severe consequences as well.

Warren Throckmorton isn’t convinced that the Christian world takes the issue seriously, given the response to a number of high-profile cases of Christian authors lifting material from other books and calling it their own. Sometimes there is a legal settlement, but often the issue is greeted with a yawn with no further action taken.

Mary DeMuth believes one of the reasons for this problem is the Christian celebrity culture. Big name authors bring in lots of revenue to Christian publishers. At the same time, there is pressure for them to produce books quickly. Interns or associates they hire to write much of the material may not be careful about what they lift from other sources. And sometimes the authors themselves are borrowing concepts from other authors without an appropriate citation.

Warren Throckmorton also believes that if we started demanding that authors write their own material, ghostwriters and researchers would be out of work. And fewer books would be published by these authors each year.

We might expect that the Christian world would hold to a higher standard in publishing than the secular world. But the lack of response from Christians on social media about some of these cases of plagiarism suggest that we aren’t holding authors to that standard. The solution, of course, is for those of us in the Christian public to hold them accountable.