Hiding the evidence? Ed Litton and Redemption Church remove videos at center of SermonGate plagiarism allegations.
As damning video evidence surfaced that President of the Southern Baptist Convention Ed Litton borrowed portions of a sermon on Romans 1, Litton’s church removed video evidence from the church website and set over 100 videos to Private on YouTube.
That is just what honest men do when in the middle of allegations that they stole material from others!
Sermons from before February 2020, including the January 27 sermon at the center of the present controversy disappeared from the Redemption website. The includes the entire section of the Romans Expedition sermon series that was preached for a significant portion of 2020.
This includes a video we reported that was similar in many elements preached by a Campus Pastor on the same date at Redemption Church.
A total of 143 videos were set to Private and unavailable for viewing on YouTube as of 9 a.m. Saturday, June 26, 2021.
You can see that in this screenshot.
The entire controversy erupted after Reformation Charlotte reported on a sermon where Ed Litton adopted the same language as J.D. Greear of the Bible “whispering” about sexual sins like homosexuality.
Attention exploded on this topic, with Todd Starnes and Dr. Robert Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist Church of Dallas, Texas, calling out Ed Litton for bad theology.
Then, an Internet sleuth compared additional portions of the one sermon that showed significant and sometimes word-for-word similarities between the sermons preached about one year apart—Greear’s sermon coming in 2019 and Ed Litton’s sermon coming in 2020.
If your first instinct is to hide the evidence, then what does that say about one’s character? It also begs us to ask how many more sermons contained similar segments of borrowed material?
So, now we must wonder what does Ed Litton have to hide?
And, did anyone save the evidence before Ed Litton, Redemption Church and SBC Elites tried to hide it?