What would Jesus do?

There has been a large amount of contention in the church about many topics, but a hot one right now is the validity of crowd sourcing. Crowd sourcing is the enlisting a large group of people to do a task; for this discussion it is the Christian people funding Christian companies. The two sides of the argument are both strong because Christian companies dislike the idea of lending services or products for free claiming because it goes against one of the ten commandments, “Thou shall not steal”. Whereas, the other side of the argument states that it is better to spread the word of God freely for all to hear with no charge.

                When Moses brought the Ten Commandments down from Mount Sinai the people of Israel were not allowed to touch them because they were deemed too holy to be held by anyone else other than Moses and his brother Aaron who set the Israelites free. Today, these Ten Commandments still shape the ideas and morals of the Christian church, so to argue the validity of them seems unfathomable. Christian companies and music groups are oddly enough some of the most often stolen content online. One would think that only other Christians would be interested in stealing this content, but why would they go against one of their commandments. Christian groups who go against the idea of giving free services have alternative ways of receiving payment. Jenkins, Ford, and Green use traveling gospel groups as an example. These groups will often not require an upfront fee to perform, but are allowed to sell their merchandise at a small table and a given a “gift”, most likely monetary in retribution. Most groups like these make most of their money by selling music online. Online content, mostly musical, is so often pirated these days that it doesn’t seem like a crime anymore. These artists are still hard working people that are trying to make a living off their content so it seems ironic at least that religious music is so often stolen even though it goes against the very values it preaches. Free content online goes back to the “gift” economy. People will post content online free of charge for their close followers, expecting them to share to the outside world in hopes of gaining more followers. They are passively asking for a gift in return that their followers will share their content across many platforms as payback for posting their content for free. Artists sacrifice copyrights laws so that the content can be spread thinner and wider to an international audience.  Groups have to choose between copyrighting their content or risking it and offering their art for free to get better advertisement. Whether or not society chooses to agree with their choice is an entirely different concept, which is where piracy stems. Is God really going to damn someone for stealing his word?

                Spreading the word of God is the main goal of most Evangelist Christian groups and they survive on the consistent want of religious content. But, what does society like most, free things. Thus, it seems logical that to spread the word of God more, it is economically smart to offer the word for free if a group is wanting to reach the largest possible audience. There are many Christian groups that endorse free content like the example we learned about, Faith Launcher. Faith Launcher was a website that used crowd sourcing as a way to fund Christian businesses. They offered grants and donations for kick starter companies to get on their feet. Then these groups must rely on their own advertisement to be successful. Once they reached a level a notoriety they could be sustained solely on selling merchandise that’s supported their group. For a different example, Christian YouTubers, “The Bible Project” create content that is free to access online. As soon as they gained so many followers they were obligated to create other forms of products like posters which are available on their website. Other non-Christian vloggers publish book as it becomes more popular, but other types of merchandise like clothing is sold as well.  Christians are obligated to give as much money as possible to charity most of the time ones that live out the Christian message, so it is not uncommon to see many companies survived this process.

Merchandise: https://thebibleproject.com/products/

                It is hard to pick a side to this argument as a Christian and entrepreneur, but as long as religion exists in this world this argument will continue. One must consider what is worse, breaking a commandment by stealing someone’s subject to spread the word of God further or be confined to only copyrighted ideas. The online market has become so influential to our economics that it is hard to escape the moral issues that reside with it. So what side would Jesus chose?