Reacting to Comments on "The Worship Tax"

The Temple Cleansing and the Worship Tax

So we're really thankful that our latest video, the Worship Tags, has resonated with a lot of people. And so we want to just look through a few of the comments and respond to them, react, maybe unpack a few more things that we didn't get to unpack in the video, maybe clarify some things.

You can just start with that first one, I guess. The one that got the most likes, is it? Yeah, it is written, my house should be a house of prayer, but you have made it into a desert for you. So I'm glad that my reference to that passage in Scripture was appreciated by people.

In fact, I'm not sure even if people got that far into the video to reach that, but that verse came into their mind as well. And I think it's true. I think people are very dismissive of that passage of the temple cleansing, that it could apply to today at all, because it was to do with the temple back then.

But I think that misses a lot of what Jesus was angry about. He was angry because worship then was being commercialized. Rather, not even that, it was just ordinary things being sold in the temple, not spiritual things necessarily, just animals and things.

Whereas today, we're actually commercializing spiritual things. We're commercializing these songs that we've written to praise God.

Copyright, Old Hymns, and the Limits of Workarounds

Yeah, this is a comment that came up pretty frequently, people from different traditions that appreciate older music. And I would count myself among them. But you know, there are some folks that are saying things like, we got to just be using Gregorian chants.

You know, if everyone were just using Gregorian chants, this wouldn't be a problem. While that may be true, that if you used old enough music, you wouldn't have to worry about copyright. It misses the larger problem here.

And this is not just an issue in music. Obviously, our site, Selling Jesus, is dedicated to addressing this in all different aspects of Christian ministry. So if you think you've avoided the problem just by going back to old hymns that are out of copyright, you really haven't.

There are lots of other problems that are related to the exact same thing. It doesn't matter if it's Bible study guides that are under copyright, if it's translations that are under copyright, if it's just all kinds of materials that people copyright so that you cannot use them freely.

Using old hymns is only a small solution because the problem is much larger.

It's kind of like walking out on the problem, right? Instead of actually grappling with it, confronting it, or dealing with it in some way.

Yeah, if you do acknowledge that this is a sin problem and not just a disappointing fact of reality, then, yeah, to just find a way around it, to circumvent the issue, is putting a band-aid on a problem where heart surgery is needed.

Yeah, and quite often these old hymns will be put to modern music without people realizing. They may be used to the hymn, but it might just be the lyrics that are old. And actually, a lot of them have been put to new tunes, and that music will be copyrighted.

So even if the lyrics aren't copyrighted, the music may be. So it's not necessarily that simple.

And it's not only the case with the music. A lot of times the lyrics are updated, either to get rid of old D's and vowels, or for all kinds of reasons. I once talked to a copyright lawyer who explained to me that there was one case where someone had used their typo in a score of music as a claim that it was a creative modification of an old public domain musical composition.

And this actually got some traction in court. I forget how it ended up going, and I can't cite the case. But yeah, unfortunately, if you think that you've avoided the problem entirely by using hymns, you might have avoided CCLI, but those hymns are not necessarily out of copyright.

In fact, the majority of hymns that my church sings, even though they were written a very, very long time ago, either the update to the lyrics, the update to the melody, or even the harmonies are things that are still under copyright.

And it's not just a given that they are not.

I very firmly believe that every generation needs to sing to the Lord a new song. It's not just about singing the old songs. We are commanded to sing to the Lord a new song. And if we're going to write new songs, as we should, you have to face this issue that we're bringing up in this video.

Are you going to copyright them or not? Are you going to allow the body of Christ to use them freely or not? And so, yeah, we've got to face that.

Christian Artists, Publishers, and the Question of Suing Churches

Yeah, that comment down there, should we really be singing the songs of those who would sue us for using them?

That was a common thought, a number of these. There was someone who said that encouraging all elders to not have any copyrighted music sung during the service. Now, that's another question. Is that a solution here?

Yeah, I guess I do want to clarify that we're not just bashing on artists here. And I am highly doubtful that there'd be many Christian artists who would actually sue a church. I think that would be a pretty swift end to their career probably as well.

So, we're not implying that all of these artists are just waiting to jump on someone and sue them if they don't pay their licensing fees. Nevertheless, by not freeing them from copyright, you're leaving that dark cloud over people so that there is always that potential.

Even if you never make use of it, you're leaving the potential to sue them if you want to. I think a more realistic scenario will be that a publisher sues a church, probably a large church, if they were using copyrighted music without paying for it.

I think it's more likely the publisher would step in because some of those publishers are owned by secular companies as well. So, they would literally just be after the money in that case.

Yeah, there's a host of related questions. Should you sing songs from people who, it turns out later, weren't really Christian? Should you sing songs by people who have questionable theology, even if the song itself does not?

Should you sing songs if there's negative associations in different ways? There's a lot of related questions here that if you have an answer to one of those, it might imply an answer for this. But just regarding this, I think there's something to both sides.

There's something to the side of me that wants to just say, you know, scrap it all. Who needs it? And then there's something else to the argument that it would be reasonable to push back on the copyright madness by using these things.

Jesus addresses that to some degree when He addresses the worship tax. You know, and of course, that's what this video is called, the worship tax. But, you know, in Matthew 17, Jesus says about the temple tax, What do you think, Simon, from whom do the kings of earth take toll or tax, from their sons or from others?

And when he said from others, Jesus said to him, the sons are free. However, not to give offense to them, go to the sea and cast a hook and take the first fish that comes up. And when you open its mouth, you will find a shekel.

Take that and give it to them for me and for yourself. So, I mean, even there in that passage, he's describing some, you know, unjust use of, you know, religious authority slash government authority that would that would take taxes for worship.

And he seems to be acknowledging on the one hand, it would be right in some circumstances to go ahead to not give offense. But then also, he leaves it open that there is room for pushback as well. And he doesn't exactly navigate where that line is.

And so, I think, yeah, both of those are worth considering in any given situation.

Fruit, Discernment, and the Standard of Christ

So, last I checked, even Bibles themselves cost money. There is a large chain of people who work thousands of hours to produce this music and the quality reflects it. These songs are reaching far more people than any of the questionable theology.

You will know a tree by its fruit, and this music bears a lot of good fruit. What fruit does this video bear? How does it declare the glory of God? Does this video bring unity to the body of Christ?

Mike Trock. Jared Well, I have a very simple, I have a very simple answer to this one. Pete We could elaborate.

Jared. That was very eloquent. Yes.

Yeah.

So, the argument about fruit and conversions and things like that often sounds very pious because it does appeal to the words of Jesus. Right? You will know them by their fruit. But what is the fruit that he's talking about there?

I mean, it is a goodness of good works that is to be measured by the biblical standard of good. It's not about necessarily what other people might find good. And you see that in a lot of churches where different practices will be justified by the number of people that it brings in or the number of supposed conversions or, you know, just different metrics that turned out to be more inflated than the real spiritual thing that should be being measured.

So, this is just a, this is a common tactic that people use that really needs to be questioned. Well, what is the good in the good fruit here? And I would say good and the circumstance would be the ability to share God's word with others.

And a lot of people have been moved by this video to make changes, to give things away for free, to labor for the Lord without expecting in return. And that is good fruit. And there's no reason to say, well, you know, the number of plays is better fruit because that represents, you know, hearts that were really moved to worship God, etc.

Perhaps that's a good thing, but that's no reason to say that we can't question whether or not those practices have some imperfections.

Yeah, the fruit that we're seeing is we get emails as well, people being touched by this and encouraged and rethinking some things, some critical things. But, you know, one of the crucial things is the church is equipped now to operate with more discernment about this through videos like this.

And that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to edify the body of Christ by not only informing them, but also exhorting them to think deeply about these things and to search the scriptures for themselves to see if this is something that they should be supporting, that they should be part of, that they should be doing as artists as well.

And so that's a lot of fruit for me. And, you know, you could ask the same question, what fruit did it bear when Jesus went to the temple and drove out the money changers, right? You could say the same thing.

Oh, how does that declare the glory of God? Does that bring unity to the Jews?

You know, Andrew, I find myself asking similar questions in a lot of other realms of my life. Where I get pushback is, would the standard that you're holding me to that sounds biblical, would Christ live up to this standard?

And frequently it just seems like it's not the case because, yeah, if you take any one of these dimensions and then give it a caricature on its own without taking in the fullness of biblical revelation, you can make a lot of things sound like they're something that they aren't and then not even meet that standard because, yeah, you've constructed something that's unbiblical even if it sounds biblical.

Yeah.

Christian Tone, Respectable Sins, and Selling Ministry

And, you know, actually one of the criticisms in one comment was the tone was just too mild of the narrator who was John. Somebody said, yeah, I like this video but John should have sounded a little bit more angry and riled up about this in the narration.

And I think that's exactly probably what Jesus would have sounded like. You know, when he talks to the Pharisees, it's not really very politically correct what he does and, yeah, I mean, often we're just like what some authors call milk toast speech.

You know, what we do is in a lot of ministry is we're just walking on eggshells, trying not to offend anyone, trying to be as charitable and gracious as possible. And then the prophets just like burst in like a bull in a china shop, you know.

Yeah, we got to do our best Alex Jones impersonation next time and just like go crazy rant, you know.

Can you believe they're doing it and Blackstone is making money off of this?

We could get some AI to make that happen.

Nice.

Yeah, no, it's a delicate balance. And, yeah, we do want to be charitable. We do want to be kind and gracious. And as we always say, we assume the best of most of these people, that they are well-meaning.

But we are calling sin, sin here. And we do realize that there are a lot of respectable sins in the church and we're not surprised that this is one of them.

Yeah, and we should probably answer that first sentence there, that last I checked, even Bibles themselves cost money. Because quite often people think that we just focus on artists and we're forgetting about all the other Christian things that are being commercialized as well.

If that's you, please check out the rest of our videos because you must be new to our channel because we spend a lot of our time addressing all sorts of different categories. And that includes pastors who are selling their teaching for their books or through other courses and things.

So, it's not just artists. Pastors are doing it too. Many other different people are doing it too. And Bible publishers are doing it too. So, you can look forward to hopefully an upcoming video on Bible publishers that will answer that very clearly.

It just so happens that the worship industry was the focus of one of our first major videos addressing specific ministries.

The Smallness of the Money and the Burden on Churches

Well, one of the common threads that I noticed was these people aren't really making that much. Some people even commented, like, I'm an artist and I have my music with CCLI and I make like $5 a year or something in royalties, whatever.

And so, obviously, this can't be that bad because it's not that much money. And then other people were like, oh, cry me a river. It's like $100 a year or whatever for these churches. That's like nothing.

So what? It's such a small amount of money. And this comes up in other areas that we talk about, obviously, with selling Jesus. So, how would we respond to that?

Yeah.

Like, for me, it's not so much the amount. It's about the principle and the fact that, especially worship, of all the different things that get commercialized, I guess scripture is pretty high up there too.

But when it comes to worship, I feel like this is the clearest and, in some ways, worst violation of selling ministry. Because that's direct communication with God, which I point out at the start of the video.

I compare it to prayer. Because when we pray, we're talking directly to God. And when we sing, we're singing directly to God. And so, to commercialize that is, no matter, even if it's just one cent per year, it is wrong.

It's incredibly wrong. But, you know, even if we do think about the amount, it is a burden to some churches. It's a burden to small churches that are struggling financially. And it's an administrative burden.

If you're a small church, you have very few people to help out. The last thing you want to do is have to, every Sunday, go and report what songs are being sung. And I think in another comment, someone mentions that, oh, CCLI solved that because it's automated now and you don't have to go in and report it manually.

Well, that's only true if you're paying for premium software. So, if you've got that software for your church that automatically reports it, that's great. But a lot of small churches aren't paying for that expensive software.

And they do have to report it manually. They have to, every time they choose a song, they have to go and report that. So, it is a financial burden and it's an administrative burden as well.

Yeah.

I think something else I'd point out here is Proverbs 28, 21. To show partiality is not good. Yet a man will do wrong for a piece of bread. Yeah, it doesn't really matter the quantity of money. Even wrong for a piece of bread is still wrong.

And to partially give the Word of God to those willing to pay the price just for a small amount, in some ways it makes it worse.

Yeah.

Because why wouldn't you give if it really is just that little of a difference for you?

YouTube Ads, Platform Control, and Ministry Distribution

Yeah.

And most of the artists will be earning hardly anything. And, you know, okay, in that case, yes, it'd be nice if they were supported more. But, you know, why even charge anything at all if you're only earning, you know, $10 a year or something?

Like, why not just release it for free?

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

There's actually, right there on the screen, Conley, this other comment about an ad that they saw in the middle of the video. And I just want to say that this worship tax video actually helped with this problem.

For the, you know, up until this point, the whole history of this channel, we've had this problem with ads that are forced onto our channel by YouTube against our will or desire. But YouTube has gotten greedy, and they want to monetize everything they can, no matter what you feel like as the creator, and whether or not any of that revenue goes to you.

Because if your channel isn't monetized and there's still running ads on your video, you're not receiving anything from that. Now, the worship tax video got so many views, it helped us reach a threshold so that we were able to become part of the YouTube partnership program, which enables us to monetize our videos.

But instead of monetizing them, we just simply don't, and that actually reduces the amount of advertisements on our videos quite significantly.

Oh, it doesn't take it down to zero?

I don't know. I can't confirm that. But I have noticed, you know, anecdotally and just experientially, that it significantly reduces the amount of ads, if not eliminates them completely. So, yeah, we're praising God for that.

This is the way to beat YouTube at their own game, and that's what we're trying to do. Now, obviously, we think it's unfortunate that YouTube does this to small channels, and we hope that it doesn't happen in the future now that we've reached this threshold.

But if it does, just know that we have a whole article on ads on sellingjesus .org, how it is not biblical for ministries to support themselves through advertisements. And check that out. That's what our position is.

And so, you will never see an ad that was put there by us on our channel, just to be clear.

False Accusations, the Last Days, and a Call to Reform

Yeah, so the ads are inconvenient, but part of the problem is that people are under the impression that that's something that we're doing and are under control of. But yeah, only recently have we had much control at all.

Right.

So, we're not exclusively on YouTube either. We publish on Let's Church, which is ad-free. And so, it's not like you have to watch our stuff on YouTube. We're putting it up there so people can find it easier, but you can watch it ad-free on another site.

Other accusations, I'm not actually sure what he's referring to. If he's talking about us as a channel, us as individuals, I'm not sure what he's talking about.

Just random slander.

Yeah.

These are the end times. Yeah. I mean, on one hand, that sounds like an extreme response to this, but I mean, it's true. Hebrews 1 says this is these last days. So, these are problems that exist. There will be, you know, as it says in 1 Timothy, there will be all kinds of false teachers.

One of them, if you could find this one, Conley, it says, Now that I've been made aware of this, what do I do? Pretty simple question. So, I think I answered this briefly. I said, pray for reform, help share this video to inform other Christians, encourage Christian artists to dedicate their songs to the public domain, educate yourself as much as possible at sellingjesus .org, copy .church, and by reading the Dorian Principle at thedorianprinciple .org.

Anything else that you guys would add?

I mean, there are like kind of countless ways of doing this. I mean, if you're someone who produces anything, then you can produce things. If you, you know, you can always talk to your pastor about this, see if you could introduce him to some of these concepts, get a copy of the book and share it with him.

Yeah, there's a lot of places that you can do this.

Yeah, and the comment from someone straight after that, support artists who give their ministry instead of charging for it. So, yeah, that's a great way to respond as well to actually financially support artists who are giving their music away for free.

And also, because, you know, it's kind of a blank, in some ways, it's a blank slate for the Christian music industry now, because there's literally hardly any songs that are copyright free. And so, we're almost, in some ways, starting again.

We have the old hymns.

The new frontier.

Yeah, like if you're an amateur musician or even a professional musician who just never has written a song before or published it, man, please, like this is your time to shine and to serve God. And even if, you know, I imagine a way that people can really help serve is that even if you're not writing songs yourself, a lot of people will write a song, but they'll just put the words up and maybe a track, but it's very hard for people to find.

So, you could be someone who does a professional cover of their song and does it really well, puts up a lyric video, ups the production quality, and you're free to do that if it's public domain. So, that would be another great way to serve.

Something else that I have realized has helped people who have reached out and tried to talk to me more personally, you know, over chat or email, and have gotten in touch with me, is when they realize that all of us, all three of us, are pretty accessible and that they could encourage people to talk to us, that has really enabled some people.

I've seen comments on other YouTube channels where people are mentioning us and saying, like, hey, why don't you reach out to these guys and talk about this topic? Because they'd be willing to talk to you.

So, that's the case. We're very accessible. You can find our contact information on sellingjesus .org. And if you know someone who, if you want to talk to us, that's one thing. If you know someone who you think would benefit from talking to us, feel free to give them our contact information.

If you know of a channel that addresses relevant topics that would want to have us on to discuss these things and promote it to others, yeah, let them know, too. We're available for any of that.

Copyright, Fair Use, and the Case for Free Use

Yeah.

That's a good word. There's another comment right here, if you can find it. It says, well, one of the things is, like preachers, songwriters have bills to pay and families to feed. Plus, a copyright protects your song from improper use, like the unauthorized changing of lyrics.

And we have a very brief response here with a link to it, but I thought maybe we could unpack a little bit more there.

Yeah.

So, basically, copyright protects you from Chris Tomlin coming along later and changing your lyric. No, just joking. Because he's famous for changing the lyrics of public domain hymns. But no.

Yeah.

This is one of the objections that we often get, that copyright protects songs. In fact, under fair use law, it's actually legal to make a parody of your song. So, if someone wants to make your song ridiculous or even satanic, for example, they could probably legally do that as a work of parody.

More likely, you're going to have people that want to tweak your song in a helpful way, in a biblical way. And they're the ones that aren't allowed to do anything with it. When it comes to actually mocking or misusing a song, one, it's very rare, but two, some of that will be allowed in fair use law.

And also, if it happens in another country that's not your own, you're very unlikely to be able to do anything about it. Because it's quite hard to sue internationally, from what I've heard. So, yeah, in theory, it gives you some control over your song.

But that doesn't necessarily mean it actually protects it, practically speaking.

Yeah.

And the other half of this, songwriters like preachers have bills to pay and families to feed. One of the common things that we say here is that ministry should be supported, not sold. So, the fact that ministry and ministers should be supported does not mean that you have to sell things to make that happen.

There's all kinds of ways for God's people to give to the work of ministry so that those families get fed. That doesn't involve selling things.

Yeah.

The end does not justify the means.

Yeah.

Have you guys heard of Weird Al Yankovich?

Oh, yeah.

Of course.

So, that would be an interesting case to look into along these lines, right, of this issue of parody. Because that's basically, he built his entire career off of famous songs that he rewrote with silly lyrics.

Here on Quora, it says, If he hadn't gotten permission explicitly and just done it under fair use, could he make money off of those songs, those parodies?

I think he would have been fine. So, fair use, one of the things that the judge does use to determine whether or not it's fair use is how much money was made. And it's not like a guarantee that if it made money, then it's not fair use.

Yeah.

So, maybe I should take back what I said. I don't really know how it would happen if it went into court. But, yeah, this is one of those things where fair use is determined by a bunch of different factors, and none of them are like….

None of them, like, certainly put you in the clear-cut category. So, money is just one factor that they consider.

Yeah.

Yeah, so, it's interesting in this Quora article. It says, Most bands consider being parodied by Weird Al one of the highest accolades a musical group can get. So, they love it. They already have a wall full of gold records and all the music awards, and they wonder what else is there.

And when Weird Al calls, then you've achieved the pinnacle of musical success. So, that's interesting that these people actually consider it a success when their song is warped and parodied. It just makes it more famous anyway.

Yeah, that's a silly example, but it's true. Like, imagine you were discipling someone, and they came up with just an extra verse to your song. And it was just great. It was awesome. And it made the song so much better.

Wouldn't you want them to be able to do that? And if you do want them to be able to do that, then they could be on another side of the world. You may never meet them. So, you don't want to force them to have to come to you for permission, and to be able to track you down and find your contact details and things like that, to be able to simply improve a song for their church or to bless other people.

Or to translate, right? That's a very common example where people don't realize what they're inhibiting with these restrictions. They're inhibiting people from using it in a different language. And the example I always point out for this kind of thing is the King James Bible, because copyright for the King James Bible is not enforced outside of the UK.

If you look at the number of times people have taken the King James Bible and changed it into something you'd prefer not to have, like the Joseph Smith translation or something like that, the number of times the freeness of the King James Bible has improved the lives of Christians vastly outweighs the times that it's been used for something that you would disagree with.

So, it's not, yeah, these are just not good arguments, even from a practical perspective. And I don't think practicality should drive the conversation, but even from that perspective, it's not a good argument.

1 Corinthians 6 and the Limits of Copyright Enforcement

Yeah, and finally, on top of all of those other reasons we've given, finally, we're not saying that it's okay for people to manipulate songs and put bad theology in them or something like that. But how does Paul instruct us to deal with those kind of situations?

Well, he tells us in 1 Corinthians 6, I believe, of how to deal with these issues where someone has actually wronged you. They've actually done the wrong thing. And Paul admonishes them and says, why would you go before a secular court?

Wouldn't it be better to be wronged in that situation than to go before a secular court? And no matter what way you look at this, whether it's a legal standpoint or money standpoint or whatever, the Scripture tells us pretty clearly that it's not appropriate to use copyright in almost any sense.

Yeah.

Let me just handle this one here real quick. Yeah, this day and age, people use platforms to live stream. You have to have CCLI in order to use those songs during the live stream. So this is sort of true.

There's a lot of rules in the US that actually makes it okay if it's a one-time live stream and then you're not recording it and sharing it after. However, that doesn't mean that the platform won't automatically detect it and shut it down anyway.

So yeah, there's a lot of nuance around that one.

I was just wondering if you guys remember that? Because I remember when COVID hit, that was a big problem for a few months where churches were trying to sing online and they couldn't and the videos got taken down all due to this copyright issue.

Yeah.

And so it's like their whole service, right? It's not just, oh, I have that. It's that the people who were expecting to watch the entire service got about 15 minutes of it. That was it.

Wow. Crazy.

Which, you know, in retrospect, maybe there's a lot to say about the importance of courage to meet for worship, but yeah, that was an unfortunate circumstance.

The LDS Example, False Religion, and the Church's Blind Spots

Yeah.

Well, if you guys are up for it, I'd like to end with this comment that says, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints does not use music in worship services that requires royalty payments. The Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square pays royalties from its earnings on sales of recordings, but does not charge for people to attend its performances.

And then it goes into a little bit more detail here. But this was interesting. It's always interesting to me when basically false religions, and we've highlighted this about Islam and the Quran, not having the translations of the Quran, not having copyright.

But yeah, this is always interesting to me to hear from these perspectives, often that are seemingly more freely giving than evangelicals. What do you guys think?

Yeah, I have some initial thoughts on that. I have noticed a number of times where Satan's devices are to be more scriptural or accurate in a place where believers fail to promote something false. There were a number of heretical groups in the 1800s that got a lot of success because they were egalitarian.

And what I mean by egalitarian is not what most people think, not like the male-female egalitarian, but like recognizing that the rich should have no advantage over the poor in terms of religious things.

And so because they played on the fact that this was so frequently violated in churches, either with purants, which we've covered here before, and things like that, that people saw that and they were like, this has got to be true because they're correcting this huge error.

But then they'd have all kinds of other things. You know, they'd reject salvation by grace alone through faith alone. You know, they reject the heart of the gospel. But because they're addressing these problems that were in the church at large at that time with purants or whatever the case may be, yeah, that's often the way the enemy seems to work.

And it's a shame that we open ourselves up to such weak points.

Yeah, when I was in Equatorial Guinea, the only church that ever came seeking Bibles in the mother tongue of the people there, the main mother tongue, which was called Fong, was the Jehovah's Witnesses.

And they actually came to buy Bibles to give to their congregants, and they were going to teach them to read in their mother tongue. They were that dedicated to wanting these, especially like women, older women who may never have had much schooling and stuff, they were dedicated to helping them learn how to read Scripture in their own language.

Meanwhile, all the other so-called evangelical churches in the area had no interest in doing anything like that with their congregations. It was very, very scripturally anemic in all these churches. I would go and preach, and I would just do kind of ad hoc surveys of these congregations where I would preach.

I would be invited to lots of different churches, mostly Pentecostal churches, and I would say, if you've ever read Psalm 19, raise your hand. No one would raise their hand. If you've ever read the Book of Romans, raise your hand.