Because I’m a people watcher, I watched Eddie Long’s sermon on Sunday. At least the one he did at 8. I imagine he did the same at 10, but I’m not the best person to ask about how such things work.
Either way, I watched Long take the mic at this gigantic church, a sprawling testament — good or bad — of the work he’d done. Can you imagine looking at a sprawling compound like New Birth’s (and that bad boy is really impressive) and knowing that you are the one that made that happen? I’m sure someone will say that God made it happen, but God ain’t making that happen everywhere. And until last week, that was Eddie Long’s legacy.
Yesterday, it was where he had to explain himself.
That, of course, was a piece of cake, because he didn’t have to do it. He could have walked into that room and started playing a song and it would have worked.
He really didn’t say much more. He mentioned that his lawyers don’t want him to “try” this case in “the media.” No, his lawyers don’t want him saying anything they can’t save him from.
(Now this is the part where I, as a decidedly non-religious person, get confused. If God’s got your back, I’m not sure what there is to worry about. It’s like Drew Carey said about the Popemobile: worst he can do is die and go to heaven, right? But I digress…)
I’m not gonna knock Long for that, though. If these allegations against him are true, he’s been riding these lies for too long to stop now. Somebody’s gonna have to make it incontrovertibly true that he’s had these relationships with these boys before he even hints at it.
So yeah, that was expected. I was more interested in how people continued to take Long in the last few days. I ran a few Twitter searches the last few days to get a gauge on how people seemed to feel about Long. In a way, it’s interesting to check these things because I’m so far removed from this world where people keep up with the pastors all over the country like I follow college football. That just doesn’t sound so interesting to me, but I also didn’t grow up gossiping in church.
Anyway, I saw a few distinct camps pop up. The most noteworthy were those using the Long situation as an opportunity to bash the concept of the megachurch, taking this situation and using it to make damning general assumptions of all these ministers. The other camp were those who fervently defended Long, to the point that people questioned whether they loved Long more than God himself.
From where I stand, his congregation is in a pickle. Imagine, for a second, that you invested money with Bernie Madoff. Now imagine you got the news that Madoff has really been running a Ponzi scheme. If you could choose which were true, whether Madoff was being falsely accused or not, which would you pick? You’d choose the option that validated your investment, of course.
People simply invested money with Bernie Madoff. They invested their beings in Eddie Long.
Now imagine that you’ve entrusted this central part of your being to the guidance of this preacher. You seek to be a better person every day, and you follow the direction of this charismatic man that has enraptured thousands of others. You’ve given a percentage of the money that you barely have enough of to build these towering monuments to his ministry and, by easy extension, himself. You don’t just go to New Birth. You are a member. Eddie Long doesn’t just represent you. In many ways, he is you.
Or, perhaps more accurately, he’s a representation of who you want to become.
And there’s word that maybe, just maybe, he’s taking boys on out-of-town trips on the weekends.
In that situation, what are you going to choose to believe? Not a one of them loves Eddie Long more than God, but it wouldn’t be ridiculous to say they have a stronger relationship with God because of Eddie Long. To see that toppled, that the man who encouraged them to work on their shortcomings has instead been masking his? Yes, I get why they’re hurt and, yes, I get why they’ll do anything not to believe what’s out there, regardless of what an affront doing so is to common sense.
Cuz oh, the applause Long got was just that: an affront to common sense. It is entirely possible someone’s running a game on him, but he certainly isn’t deserving of encouragement right now. He’s really not deserving of anything, not even that dime out of every dollar you make. If you give him your money, he’s accountable to you. To say he doesn’t have to answer to you is to sell yourself short, especially when he who pushes a Bentley defiantly compares himself to David and his slingshot, saying he had “about five rocks left.”
Coincidentally, I knew a David that used to sling rocks, too. But I digress.
But I watched those people clap and seek to protect Long, and I couldn’t be mad. To protect him is to protect themselves, from disappointment and a host of other things. Just like he’s human, so are they. To call those people stupid or to chastise them for their reaction seems, to me, to have no understanding of the stakes at play.
Then there’s the folks bagging on the superpreachers. They’re right, even though I don’t think they seem to know why. See, here’s what Eddie Long and others need to realize…
If you’re going to make your bones selling virtue, you absolutely have to live it in this day and age. Information travels too easily and the money’s too big in too many places. You will, at some point, get caught. There’s simply no avoiding it.
Humans just aren’t in the business of saying “no” to things they like. It’s just not how we work. I mean, we’ll do it if it stops us from going to work on time — and they day you can’t is when you’re called an addict — but we are hedonists at our cores. You can phrase that differently if you like and say we’re born into sin. It’s all saying the same thing, really.
Put a human in front of a major operation and you’ll give him power, but you won’t give him strength. He can deliver blows, but he’s no better equipped to take them. Take a man with a weakness and give him that prestige, and the weakness will remain.
Now, for a second, imagine that man has a weakness that he’s been denying forever, but afford him a position that makes his word the last in every earthly interaction he has. Make him attractive and pious. Give him access to whatever he could possibly want. And make it such that people want him to have all of this, thereby insulating him from accusation and dissuading anyone from uncovering his secrets.
Which one of you can definitively say you wouldn’t fall? Like I said: you can’t sell morality on credit. Collection time is always around the corner.
So are all of these superpreachers crooks? No. But they are powerful men, a dichotomy that should make these dudes realize that writing checks those tithes can’t cash is a guaranteed recipe for disaster.
In the end, I guess humanity is all we’re left with. It’s humanity that makes people seek cats like Long, and it’s humanity that, to a degree, has him in the situation he’s in. But if these accusations are true, then the defense of humanity won’t deflect anything from Long, because it will mean that it’s humanity that he exploited. And that humanity would be one he could relate to personally, making these stories even more appalling.
We’ve got so many gay men in the church, searching for answers because they truly believed their sexuality is their ticket to hell. They direct choirs and all kinds of other stuff, trying to make sense of being someone they’ve been raised to believe is wrong. And when God doesn’t turn off who they are, they go deeper and deeper into the church in hopes that their “problems” will be fixed.
Well, know what? You spend enough time in a church, putting in all that work, have some charisma and intelligence, and get a couple of the right breaks, and you might one day get a church of your own. You can turn that church into something approaching an empire, and you can continue the church work you’ve been doing forever.
Or, you could get all that power and have all that ability to help — most of which you use — and put it to use when you see a young man that reminds you of yourself, fighting the confusions and looking for answers like you were at that point. Yes, you could help that young man.
Or you could introduce him to Tyler Perry and take him on an out-of-town trip.
Given how plausible that is, it blew my mind to see that church try so hard to defend Eddie Long. But after thinking about it, I sure couldn’t blame them.
Human is all they can be. From all of this, I hope Eddie Long and those around him get a better grasp of just what that means.
