I remember the first time I met Eddie Long … or the first time I made the acquaintance of Eddie Long’s “entourage” in the form of a pack of wild security guards … Black folks who had been given just enough ‘white power’ to think it was okay to bark at people who asked if they could speak with him for a moment.

Suffice it to say, the initial impact left a strong taste of bitter in my mouth and had me wondering just what in the holy hell a pastor could be doing that would call for him to be surrounded by nasty-attituded bodyguards. I’d never known a Pastor who needed bodyguards, and wasn’t His Grace supposed to be sufficient?

I was met with all kinds of excuses about how I didn’t know what kinds of “sufferings” Bishop Long had to endure, and about how “famous” he was and how he had received death threats and needed the extra security, and I stopped wondering about it because I knew that all kinds of famous–and infamous people had to hire bodyguards at some point along the way. Sometimes, people are just jealous and jealousy is the root of all evil with money as just an involuntary partner-in-crime.

Back in the day, I lived in Decatur, Georgia off Rainbow Drive and would make the short trip up Snapfinger Road to go to New Birth just as it was beginning to outgrow its smaller church dimensions. I’d spent several years looking for what we often refer to as a “church home.” I moved to Atlanta in the early 1990s and for nearly two years had visited several churches when New Birth was recommended to me.

Prior to that time, I’d never heard of Eddie Long, but I was missing my Sunday Morning Nightclub evangelical ritual performances to which I had become accustomed over the years since I was “saved” (in the typical white Roman church christian manner) back in November of 1979.

It was kind of daunting discovering that there was so little room in the church parking lot that I had to park several blocks down in an adjacent lot belonging to some nearby businesses and wait for a church shuttle to pick me up, but wait I did.

The inside of the church had a typical 1990s mega-church pentecostal atmosphere and feel and it was right on the cutting edge of New Birth “taking flight” into national prominence due to Bishop Long’s earthly presence. A lot of noise and fanfare and cut’n’paste sanctified worshiping with people saying the same old things I had listened to all throughout the 1980s. Teachings about healing and prosperity and ‘stuff’ that was becoming pretty repetitious to me by that time. And…

I could tell by being there for an hour and a half that the search for a church was still on.

My personal spiritual maturity and growth had leveled off, so I was beyond trying to figure out what was up with my physical health and my economic pocketbook. I needed to hear something cleaner and more crisp than that and more in-depth. I needed spiritual balance, not anything too far to the left nor too far to the right, and New Birth wasn’t cutting it for the moment.

But that was also right around the time T.D. Jakes was becoming more popular and Creflo Dollar was about to be…and they all followed suit with the white pentecostalists that came out of a Black holiness camp meeting outgrowth in southern Los Angeles by the name of the Azusa Street Revivals. By then, I had grown tired of going to the local Bible & Book Store picking up numerous books and references and listening to preaching and pontificating about physical healing, money, houses, cars, life’s material fineries, and how to get a man.

Ten years into it and it got boring and base. Simple metaphysical and hyper-spiritual concepts started to sound overly-simplified, overly-metaphorical, and trite; plus none of it really worked as they taught. I had not seen, in years of listening to this kind of teaching and many years of prosperity seed-faith “tithing,” a bit of change in my life or anyone else’s who believed in these “thinkonomics” concepts.

It wasn’t hard to conjure memories of the many Black and poor women back in my day (the 1960s and 1970s) who would wrap a dollar or two in a hankie and put it in their bosoms to save in order to send to “Rev. Ike” so there would be “no telling what God could do if they believed.” Them folks lived broke, died broke-r, and never had a single whisper of financial blessings come to them behind sending Rev. Ike money, but Rev. Ike was getting richer by the second. The Name of hyperfaith God had become an automatic lottery win at a Vegas slot machine just by throwing some specific religious keywords around and making people believe it by doing a lot of yelling, hemming, and hawing.

It wasn’t long after that before some of these new school Rhema-based teachers and philosophers, taking their cues from Kenneth Hagin’s ministry and camp meetings in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, started sounding more like motivational speakers than ministers of the gospel.

Shortly after that, about less than a decade later, many of the “super-churches” started cracking at the seams.

Beginning with the fall of Jim & Tammy Fay Bakker of PTL tele-ministries and winding around to an infamous YouTuber with a solid fan base who had nothing good at all to say about Eddie Long or any of the others like him, full circle came and went back around again. And again. And again. It all became such BS., MS., PhD., and enough was enough. I had to fight a measure of deeply seated guilt for leaving these “christian” philosophies after being indoctrinated for so long, but going backward instead of forward was not an answer. I was simply not the “Jim Jones” type even when we weren’t being invited to a faraway land to prepare for the ultimate second coming of Christ.

As one minister after another- from Jimmy Swaggart to Earl Paulk- fell from grace for one reason or another, and probably from off the top of Grace, the word got out about Eddie Long and his midnight soirees and tete-a-tetes with traveling young men while masquerading as a sanctified spiritually mature married man. For whatever reason, I wasn’t the least bit surprised to hear it.

That kind of news coming out of fan-based churches that hedge their bets on celebrity, cold hard cash, and twisted scriptures that cannot be considered godly by any reference in the Bible was not shocking, it was rather expected.

It not only gave more credence to the legitimacy of homosexuality and pedophilia which had mostly been practiced in the Catholic church and remained mostly hidden in Protestant nations, but it definitely underscored the reasons for the growing numbers of people who were slowly but surely converting to atheism. I already know the story they will tell: “Those people are not becoming atheists because of mega-churches, they are becoming atheists because of THE DEVIL.”

Some people give the devil far too much credit.

There is no “devil” in hell who can be more culpable and responsible for people doing exactly what they choose to do and how and when they choose to do it.

Long took a shadowy responsibility for his unconfessed sins by settling lawsuits, and his church made the overt decision to publicly “forgive” him of his trespasses, crown him “king” and continue on as if nothing had happened; but you can’t help but wonder about the lives of the young men who were blinged out by his celebrity and perceived power that his church kept giving him even after he took advantage of it, and them.

Of course, it seems hypocritical when sin looks one way on one person and looks like something else on someone else, depending on who it is. It’s just as hypocritical when white people treat a white criminal gentler and kinder than they do a Black one who commits the exact same or a similar like-kind crime.

Sometimes, God’s people act like they have the only license to decide what should be forgiven and what should not; and the way the “forgiveness” manifests when they are done.

Mad at the heterosexual President of the United States-not a pastor-for legalizing American gay marriage?, but perfectly accepting and defensive of an evangelical minister-not a president-who had homosexual relations with scarred young men who will never forget it.

It’s no “judgment” or slight on the name of Bishop Long that he asked for forgiveness and received it from his church and has more than likely received it from God BECAUSE he asked of Him; however, to this day “the hidden secrets” of deviant and adulterous sex in the church has cast a notorious spell on the people of God, on the BLACK church. Then they come back with excuses for one sin and condemnation for another, as if God is some kinda ‘respecter of persons’.

He who speaks with angel’s wings on his back and a forked tongue in his mouth is not one who can be trusted to tell the truth.

But … “It’s different with him.” Is it? Why? Because his name is Eddie Long and he was rich and famous?

It makes no sense whatsoever to use death as an excuse to mask a definitive truth about a man whose chosen lifestyle hurt others and cost the tremendous price of a living testimony about the saving grace of God.

Even worse, imperfection is one thing, forgiveness is another thing, but excuses to cover up and discharge egregious sins are a WHOLE ‘nother thing all together. Sometimes, we cross wires and are too light in the butt-cheeks about specific boundaries, especially when something has gone too far and should not be excused on our watch.

The lives of too many others are at stake because we duck and dodge the truth, excuse some people and not others, and look away and feign spiritual blindness in order to save face in the body of Christ; and all that does is lay the groundwork for the next time it happens.

If Donald Trump dropped dead tonight, and trust, there are people out here wishing he would, he’d be no less evil the morning after as he is right now. He should not get a pass on the crimes he has committed, not even a pass by church people, just because his name is Donald Trump. But the almighty “we” are absolute hypocrites in that sense. Barack Obama in Donald Trump’s shoes would have been shot down faster by Black people before a white person could lay hands on him.

It explains why so many have brought shame to the Name of the Lord God Most High–as there are no actual abiding consequences to care about. “They’ll forgive me and I’ll just move on to the next phase”.

Mostly Black “church people” were afraid to utter the name of Prince Rogers Nelson when he died last April 2016 and that man had spent his entire life doing nothing BUT helping people. No one ever sued him for molesting young men and his music preached a deeper ‘gospel’ about the world we live in than an Eddie Long-type is or was capable of handling.

They are too busy forging ahead on personal wealth and material gain, all the while ignoring all of the spiritual and racial atrocities that swirl about their feet.

We all soon learn that money does not impress God, nor the things that can be bought with money. Long figured that one out the hard way, I can only guess … but be honest, though, seriously…

Bishop Long likely did help a lot more people than he harmed.

We pray it counted for him in the end.

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