In September 2010, four young men stood up and said the same thing about Bishop Eddie Long: that the pastor of one of the largest churches in the country used his pulpit, his private jet, his mentorship program, and the promise of “I will be your dad” to coerce them into sexual relationships when they were teenagers. A fifth man joined before the case settled. The lawsuits named Longfellows Youth Academy — a program built, on paper, to develop young men — as the very pipeline through which the alleged grooming happened.
And what did New Birth Missionary Baptist Church do with that information?
They gave him a standing ovation.
Eight thousand people at the 8 a.m. service alone rose to their feet and cheered before Long said a single word in his own defense. When he finally spoke, he didn’t deny anything specific. He compared himself to David fighting Goliath. He said he had “five rocks” and hadn’t thrown one yet. That was enough. The congregation didn’t need details. They needed their bishop to still be their bishop, and so a room full of people decided, in real time, to believe a feeling over four separate legal complaints filed by young men who had no reason to coordinate a lie together.
That’s the part I need us to sit with before we even get to the “would things be different now” question. It wasn’t a few loyal deacons defending their pastor behind closed doors. It was thousands of people, in public, on camera, applauding a man who had just been sued by teenagers he’d mentored — for exploiting the very thing he was supposed to be protecting.
So would 2026 believe them?
I want to say yes. I want to say the culture has moved. We’ve had #MeToo. We’ve had church after church — Southern Baptist, Catholic, nondenominational, doesn’t matter — get dragged through independent investigations that confirmed decades of cover-up. We’ve had “believe survivors” become a phrase people at least know how to perform, even when they don’t practice it. So surely, if four young men stood up today and said a megachurch bishop used his spiritual authority to pull them into sexual relationships as teenagers, the response would be different.
Here’s my honest answer: partially. And the parts where it wouldn’t change are the parts that matter most.
What would probably be different
The information environment is different now. In 2010, Long controlled the narrative because he controlled the room — literally, the physical room his congregation sat in every Sunday, and the media access around it. Today, accusers don’t need the Atlanta Journal-Constitution to carry their story credibly. They have TikTok, Instagram, independent Black media, podcasts hosted by other survivors of church abuse. The gatekeeping that let Long get out ahead of the story with a rehearsed “David and Goliath” sermon before anyone heard directly from his accusers — that gatekeeping is weaker now. People can go straight to the source.
There’s also more institutional memory. Pastors like Andy Savage, Ravi Zacharias, and Carl Lentz have all been publicly, credibly exposed since 2010, and each exposure chipped away at the reflexive “not my pastor” instinct. People have watched enough of these stories resolve the same way — allegations dismissed, then quietly confirmed years later — that the pattern is harder to unsee.
What almost certainly wouldn’t change
Go back and read what one young man told a reporter outside a gas station near New Birth in 2010, explaining why he didn’t believe the accusers: one of them had a pending burglary charge, so obviously he was lying to “take attention off himself.” That instinct — find any flaw in the accuser and let it cancel out the accusation — is not a 2010 problem. It is the single most durable pattern in how communities respond to abuse allegations against beloved leaders, and it shows up just as fast in 2026 comment sections as it did outside that Citgo.
The specific dynamics that protected Long haven’t gone anywhere either:
The homophobia did double duty. Long spent years preaching against homosexuality — famously blaming “feminized men” for society’s problems — while allegedly pursuing sexual relationships with young men in his own congregation. That contradiction should have destroyed his credibility instantly. Instead, for a large chunk of his base, it made the accusations feel like a conspiracy against him rather than evidence of him. Some of his congregation reasoned that a man who preached that hard against homosexuality couldn’t possibly be doing what he was accused of — the sermon became an alibi. That specific inversion, where the loudest condemnation of a thing is read as proof of innocence rather than a red flag, is still very much alive in how the church treats its most performatively “righteous” leaders.
Class and access still buy silence. Long settled with his accusers for an undisclosed amount later reported to total at least $1.5 million, then had his lawyers turn around and try to claw nearly $900,000 of it back when three of the men talked to reporters anyway. That’s not a relic of 2010. NDAs tied to settlement money are still the standard playbook for churches and organizations trying to make an accusation disappear, and they still work, because most accusers don’t have the resources to fight a legal team funded by tithes.
“He mentored me” is still read as a defense instead of the mechanism. The most chilling detail in the entire case is that the alleged abuse happened through a program explicitly built for father-figure mentorship of teenage boys — the same appeal that made congregants trust Long in the first place. Communities still struggle to hold both truths at once: that closeness and care can be real and be the exact tool used to manipulate someone. We’re better at naming grooming patterns in schools and youth sports now. We are still not good at naming them in the pulpit, because pulpit access is coded as spiritual, not institutional — and spiritual authority gets a pass that institutional authority increasingly doesn’t.
The uncomfortable answer
If Eddie Long’s accusers came forward today, I don’t think they’d be laughed out of the sanctuary the way they nearly were in 2010. I think they’d get more coverage, faster, from more independent voices, and a portion of the public — probably a bigger portion than in 2010 — would take them seriously from the jump.
But I don’t think the church itself would move any faster. The instinct to protect institutional legacy over individual harm isn’t a media literacy problem that TikTok fixes. It’s a discipleship problem. It’s what happens when congregations are trained for decades to treat their pastor’s authority as functionally untouchable, and to treat any challenge to that authority — even one backed by five separate accusers — as an attack on God rather than an attack on a man who happens to stand at the front of the room.
Until that theology changes — until “protect the anointing” stops outranking “protect the child” — the standing ovation is still on the table. We’d just be filming it in higher resolution.
