Gross Gross Gross

I’m trying to make preparations so cooking will go easier tomorrow. In the meantime, my wife and I are talking about the T.D. Jakes mess which broke a day or two ago.

I’m always glad when I can say I never thought much of a suddenly-disgraced preacher, partly because some awful preachers have fooled me. I’m happy to say I never had any use for Jakes. He’s a motivational speaker, plain and simple, which means he teaches pride. Any Christian over the age of 4 should know pride is the worst thing there is. Jakes teaches people how to get God to make their ungodly dreams come true instead of showing them how to get aligned with God’s plans.

He always struck me as incredibly arrogant. I have my moments of pride, but I can’t imagine having the brass to stand in front of tens of thousands or millions of people, like Jakes, bellowing self-indulgent nonsense like an angry walrus. It’s like watching a rock star zone out while playing a guitar solo to a packed stadium.

Jakes is partially responsible for the money-worshiping horror known as Paula White. She calls him “daddy,” which is beyond creepy. You can’t pal around with Paula White and claim to know anything about God.

I have a lot of black friends, and I used to go to a black church. God help anyone who tells black Christians there is something wrong with a TV preacher, especially one who is also black. It’s like poking the Beyhive or saying Michael Jackson should have been hanged for molesting boys, which is true. Fans will swarm you. On the web, people who can’t possibly know whether the stories are true are going after people who assume they are or merely think they might be.

If you’re not up to speed, the story is that T.D. Jakes has a long history of going to homosexual parties hosted by Sean Combs and letting other men use him like a woman. Well, not quite like a woman, since sex with women is normal and involves organs designed for the purpose. But you get the idea.

Yesterday, I decided to see how things shook out before drawing conclusions, since people are accused falsely all the time, but now I’ve seen more accusations come out, and I saw part of Jakes’ lame response. I’ve also seen a horrible interview he did with Huffpo, the noted Christian news outlet, in which he endorsed homosexuality in churches. I still don’t know for sure, but it’s starting to look very bad.

In his sermon today, he sort of addressed the stories. He looked utterly humiliated. It’s hard to describe the look a man has on his face when the most humiliating things about him have just been exposed to the entire world, but Jakes had that look. No matter what he was saying or how confident he made his voice sound, he had the expression of a man who was crying.

He was also defiant, arrogant, and belligerent. And he made accusations. This is how guilty ego cases act when they’ve been exposed. “How dare you touch God’s anointed?” “I can’t address this nonsense because I am here to preach God’s word.” “DO NOT AROUSE THE WRATH OF THE GREAT AND POWERFUL OZ!”

If I were accused of letting male strangers have sex with me at rapper parties, I wouldn’t say things like, “I’m not going to address a lie,” and I wouldn’t get caught up in praising myself. I’d tell people they were out of their minds to believe it. I’d say the thought of sex with men made me heave. And I wouldn’t have an expression like a kid who just got put on Tiktok wearing his mother’s clothes.

His ministry said the stories were false. That’s vague. It’s easy to say a story which is fundamentally true is false, simply because some details are wrong. “Is it true you lured an 8–year-old boy into your basement with a bag of Snickers bars?” “NO! They were Milky Ways.” If you’re innocent, you don’t just deny the particular story that’s being spread. You deny being the kind of person who would be involved in such things. You deny you have ever engaged in that type of activity.

A real denial would sound like, “I have never been engaged in any kind of sexual activity with another male.” “I am not a homosexual.” “None of this is true.” “Nothing remotely like this ever happened.” It would be broad, to cover all the bases.

Jakes has taken up for homosexuality, not just homosexuals, in the past, so the impression I get is that he was laying the groundwork for a quick recovery should he be exposed. Today he said that even if the stories were true, he would just need to repent. Again, it looks like he’s preparing for more disclosures.

No, you can’t just repent and go back to work next Sunday. It’s true that God will forgive Jakes if he repents, but that doesn’t make him fit for ministry. You can repent if you slip briefly into looking at porn. You can repent and move on if you slip and get high from time to time. You can’t just turn on a dime and resume a global ministry after admitting you’ve let legions of men sodomize you. It doesn’t work that way. There is a difference between slips and a lifetime of consistent hypocrisy and perversion.

Maybe he’s innocent, and he’s just very bad at denials, but he couldn’t look much more guilty. He should look furious or amused. Not devastated, deflated, and lost. He looks suicidal.

I like seeing horrible ministries destroyed, and I like seeing bad people have their claws torn off of gullible Christians, but if Jakes is really finished, it will cause problems for many people. Their faith will be shaken. Many will give up on Yeshua altogether.

This is what comes of not praying in tongues. If you pray in tongues, God will eventually lead you away from every fraud and phraraoh. If not, you will continue to believe every idiot who can find a TV camera to stand in front of.

T.D. Jakes has no business preaching, regardless of whether he’s a homosexual. Any preacher who endorses sodomy is working for Satan, so I hope his ministry is destroyed quickly, whether by this story or some other crisis.