Bishop Eddie Long | Pastor prominent on the national, world stage

But the televangelist, author and political activist has been largely silent since the scandal broke Tuesday. In separate lawsuits, three men accuse the flashy pastor of using pastoral influence to coerce the young men into sex, an accusation Long's attorney Craig Gillen adamantly denies.

Tulane University sociology professor Shayne Lee, who has tracked Long's rise to fame, said the scandal will have lasting effects on Long's career.

"This is tremendously damaging and I don’t think he will be able to recover," Lee said. "Unless he gets the most fervent defense against the allegations, his ministry will suffer."

Long is among the country's most prominent black church leaders, known for rapidly growing New Birth's congregation from 300 in 1987 to more than 25,000 people today. But it wasn't solely through New Birth that he became a celebrity church figure, Lee said.

Rather, Long first became a national player in the mid-1990s with the Full Gospel Baptist Church Fellowship International, a network of black Baptist ministers seeking to establish a new order within their community that fused a Pentecostal fervor with traditional Baptist worship, Lee said.

Long was a prominent leader in the movement, which drew more than 20,000 attendants to its first meeting in 1994, Lee said. The charismatic pastor capitalized on that national visibility back home in Atlanta, quickly growing in popularity in resources to the point that he no longer needed the fellowship.

“By the 2000s … [New Birth] became a spiritual kingdom, and that’s when Eddie Long really took off,” Lee said.

Along with Long's accomplishments -- among them a 240-acre church campus and a charter school -- has come criticism of his finances. A 2005 AJC investigation of one of his many non-profit organizations, the Bishop Eddie Long Ministries Inc., show that he was compensated with more than $3 million in salary, benefits and use of property between 1997 and 2000, nearly as much as it gave to all other recipients combined during those years, according to tax records.

Long defended his compensation from that charity in an interview with the AJC.

"We're not just a church, we're an international corporation, " Long said. "We're not just a bumbling bunch of preachers who can't talk and all we're doing is baptizing babies. I deal with the White House. I deal with Tony Blair. I deal with presidents around this world. I pastor a multimillion-dollar congregation."

And in late 2007, he was among six televangelists who were the subject of an investigation by Sen. Charles Grassley, (R-Iowa). Grassley made an inquiry into the ministers' extravagant lifestyles while they oversaw tax-exempt organizations.

That the powerhouse preacher is at the center of a gay sex scandal is deeply at odds with his history of anti-gay ministry. In December 2004, he and the Rev. Bernice King, daughter of the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., staged a march attended by thousands to voice opposition to gay marriage. The march also advocated on other issues including health care and education reform. New Birth also offers counseling services to people “struggling with homosexuality,” according to its website.

"He’s been a leading sort of figure on the forefront of traditional conservative social values, thinking about traditional marriage, but he does so in a way that seems politically non-threatening," said Andra Gillespie, assistant professor of political science at Emory University. "He doesn’t use the same strident language you typically associate with the religious right. It's done in a way that is more culturally appealing to African Americans."

Lee said Long is known for preaching a gospel geared toward men.

“His unique version of muscular Christianity, this virulent manly gospel for men ... resonated with a lot of people in Atlanta, which is the irony of these allegations,” Lee said.