WASHINGTON (Bloomberg) — Some funerals are simple affairs, meant merely to remember the departed and to comfort the mourners.In the black church, they tend to be more elaborate, all the more so when the deceased is a cherished leader.

And when the departed is a symbol to millions of people the world over, the funeral becomes a magnet for those eager to promote their own agendas, black or white.

Agendas were flying all over the suburban Atlanta megachurch during the six-hour service this week honouring Coretta Scott King.

President George W. Bush, criticised for missing the recent funeral of another civil rights leader, Rosa Parks, wasn’t about to make the same mistake. He delivered the nation’s condolences to the King family with eloquence.

By doing this, Bush could appear kinder and gentler without actually supporting the kinder and gentler causes that King championed, such as peace and aid to the poor and infirm. On the day before the funeral, his budget asked Congress to cut aid to the poor and infirm and to pour more money into waging war.

This is where the agendas of others came in to play, namely the one aimed at denying Bush whatever points he hoped to score.

Former President Jimmy Carter and civil rights leader Joseph Lowery took turns slamming the war in Iraq, Bush’s puny support for the poor and the whole idea of eavesdropping on Americans, which had been used against King’s martyred husband, Martin Luther King Jr.

There was no place to hide for the president and first lady seated on the dais, whose squirms and grimaces were caught on camera.

Churchgoers cheered.

“Political theatre is not uncommon in the black church culture,” said Robert Franklin, a professor of social ethics at Emory University’s theology school in Atlanta.

But Carter and Lowery went too far.

“There are more constructive ways to carry on a conversation about the future of the country and the nation’s poor than using this sacred occasion,” Franklin said.

Another former president came with a different agenda. Wildly popular among African-Americans, Bill Clinton basked in the crowd’s adoration while his wife stood next to him, nodding, and hoping some of that adoration would splash onto her.

When it came time to turn the microphone over to her, he squeezed her hand (isn’t that sweet?) and stepped aside, but never out of camera shot.

Thus, their unspoken message was doubly delivered: Put one Clinton in the White House and you get the other one for free.

Politicians weren’t the only people trying to score points at King’s funeral.

The biggest winner was the church’s flamboyant leader, Bishop Eddie Long, who built New Birth Missionary Baptist Church from a 300-member congregation into a 25,000-member church with its own broadcast, an international ministry and ties to the Bush White House.

In August the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that the non-profit group, Bishop Eddie Long Ministries Inc., gave him more than $3 million in salary and benefits between 1997 and 2000, including the use of a $350,000 Bentley and a six-bedroom home on 20 acres.

Plus, the congregation gave him “love offerings”.

Long explained to the reporters that he is worth it.

“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,” he told the newspaper.

“You’ve got to put me on a different scale than the little black preacher sitting over there that’s supposed to be just getting by because the people are suffering.”

Like his friend in the White House, Long has also spoken out against gay marriage. He preaches, “Homosexuality and lesbianism are spiritual abortions.”

Long apparently didn’t heed Coretta King’s call in 1998: “I appeal to everyone who believes in Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream to make room at the table of brother- and sisterhood for lesbian and gay people.”

Nothing says you have to believe every principle pronounced by someone whose funeral service you are conducting, of course.

But by hosting the funeral service of Coretta Scott King, “His stock went up, his reputation, his moral stature,” says Franklin, even though in many ways Long is the antithesis of her and her late husband.

None of that could have happened, but for the agenda of the Rev. Bernice King, one of Martin and Coretta King’s four children and an elder at New Birth.

It was Bernice King who brought the service to Atlanta’s suburbs, away from the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church in downtown Atlanta, where Martin Luther King Jr. preached and where his funeral service had been held, and away from the larger, new Ebenezer sanctuary across the street.

“God just ordained it to be here,” she said at the service. “God said it’s time for the world to be born again. It’s time for a new birth.”

This is the church of the new black America, she seemed to be saying. Franklin worries that it is turning its back on the urban poor and on the social gospel that Bernice King’s father preached.

“The old has passed away,” she said at the service. “We’re going to see what God does through the seed of Martin and Coretta.”

That’s an agenda yet to come.