The televangelist who politicized the Christian right
Pat Robertson transformed U.S. politics by harnessing conservative Christians as a potent political force. In the 1970s, the Baptist minister and founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network found international fame as host of The 700 Club, a long-running show that combined evangelizing with political talk. Riding that popularity—and, he said, heeding God’s command—he ran for president in 1998, then founded the Christian Coalition, an advocacy group that mobilized evangelical voters and helped turn the Republican Party rightward. Robertson had a calm, folksy manner and gentle smile that belied his often incendiary rhetoric, which cast progressives as forces of evil. Feminism, he said, encouraged women to “kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians,” while homosexuality was “an abomination.” Assailing morals was a lucrative enterprise: Through programming, books, videos, and a university, Robertson’s empire pulled in more than $300 million a year at its peak. “My chief aim is to glorify God and serve mankind,” he said. “But I’m also an entrepreneur.”
Raised in Lexington, Va., Robertson was born into “a Southern family steeped in politics and religion,” said the Los Angeles Times. His father was a long-serving congressman and senator, his mother a born-again Christian. After prep school, Robertson graduated from Washington and Lee University and served two years in Korea as a Marine. He earned a law degree from Yale, “but failed the bar and never practiced.” Instead, he sold audio components, “gambled recklessly,” and frequented nightclubs, said The New York Times. Feeling empty, he considered suicide before “an encounter with an evangelist” changed his life. Robertson promptly “poured out his bottle of Courvoisier” and “left his pregnant wife and child to attend a Christian camp in Canada.” On returning, he enrolled in a seminary to be ordained as a Southern Baptist minister.
Obeying what he said was a message from God, in 1960 Robertson bought “an ailing television station” in Portsmouth, Va., for just $37,000 and renamed it the Christian Broadcasting Network, said The Telegraph (U.K.). The station struggled until he organized “the world’s first telethon,” soliciting tithes from 700 viewers “in return for the promise of spiritual healing.” That was the birth of The 700 Club, whose mix of “hard-right politics, faith healing, and lifestyle news” eventually made Robertson “the world’s most-watched TV preacher,” said The Washington Post. When he ran for president, he stunned the GOP establishment with a second-place showing in Iowa. He soon lost steam and dropped out, but “his candidacy heralded the rise of religious conservatives in politics.” In 1994, his Christian Coalition, by then 4 million strong, was credited with helping elect the first GOP Congress in decades.
In later years, Robertson drew criticism for blaming disaster victims “for their own woes,” said Bloomberg. He said America’s moral depravity caused the 9/11 attacks, linked Hurricane Katrina to abortion, and said the 2010 Haiti earthquake was punishment for Haitian sins. He continued hosting The 700 Club into his 90s, true to his credo of evangelism. “I don’t think being a Christian,” he said, “means just spending time in the confines of the church, behind stained-glass windows, singing hymns.”