Pat Robertson

Marion Gordon 'Pat' Robertson (1930–2023) was the son of a U.S. Senator, a Yale Law graduate, and a Marine combat veteran who became a charismatic Christian minister in 1956. Around 1960 he bought a bankrupt UHF television station in Portsmouth, Virginia, with little money to operate it. He funded it by going on air and asking 700 viewers to pledge $10 a month — the origin of The 700 Club's name. From that beginning, Robertson built the most important Christian media empire in American history. The Christian Broadcasting Network grew from that single UHF station into a 24-hour cable network that reached over 50 million households by the mid-1980s. Robertson pioneered the talk show format for Christian television: The 700 Club combined news coverage, celebrity interviews, prayer segments, and political commentary in a format explicitly modeled on secular broadcast journalism, but filtered entirely through a Christian nationalist interpretive frame. Every news story was contextualized theologically. Every political development was framed as either advancing or threatening God's plan for America. Robertson's 1988 Republican presidential primary campaign was simultaneously a political failure and a movement success. He finished third in the delegate count, behind George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole. But his campaign demonstrated that an evangelical television minister could organize a national political operation, raise $27 million, and win the Alaska, Hawaii, Nevada, and Washington caucuses after finishing second in Iowa, ahead of George H.W. Bush. His campaign infrastructure — the precinct-level organizing, the church-based voter identification, the small-dollar donor lists — became the foundation for the Christian Coalition, founded in 1989. The American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), founded in 1990, was Robertson's explicit counterpart to the ACLU. It positioned itself as defending Christian religious liberty against secular legal assault — framing Christian political power as a civil rights struggle. It has litigated dozens of cases before the Supreme Court on issues of school prayer, public religious displays, and anti-LGBTQ religious exemptions. Robertson's rhetoric was often dominionist in tone: he spoke of Christians taking leadership in government, media, and education — themes later systematized by others as the Seven Mountains Mandate (government, media, education, business, family, religion, and entertainment). Robertson made this plain in his 1991 book The New World Order, which laid out his vision of Christian civilization restored to political dominance. His statements attributing natural disasters and terrorist attacks to divine judgment on American sinfulness — his agreement on air when Jerry Falwell blamed 9/11 on 'the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists,' Hurricane Katrina linked to abortion policy, the 2010 Haiti earthquake attributed to a Haitian 'pact with the devil' — generated repeated public controversies. They were not gaffes; they were the consistent application of his theological framework to current events. Robertson died in June 2023 at age 93.

Themes this entry appears in

• Christian Nationalism
• Dominionism
• Anti-LGBTQ
• Abortion Politics
• Political Strategy

Connections from Pat Robertson

• exploited → September 11, 2001 (2001) — Robertson agreed with Falwell's framing on air, reinforcing the claim that America's tolerance of LGBTQ people, feminists, and secular institutions had removed God's protective covering.
• exploited → AIDS Crisis (1983) — Robertson used the AIDS crisis to argue that God was judging a society that tolerated homosexuality, reinforcing the theological framework that LGBTQ people were a threat to God's covenant with America.
• founded → Christian Coalition (1989) — Robertson founded the Christian Coalition in September 1989 to convert his failed 1988 presidential campaign's donor and volunteer infrastructure into a permanent political machine. The campaign had demonstrated the electoral scale of the evangelical voter bloc; the Coalition was the institutional vehicle to harness it.
• promoted → Ralph Reed (1989) — Robertson personally recruited Reed as the Christian Coalition's first executive director in October 1989 and gave him full operational control to build the organization. Robertson supplied the donor network, the media platform, and the political vision; Reed supplied the machine.

Sources

• Pat Robertson, broadcaster who helped make religion central to GOP politics, dies at 93 — Associated Press (Baptist Press) (2023)
• Jesus and John Wayne — Kristin Kobes Du Mez (2020), pp. 109-120
• The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism — Katherine Stewart (2020), pp. 80-120