The Gospel of Self: How Pat Robertson Stole the Soul of the GOP

One

The Seeds of Modern Discontent

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

—John Kenneth Galbraith

The evangelist’s message has always been self-centered, for it preaches the gospel as a means to saving one’s own ass from eternal hellfire and damnation in the afterlife. Evangelical Christianity has refined the message over the years and turned it today into the means for blessings in this life as well. What was once a powerful motivator for overall good behavior in the community has become a motivator for obtaining a better position in life, and it has profoundly altered everything in our society from our politics to our treatment of our neighbors. I helped bring this about, for I worked alongside one of the most influential evangelists of modern history.

Marion Gordon Pat Robertson is a political animal that happens to be a Christian evangelist, broadcaster, and television personality. Political smarts flow through his veins as surely as the blood that sustains his body. He was born and raised in the midst of a powerful Virginia political family. His father, Absalom Willis Robertson, was a career conservative Democrat—a Dixiecrat of the Senator Robert Byrd ilk—serving in both the House and the Senate, and Pat was groomed to follow in his footsteps, attending the prestigious McDonogh Preparatory School before Washington and Lee University and eventually Yale Law School. He also served a stint in the Marine Corps as a first lieutenant.

Pat Robertson never passed the bar exam, but instead had a religious conversion. He went to New York Theological Seminary, receiving a Masters in Divinity in 1959. A year later he established the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) in Portsmouth, Virginia. He has built a massive television empire since and is one of the most controversial Evangelical Christians on TV, where he practices the charismatic gifts of the spirit, including speaking in tongues and signs and wonders such as healing. But the political animal continued to seek the surface throughout his television ministry, and this would play a huge role in my own life and in the political dynamics of the Republican Party, one that continues to this day.

When I worked with him in the 1980s, we practiced and promoted a brand of Charismatic Christianity that was seen as a breath of fresh air to a faith that had grown stale in every aspect, from its music to its preaching, and we worked long, hard hours to move hearts and souls in the way we felt was right. In so doing, we altered the course of political power in the United States, and it was as natural as our Christian calling. Taking positions on social issues formerly held by conservative Democrats, such as the sanctity of life, religious liberties, patriotism, family, school prayer, and respect for individualism and tradition, we spoke to primarily rural and suburban Christians on behalf of the Republican Party. We presented as Biblical mandates or laws economic views that catered to the haves of culture, teaching that being one of the haves was available for everybody. Our arguments and teachings helped move the GOP to the right on the political spectrum and created a following that continues to baffle even the smartest political analysts in the country who are confounded by how such people would act against their own best interests in giving power to Republicans.

Pat Robertson was a highly intelligent, articulate, well-read, creative, and brilliant man to work for. There wasn’t a day that I didn’t admire his ability to communicate via live television. The more prepared I was, the better he was able to perform. I was a willing participant in his social engineering, because I agreed with him that the world was going to hell, and I was proud to be at his side in trying to change that. And it didn’t matter one bit to me that we crossed lines along the way. I was an experienced news executive, and I knew right from wrong when it came to journalism and the narratives of liberty.

I used that knowledge to bring our daily message right up to the edge of both ethics and the law without embarrassing ourselves. It turned out that my efforts could not protect us from what happened outside my purview. Many hands were involved in our political efforts, and it became evident that they weren’t guided by the same principles we tried to apply to The 700 Club.

Moreover, there is a vast difference, I discovered, between what we believed and did as leaders and teachers, and what the students would do with what we taught them. This is why I don’t fear conservative leaders in the world today, but I’m frightened to death by their followers. We broke the law. We stretched the truth. Why would we be surprised or complain if our followers did likewise? Our attempts to manage a political movement trapped us in the belief that God needed us and our work in order to accomplish change in the hearts of humankind. We organized human efforts to change, and that is an untenable position for those attempting publicly to do the work of God.

I do not know how to adequately justify this dichotomy in my own thinking and behavior during the time I helmed The 700 Club. Was I simply caught up in something that I couldn’t handle? Was I naïve, because I was such a novice in the faith? Was my ego running the show, as I gave myself completely to the task of CBN? Perhaps it was none or all of the above, but I do know that we created—or at least played a major role in the creation of—the extreme Christian element that has dragged the Republican Party today to the edge of fascism. There is no zeal quite like that of religious zeal, for it comes with blinders to alternative views of reality. When this zeal is aimed at pleasing God Himself, it’s impossible to negotiate or reason with it or its consequences.

And why should conservative leadership care as long as this group votes? Politics is a dirty, dirty business, as Pat discovered later with the tactics of his chief rival, George H.W. Bush. Trying to reform a culture through political means is vanity and a useless pursuit, and yet this was the consequential fruit of my work at CBN and The 700 Club. It may have been great television, but the internal price I paid, as you will later discover, almost brought about my total destruction as a man, a father, a believer in something bigger than myself, and as a professional observer.

Ronald Reagan was the President when I joined CBN, and there was a sense of revival in the air, for we had just come out of the decade of Vietnam, Watergate, and the Iranian hostage crisis. We had been floundering as a nation for more than a dozen years, since the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King. By the early 1980s, people were suddenly hopeful that prosperity of all kinds would soon return to America, and I got deeply caught up in it. We were, after all, counterculture, and that fired my imagination and gave me strength, for we were in a position to actually make a difference in the lives of many.

Little did I—or anyone back then—realize how far off the rails we would run giving chase to a vision of God’s will for Christians, the church, and the US as a whole. This is a profoundly difficult statement to make for me, who was so intimately involved in the process, but it is a truth nonetheless that must be examined without the blinders that accompany the fundamentalist regimen of certain Evangelical Christians. The stakes are simply too high for us and for our progeny to ignore the facts of what we did and mostly how we did it.

Fast-forward thirty years, and America is now a bitterly divided nation. It is as though a new civil war has emerged led by polar opposites on the political spectrum. All equilibrium seems lost, and we are awash in the chaos of division at every level. Add to this the remarkable technological advancements of the last fifteen years that have undercut the power of top-down communications systems in favor of lateral, peer-to-peer communications, and the depth of this division is bitterly played out in what we call social media every day.

There is no sense of community anymore—no one nation, under God, indivisible—and we are a people bickering and at each other’s throats. The press no longer functions with the public trust, for journalists have been exposed as biased, manipulative, and in it for themselves. Spiro Agnew’s famous speech about the power of television news—while thoroughly dismissed by the press at the time—turns out to have been prescient:

…the president of the United States has a right to communicate directly with the people who elected him, and the people of this country have the right to make up their own minds and form their own opinions about a presidential address, without having the president’s words and thoughts characterized through the prejudice of hostile critics before they can even be digested.¹

At CBN in the early 1980s, we hammered home the idea of a liberal bias in the press, which has turned out to be a lasting cultural contribution, as the success of Fox News demonstrates. The press has yet to fully accept this idea, however, even though the artificial hegemony of objectivity has today been replaced by the concept of transparency.

The American ideal of oneness through assimilated diversity—the dream of which Martin Luther King once spoke—has been crushed under the weight of well-intentioned groups who prefer the country as a tapestry of many different types of people rather than as a melting pot with unified ideals.

In the midst of this today, a master manipulator, showman, and salesman has seized power in Washington by exploiting fear, repeating themes that resonate with certain Americans, and promising simple solutions to complex problems facing the country. Intellectuals, media, and political observers are still puzzled by how Donald Trump was elected President and are positing theory upon theory as to why his followers heeded his call.

The reality, however, is that they were never heeding his call; he heeded and responded to their call. Donald Trump is skilled at deciphering the voice of those who feel disenfranchised by the culture and where it’s heading. As a salesman, Mr. Trump sensed an entry point into the minds of his sales targets, initiating his innate ability, which then enabled him to articulate a product that sold. All he had to do was to paint a black and white, dystopian view of America and offer himself as the solution. This is not original thinking, for all he was doing was repeating the things discussed in the back rooms of white evangelicals, and we at CBN were the ones who planted many of those thoughts. These people are many of the same ones we organized and nurtured thirty years ago with The 700 Club, and I feel responsible, at least in part. As executive producer of the program during the season up to and including Pat Robertson’s run for president in 1988, I helmed every part of what we put on TV, the result of which was a very deliberate and profound turning of the Republican Party to the right.

We knew exactly what we were doing, too. Armed with research at every step, we presented a form of Christianity that included getting involved in politics at every level. God wanted us to wrest control away from those who were destroying the Christian foundation of the country, and Virginia Beach was the most appropriate location from which to do it. It was here, after all, where English settlers first landed in the new world and planted a cross on the beach, dedicating the land to our Lord and savior, Jesus Christ. There is a monument to this 1607 event at the northern end of Virginia Beach, where the settlers originally set foot on the continent. That gave us all the authority we felt we needed to finish the work that had begun there almost four centuries earlier.

Everything we presented was done with a sense of urgency due to what we felt was the pending return of Jesus Christ as prophesied in the Book of Revelation. Israel was the key to our understanding, for certain Christian teachings state that Jesus won’t return until God has given Jerusalem back to Israel, which had begun in 1948 when Zionists—through an executive order from the United Nations following World War II and the subsequent war against Arabs who disagreed—began to seize land, water, and structures from Arabs who had lived in the Holy Land for millennia. Now that Jerusalem was back on a map labeled Israel, we taught that the return of Jesus was imminent, and that meant we had to prepare. We claimed the role of John the Baptist in preparing the way of the Lord, which gave us license to say and do whatever we felt was necessary in establishing God’s kingdom on earth.

This belief was furthered by the words of many others and in books like 1970’s The Late Great Planet Earth and later in the Left Behind series of novels, which reference the re-establishment of Israel. We taught a literal interpretation of Jesus’ proclamation that, in the end, He will remember those who support Israel and cast aside those who do not. It was simply the right thing to do in the wake of such strong, albeit convenient, evidence that a movement of God was underway in the United States.

We certainly weren’t alone in this task. Billy Graham had been telling the story of salvation for decades and was the friend of presidents from Harry Truman to Barack Obama. Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority grassroots political movement was certainly also vocal. However, CBN had at least two unique aspects to the ministry that would put us at the forefront of change. One was Pat Robertson, his pedigree, his knowledge, and his insightful and brilliant political mind. Two, we fronted for Charismatic Christianity, which was a key part of the revival of the late 1970s and early 1980s. This gave us advantages over other Christian leaders and ministries and made our work singular in shifting Republican Party emphasis to the right. And a key component of both was a special classification in the world for the state of Israel.

And if the Jews of Israel were our friends, then the Muslims of the Arab world had to be the enemy, for there were no shades of grey in the worldview we presented. At home, we struck a chord with Christians over issues deemed an attack on the basic structure of the traditional family. In doing so, we were convinced that God was on our side, for nothing in our manual could justify the murder of innocent unborn babies, the normalization of homosexuality, the de-sanctification of marriage between a man and a woman, public schools teaching contrary to the faith including the removal of the Ten Commandments and restrictions on prayer, the theft of our resources by the government, and the relentless pursuit by liberals to take what was ours and give it to others. When everything was taken into consideration, this was a powerful message to people in the trenches of America, the same people Donald Trump exploited in winning the election for president.

Before there was Fox News, there was The 700 Club, where everything was calculated to form a doable action plan for people who were predisposed to anger over the direction in which the country was headed. Again, we were heroes swooping in to rescue America from the influences of the devil. Or so we thought. And we were quite serious.

It would be foolish and naïve, however, to portray this fully as a religious movement, for to do so would dismiss very similar strategies and tactics we saw during the candidacy of Donald Trump. We were the ones, after all, who led the movement of politics to the right, the result of which we have with us today. Christian or otherwise, the Republican Party is now so far to