If you look at the headline and the art for this post, it’s obvious that this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in) focused on media coverage of the Rev. Pat Robertson’s retirement as host of the “700 Club.”
Try to forget that. Work with me here, for a moment.
What if I told you that the man at the heart of this story grew up in Washington, D.C., as the son of a U.S. Senator. Then he did his undergraduate work at a quality school known for its academic rigor, graduating magna cum laude while studying history at Washington and Lee University.
Later, he earned a Yale Law School degree. After that — think low New York bar exam scores and a big religious conversion — he earned an MDiv degree from New York Theological Seminary.
Somewhere in that mix, he served in the U.S. Marines. Later, he founded a multi-million-dollar broadcasting empire and started a graduate-school university and a law school.
Does it sound like someone with a pretty good shot at having an impact on American life and culture?
Well, that’s Pat Robertson — sort of. It's clear that, for most journalists, this resume doesn’t have much to do with the man’s life and work. This is, after all, the religious broadcaster (as opposed to televangelist) who, for decades, served up “spew your coffee” soundbites that launched waves of embarrassing headlines and late-night TV jokes. He was important because this was the kind of wild man who helped lead the Religious Right further into the heart of Republican Party politics.
The minute anything crazy or scary happened in the world — from politics and pop culture to hurricanes and earthquakes — the press turned to Robertson for what was billed as semi-official “evangelical” reactions, even as his words frequently left mainstream evangelical leaders sad, puzzled or furious.
Robertson was one of the official alpha-male media voices of evangelicalism, even after he women and men had emerged who had more clout and connections in the movement.
I was never a Robertson fan. However, it was always clear to me — thinking in terms of church history — that he wasn’t really an “evangelical,” strictly defined, even though he was an ordained Southern Baptist minister. The key is that he was a leader in the rising tide of charismatic and Pentecostal Christianity in America and the world at large (see this Pew Research Center resource page).
Does that matter? Well, Pentecostal Christianity very diverse, in terms of race and class, and is the fastest growing for of religious faith on the planet.
Robertson pulled so many Pentecostal beliefs into tension with mainstream American life, including a kind of TV-friendly power prophecy emphasis that stunned many journalists (and, behind the scenes, GOP elites). Robertson wasn’t a typical evangelical. In terms of history, he was a breakthrough charismatic-Pentecostal figure in mainstream American life.
You can get a tiny glimpse of this in the Washington Post piece about his retirement:
An ordained Southern Baptist minister, Robertson has for decades been an influential leader among evangelical Christians, in particular those who are charismatic or Pentecostal, which means their worship is more experiential and might include healing services and speaking in tongues.
He has done so through media, legal and political movements. Those include CBN, which was the first 24/7, U.S. Christian television station and now broadcasts news, children’s programming and other features. The network says it reaches about 800,000 viewers in 174 countries. Robertson began his show as a telethon, aiming for 700 people to each contribute $10 per month to the station. An early transcript quotes Robertson saying that people who called in were being healed.
The missing word in this story, and many others, is “prophecy.” As Julia Duin has noted, over and over, it was impossible to understand the role that religion played in the Donald Trump White House in terms of ordinary “evangelical” culture and networks. The key players were all charismatic-Pentecostal leaders — megachurch and social-media stars walking in the footsteps of the Lion In Winter that was Pat Robertson.
Some of them made headlines, many did not. Journalists often failed to spot this changing of the guard.
But if you flashed back a decade or two, you could see it coming. Consider, for example, an essay I wrote for Poynter.org entitled, “Excommunicating Pat Robertson.” Here is how that piece opened:
Let’s pretend it is Oct. 1, 2005.
After a long, long September of storms, Hurricane Wilma misses the Keys and veers into the Gulf of Mexico. It heads straight for Louisiana.
After a long, long day in the newsroom, you sit on the couch flipping from one cable news channel to another. Then you see a familiar face in an MSNBC tease and hear, “We’ll be back, live, with the Rev. Pat Robertson, who says that this new hurricane is more evidence that God is angry at New Orleans because …”
Pause for a minute. When you hear these words do you experience (a) an acidic surge of joy because you are 99.9 percent sure that you know what Robertson is going to say, or (b) a sense of sorrow for precisely the same reason?
If you answered (a), then I would bet the moon and the stars that you are someone who doesn’t think highly of Christian conservatives and their beliefs. If you answered (b), you are probably one of those Christians.
The bottom line: Many journalists were happily using Robertson as a straw man and, perhaps, inflated his importance at that moment in time — the George W. Bush era. Whenever Robertson’s face appeared on TV screens, he reinforced their stereotypes of the beliefs of millions of conservative Christians.
Was Robertson already over the hill, for the most part? Check out one more chunk of that Poynter essay:
During the media storm following the 2000 election, the Ethics & Public Policy Center held a forum about the role religious faith played in that election (click here to see a transcript). Michael Barone of Fox News, during a conversation about the faith-based stories that journalists missed during the campaign, made the most interesting point.
One of the overlooked stories, he said, was the behind-the-scenes effort by Bush campaign insiders to keep the old lions of the Religious Right out of the news. This could not have been easy, seeing as how Jerry Falwell, Robertson and others crave camera time. But someone cut them out, or convinced them to stand down. In their place, new faces emerged — such as Rick Warren. …
Someone bluntly said: “I wonder who managed to get Pat Robertson to shut up?” Right, I replied. That task would have required a miracle worker.
So there’s a final point to consider. In terms of actual clout in “evangelical” culture, who was more important in 2000-2005, or thereabouts — Rick Warren or Pat Robertson?
What about today?
For those interested in this topic, I recommend this Religion News Service essay: “Pat Robertson turned Christian TV into political power — and blew it up with wacky prophecy.” It’s a guest piece that was written (wise choice here) by the veteran religion-beat pro Mark I. Pinsky.
Also, believe it or not, my very first “On Religion” column — dated April 11, 1988 — focused on a Denver campaign stop during Robertson’s run for the White House. Here’s a passage noting the tensions between Robertson’s core beliefs and the realities of GOP politics:
… This 1988 scene held pieces of the puzzle that is Robertson's future.
The faithful raised their hands high in praise to God and sang familiar hymns with a man that they knew well, a fellow "charismatic" Christian who believed in miracles, prophecy and "speaking in tongues." A nearby table held tapes on a subject close to Robertson's heart – healing.
It was a scene from his past. And Robertson's aides were trying to keep it out of his public image in the present and future. So, they ripped the "press only" sign off the door 90 minutes before he arrived. If Robertson was going to show his colors, it would be in a safe place in front of supporters.
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