I must admit that I have not had the time to dig into the 666 million words or so (that’s an estimate) of news and commentary dedicated to the death of the Rev. Pat Robertson. It’s hard to do much reading when at the wheel of a car for about 1,400 miles (and that was the return trip).
But I do have some thoughts on the passing of the charismatic quote machine that journalists loved, loved, loved to hate (see my 2005 commentary for the Poynter Institute). If Robertson didn’t exist, blue-zip-code pundits would have created him ex nihilo.
Truth be told, I never met the man — even though, technically speaking, I briefly worked for him during a failed 2000 attempt to build a D.C. beltway-based master’s degree journalism program for Regent University.
How to describe Pat Robertson?
First and foremost, he was a media maven and entrepreneur, creating the Christian Broadcasting Network in 1960. Years later, he sold the Family Channel for something like $2 billion. Love it or hate it, the niche-news and commentary DNA of The 700 Club can be found all over the place on cable television.
For journalists, he was mainly a political activist — playing a major role in the creation of the Christian Coalition. In 1988 he made a surprisingly relevant attempt to win the White House, seeking the Republican nomination. He was the son of a U.S. senator and, before jumping into media work, graduated from Yale Law School and New York Theological Seminary.
The media entrepreneur poured millions of dollars into academica, with the creation of Regent University — which only offered graduate-school degrees in subjects that Robertson considered culturally significant (such as law and mass communications).
Robertson was a bestselling author, with the help of numerous ghost writers (including a major gay-rights pioneer).
I would argue that his most significant achievement was helping merge the charismatic movement into mainstream evangelical Protestantism, adding doctrinal elements of Pentecostalism into the rapidly growing world of post-denominational Christianity in America and around the world.
But here is the big journalism question: Why do so many mainstream journalists call Robertson an “evangelist,” even though crusades and public preaching of that style were never part of his life and work? Yes, Robertson would have argued that he was, in all of his work, spreading the Gospel, but he was never a pastor, preacher or evangelist. The was ordained, sort of, more than once. That’s a long story.
Nevertheless, a quick Google search for “Pat Robertson” and “evangelist” yielded about 867,000 hits. The same search in Google NEWS found more than 53,000 references. Substitute the mushy term “televangelist” and Google News offered nearly 14,000 links.
How many news articles and commentaries used the most accurate term — “religious broadcaster” — when describing Robertson? A search this morning yielded 11.600 hits.
What’s going on? Yes, part of the problem is media confusion about the meaning of the term “evangelical,” a situation that — to be honest — Robertson helped create.
But there’s more to this situation than that. Perhaps the best reflection on this puzzle was offered by sociologist Christian Smith, author of “Religion: What It Is, How It Works, and Why It Matters” and numerous other books. Yes, I am referring to this blunt 2004 essay for Books & Culture: “Religiously Ignorant Journalists — In search of Episcopals and evangelists.”
This long passage contains the crucial material and, showing great restraint, Smith never mentioned Robertson.
As a scholar of American religion promoted to journalists by my university's PR department as an alleged expert, I constantly receive inquiries from reporters wanting background, quotes, and contacts for religion stories they are writing. Usually they have one or two days to complete the story. As often as not, the journalist mispronounces the name of the religious group he or she is covering.
"Evangelicals" is one of their favorites to botch. Often in our discussions, journalists refer to ordinary evangelical believers as "evangelists" — as if the roughly 70 million conservative Protestants in America were all traveling preachers like Billy Graham and Luis Palau — or, more to the point, televangelists like Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggert. Hey, aren't all evangelicals really pretty much like these last two, or rather as many reporters tend to see them — scandal-prone limelight seekers with ambitions to impose a repressive Christian moral order on all America?
Other journalists simply cannot pronounce "evangelicals" at all. They get confused and flustered, and after a few uncomfortable tries at "evangelics" and "evangelicalists" they give up and resort to referring to evangelicals simply as "them." These are the knowledge-class professionals who are supposedly informing millions of readers about religion in America.
But my experience suggests that mispronunciation problems are only the tip of the iceberg.
To its credit, the editorial team at The New York Times managed to avoid the term “evangelist” in its obituary for Robertson. Instead (#surprise), the Gray Lady stressed politics in the wordy, grand double-decker headline:
How Pat Robertson Created the Religious Right’s Model for Political Power
The celebrity minister, who died Thursday, built a media empire and openly sought to leverage his popularity among evangelicals to influence government and the culture.
The term “televangelist” did show up in this block of solid background material, including a reference to Robertson’s crucial role in the charismatic renewal movement.
In the 1970s, his television network saw itself as part of a “new charismatic renewal movement,” which had yet to go mainstream in America. The network produced myriad shows and programs to shape how evangelical communities across the country should respond to the world around them.
“They see what’s going on in the culture from a Christian worldview, and that helps people understand how they get involved, not only maybe on national politics, but particularly on local,” said Troy Miller, chief executive officer of National Religious Broadcasters.
Mr. Trump rose to power with early backing from prominent charismatic televangelists, many of whom built businesses that emerged from the strength of Robertson’s Christian television legacy, signaling a new moment of political maturity for that brand of Christianity in American public life.
The key? Cable television.
Now, the world of cable television is splintering into myriad forms of online, streaming, niche-niche-niche semi-broadcasting. In addition to the news business, this trend is shaking the foundations of denominational Protestantism.
That’s the story. That’s what journalists need to understand about Pat Robertson.
FIRST IMAGE: Screen grab from The 700 Club, featured with a Liberty Champion article with this title: “Robertson Shocks Viewers.”