Pat Robertson, who died on Thursday at age 93, was one of the pivotal reasons the Christian right became central to the GOP coalition. Because of this, the political world we live in today is in no small part his creation.
Robertson, who mounted a failed run for the GOP presidential nomination in 1988, was founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network. His televangelism mobilized untold numbers of conservative Christians to become more active in politics, initiating a transformation that is still unfolding all around us.
To understand Robertson’s impact, I reached out to historian Rick Perlstein, author of several books that chronicle the history of the American right and its seamy cultural undercurrents over the last half century. An edited and condensed version of our exchange follows:
In “Reaganland,” you chronicle the emergence of the religious right and its fusion with the modern GOP. Crucial to this is Robertson’s role in transforming the Christian right into the most powerful group in the GOP coalition, shaped around abortion and homosexuality. Was that a key moment where the right embraced a new politics of enemy-creation?
In “Reaganland,” I talk about how the people who basically become partners in the Christian right — then known as the “New Right” — came up with a model in which they “organized discontent.” They would find pockets of anger and turn them into voting issues.
The backlash to gay rights became a way to mobilize a set of voters who weren’t particularly mobilized before. Robertson was one of the partners in this. He was kind of the transmission belt with his TV network.
Robertson was also central to Newt Gingrich’s rise and the GOP House takeover in 1994. That’s when the GOP fully embraced national scorched-earth political warfare. What’s the relationship between this type of Christian politics and that transformation?
Robertson’s contribution to the scorched-earth style of Gingrich is signaled by his absolutely bonkers turn toward conspiratorial thinking. In 1991, he published “The New World Order,” an argument that liberal elites make up a “tightly knit cabal whose goal is nothing less than a new order for the human race under the domination of Lucifer and his followers.”
Once you go down that road, you’re not exactly committed to consensus and compromise.
Robertson relentlessly demonized gay people. Between that and him making abortion central to GOP politics, his influence on the party is felt today in the end of abortion rights, in extreme anti-choice laws on the state level and in the right’s attacks on LGBTQ people.
Yes, yes, yes. Every time a riot breaks out at a school board meeting because the board wants to recognize that gay people exist, that’s Pat Robertson’s shadow. Every time a crusade against teaching the history of race in America leads to a school limiting access to Amanda Gorman’s inaugural poem, that’s Pat Robertson’s shadow.
If you want to talk about the overturning of Roe v. Wade and women who are dying because of it, look at his response to 9/11, when he and Jerry Falwell go on camera and say that God has given us what we deserve. The villains they cite are the ACLU, the “paganists,” the “gays and lesbians” and the “abortionists.”
There’s a conviction among many evangelicals today that Donald Trump was — and is — their savior leader and that the insurrection was a kind of last stand to save our Christian nation from secular ruin. Can you trace Robertson’s influence straight to the insurrectionist wing of today’s GOP? Many of those Republicans are also self-described Christian nationalists. Is that partly Robertson’s doing?
Yes, absolutely. It’s their mission to redeem the world by redeeming America — and that means defeating any influence or trace of liberalism.
You can make the argument most directly by pointing to Robertson as the vector who brought the kind of ideas that used to be limited to people communicating by shortwave radio straight into the mainstream of the Republican base.
Once you need to rescue the Christian nation from secular ruin, it doesn’t matter if the secularists legitimately won an election or not. That’s Robertson, right?
The idea that God’s law trumps man’s law absolutely saturates his world. Along with Falwell, he’s most responsible for turning Christianity into Christian nationalism and Christian nationalism into insurrectionism.
Robertson, who mounted a failed run for the GOP presidential nomination in 1988, was founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network. His televangelism mobilized untold numbers of conservative Christians to become more active in politics, initiating a transformation that is still unfolding all around us.
To understand Robertson’s impact, I reached out to historian Rick Perlstein, author of several books that chronicle the history of the American right and its seamy cultural undercurrents over the last half century. An edited and condensed version of our exchange follows:
In “Reaganland,” you chronicle the emergence of the religious right and its fusion with the modern GOP. Crucial to this is Robertson’s role in transforming the Christian right into the most powerful group in the GOP coalition, shaped around abortion and homosexuality. Was that a key moment where the right embraced a new politics of enemy-creation?
In “Reaganland,” I talk about how the people who basically become partners in the Christian right — then known as the “New Right” — came up with a model in which they “organized discontent.” They would find pockets of anger and turn them into voting issues.
The backlash to gay rights became a way to mobilize a set of voters who weren’t particularly mobilized before. Robertson was one of the partners in this. He was kind of the transmission belt with his TV network.
Robertson was also central to Newt Gingrich’s rise and the GOP House takeover in 1994. That’s when the GOP fully embraced national scorched-earth political warfare. What’s the relationship between this type of Christian politics and that transformation?
Robertson’s contribution to the scorched-earth style of Gingrich is signaled by his absolutely bonkers turn toward conspiratorial thinking. In 1991, he published “The New World Order,” an argument that liberal elites make up a “tightly knit cabal whose goal is nothing less than a new order for the human race under the domination of Lucifer and his followers.”
Once you go down that road, you’re not exactly committed to consensus and compromise.
Robertson relentlessly demonized gay people. Between that and him making abortion central to GOP politics, his influence on the party is felt today in the end of abortion rights, in extreme anti-choice laws on the state level and in the right’s attacks on LGBTQ people.
Yes, yes, yes. Every time a riot breaks out at a school board meeting because the board wants to recognize that gay people exist, that’s Pat Robertson’s shadow. Every time a crusade against teaching the history of race in America leads to a school limiting access to Amanda Gorman’s inaugural poem, that’s Pat Robertson’s shadow.
If you want to talk about the overturning of Roe v. Wade and women who are dying because of it, look at his response to 9/11, when he and Jerry Falwell go on camera and say that God has given us what we deserve. The villains they cite are the ACLU, the “paganists,” the “gays and lesbians” and the “abortionists.”
There’s a conviction among many evangelicals today that Donald Trump was — and is — their savior leader and that the insurrection was a kind of last stand to save our Christian nation from secular ruin. Can you trace Robertson’s influence straight to the insurrectionist wing of today’s GOP? Many of those Republicans are also self-described Christian nationalists. Is that partly Robertson’s doing?
Yes, absolutely. It’s their mission to redeem the world by redeeming America — and that means defeating any influence or trace of liberalism.
You can make the argument most directly by pointing to Robertson as the vector who brought the kind of ideas that used to be limited to people communicating by shortwave radio straight into the mainstream of the Republican base.
Once you need to rescue the Christian nation from secular ruin, it doesn’t matter if the secularists legitimately won an election or not. That’s Robertson, right?
The idea that God’s law trumps man’s law absolutely saturates his world. Along with Falwell, he’s most responsible for turning Christianity into Christian nationalism and Christian nationalism into insurrectionism.
