The Legacy of Pat Robertson
The late 700 Club host passed away, but his unfortunate influence lives on.
The Legacy of Pat Robertson
When someone unsavory dies, it’s easy to heap scorn on their memory.
Quite often, it’s better to let their unsavory legacy speak for itself and refrain from commenting on their life. (I lost friendships after writing about Rush Limbaugh, with one former friend saying that “God didn’t need to judge him because I’d already done it.”)
In this case, a Christian pastor writing negative things about another pastor is ugly business.
Sharing unpleasantries about someone who had a legitimate calling on their life to preach the Gospel is not easy.
But Pat Robertson left a lot of damage in his wake.
He was responsible for much of our fractured separation of church and state.
He spewed so much hate that I thought better about not writing about him.
In his later years, you could write off a lot of his vile pronouncements as senile rantings.
But someone should have exercised good sense and cut off his 700 Club microphone.
Robertson’s intentional blurring of church and state began when he found the Christian Coalition after his 1988 presidential campaign. The Coalition was used to create a mailing list of conservative Christians to mobilize as a voting bloc.
The Coalition and Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority didn’t blur the line between politics and religion in America.
They annihilated it.
The Coalition became a tax-exempt charitable organization whose sole purpose was to elect conservative Republican politicians to support policies that were seen as “Christian,” and oppose policies that were seen as “unchristian.”
A literal and figurative unholy alliance was formed between a large segment of the American Church and the Republican Party.
The repercussions of this damage exist to this day.
It has negatively impacted the constitutional separation of church and state.
It has caused the American Christian to be mischaracterized and stereotyped.
It has created an American Church culture that has bastardized the Gospel and created a culture of judgment without mercy, condemnation without compassion, and an ungodly, unseemly confluence of Christianity, extreme right-wing politics and White Supremacy.
If all of this wasn’t enough, Robertson used his 700 Club as a bully pulpit to make hateful comments.
These comments include:
· Saying Hinduism was “demonic.”
· Stated Islam was “satanic.”
· · Joining Jerry Falwell in blaming the September 11 attacks on "the ACLU, pagans, abortionists, feminists, gays, and the lesbians. "
· Declaring that Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment against America for allowing abortions
· Blaming Haiti’s 2010 earthquake on the country making a “pact with the devil” to free itself from French colonization and enslavement
There was no comment too ridiculous for Robertson to make.
Pat Robertson is gone.
But the damage he caused to the American Church and political system lives on.