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.
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:
Sargent: Pat Robertson’s “vision for the GOP completely triumphed.” That’s from former conservative Matthew Sheffield. Do we live today in the world that Robertson helped create?
Perlstein: Yes. I found a remarkable quote from him in 1979, just as the Christian right was taking shape as a political force that could impact presidential elections. He said, “We have enough votes to run the country. When people say, ‘We have had enough,’ we’re going to take over.”
They haven’t. But it’s not for lack of trying. Robertson’s vision buttresses the entire edifice of right-wing evangelical America, in particular his institution-building work creating alternatives to supposedly demonic secular liberal America.
One of those institutions was the Christian Broadcasting Network, which exploded in the late 1970s. How important was that to the growth of right-wing media at the time, which included talk radio, and what was the role of that in birthing the modern American right?
The striking thing about the Christian Broadcasting Network — which evolved from “The 700 Club” — was that it mimicked secular programming. CBN provided scaffolding for a parallel world that conservatives and fundamentalists could live in.
When you think about a right-winger living within the bubble of Fox News, that was pioneered by the Christian Broadcasting Network. The force behind this was 100-percent Pat Robertson.
The role of these kinds of institutions in birthing the modern right was that it became a self-supporting world of its own, an entire parallel reality.
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.