The Holy Terror

Suppose Pat Robertson is right. About everything: Bill Clinton is a sex-crazed, lying, drug-dealing mass murderer. Darwin was wrong. Secular public schools and palm readers are satanic. Disney World and all of greater Orlando are doomed for allowing "gay days." Homosexual behavior isn't just a sin: It's "the last step in the decline of Gentile civilization." The end days are here. He could be right. The Starr investigation has painted our nation's capital as Sodom and Gomorrah. In these dark days of terrorist bombings, nuclear proliferation, ethnic slaughter and Oval Office blow jobs, when the presidential seal has become a splotch of dry semen on a dress from the Gap, that dim light on the western horizon may just herald the approach of divine wrath and earthly doom. Ignore the signs at your peril. Pat has been warning us for years, hasn't he? And there have always been signs, for those willing to see, that Robertson and God are, well, tight. Without a doubt, the man has prospered. He took over a broken-down, debt-ridden TV studio in Portsmouth, Virginia 39 years ago and built it into an international broadcasting network. Robertson's venture into politics led to the creation in 1989 of the Christian Coalition, which has become the most formidable voice of the religious right. For a decade he has told us that America is going to hell in a hurry, and now, with X-rated impeachment hearings in the news, his day is at hand. He clearly has something going for him. Robertson knows exactly what that something is. Suppose, as he does, that God, the All-Knowing and Never-Ending Supreme Arbiter, Creator, Ruler, Fashioner and Artificer of the Universe, has been steering the Christian Broadcasting Network and has personally anointed avuncular Marion Gordon "Pat" Robertson to spread God's word. Then we're cooked. You and I. Assuming, that is, that my writing for and your reading this hedonistic magazine means we're not members of The 700 Club or born-again Christians in that heightened, touched-by-the-spirit sense Pat preaches. I myself am not, and even here in my fallen state I consider it my duty to warn those of you who are to promptly stop reading this. Cooked! Consider things from Pat's perspective: The world is in its last days. Washington, D.C. reels with tales of lust. Great natural upheavals regularly rock the planet, such as volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes and the storms of EI Nino. Social welfare indexes (the ones Robertson reads, anyway) are off the charts: violent crime, sexual promiscuity, abortion, divorce, spousal abuse, child abuse, drug use, religious persecution. "We are in a period of crisis," Robertson says, often. He is charged with sounding the warning and herding as many faithful as possible to the safe shores of charismatic Christianity. Speaking in tongues, healing by the laying-on of hands, having direct conversations with God and believing in the commonplace occurrence of miracles are among the tenets and practices that separate charismatic or Pentecostal Christians from other Fundamentalists, though all believe that every word in the Bible is literally true. Mainstream Catholics and Protestant denominations long ago stopped insisting that the world was created in seven days and that all living things on earth (save Noah and those on his ark) were destroyed by flood some 4000 years ago, bowing to overwhelming evidence to the contrary. These are the best-known archaic beliefs still embraced by Fundamentalists.

Robertson's God is more concerned with justice than with mercy. This God's anger is a terrible thing, and his vengeance is at hand. It will start with war in the Middle East, which will suddenly halve the amount of crude oil available on world markets.

"Power goes out in the big cities," Robertson explained to his CBN staff on New Year's Day 1980. "You don't get to drive your automobiles. Factories are closed down and people are out of work. There is an awful lot of dislocation. They're going to be starving. There are going to be breadlines. There are going to be riots. People are going to go crazy." Things will rapidly grow worse and worse, weirder and weirder, until finally, as Robertson paraphrases the prophet Zephaniah: "I will utterly consume all things from off the land. I will consume man and beast. And I will cut off man from the earth. For the day of the Lord is at hand. And I will bring distress upon men that they shall walk like blind men, because they have sinned against the Lord, and their blood shall be poured out as dust."

You get the picture. We're the blind men. But we're in good company. According to the creed embraced by Robertson, not only will atheists and agnostics be with us but also unreborn Catholics, Confucians, Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Jehovah's Witnesses, Rastafarians, Mormons, etc. If Robertson is right about all this, and God does in fact speak with him regularly, we owe the man tremendous gratitude. Throughout his adult life, he has worked hard to spare us from hellfire. He's still at it on The 700 Club, his popular daily TV show. He's charming, persuasive, dressed in an oversize conservative-cut suit with a knot on his tie half the size of his face. He's a little goofy in an endearing way, with big ears and an elfin smile. He invites us nicely, softly, to pray with him, and when he bows his head and closes his eyes, his broad, fleshy forehead closes down over them like a fist. This is serious business. But he's no pulpit-banger. Robertson, on the surface, is a softie. He's nothing if not accessible. He has a way of chuckling warmly while speaking, as if to say, "We're all sensible people and what I'm saying is of course (continued on page 154)Pat Robertson(continued from page 84) obvious." The only hint that there may be something stranger than a gentle, prayerful gesture here is his comment ending the prayer, forehead still fisted, as he invokes his special direct link to the almighty to effect whatever conversion, cure or balm he has requested. "May the power of the Holy Spirit touch them now in Jesus' name." It's the now that's a little jarring. Robertson wants you to know that his prayer is not getting filed away in the divine in-box to be answered in the order in which it was received. Then the elfin grin is back in place. The whole world may be going to hell, but Robertson isn't. And you aren't either, my friends, provided you surrender to the Spirit now and join the cause by dialing this 800 number, and for just 65 cents a day, $20 a month. . . .

Charismatic TV preacher, international businessman, presidential candidate in 1988, founder of Regent University, would-be Third World evangelist and entrepreneur, self-styled political boss, Robertson is on a mission from God. He wants a godly nation, which sounds to his enemies like a fundamentalist Christian state, one that might apply the Word to all facets of American life (much as the Afghan Taliban and Iranian mullahs are applying their Word). Robertson denies working toward a theocracy. He isn't likely to start flogging women for showing their faces, or lopping off the hands of thieves, and he most certainly wouldn't ban television (as the Taliban did). He wants a country where abortion is outlawed, where the Bible is back in schools, where "children are cared for by two married, heterosexual parents." He wants a popular culture that is strictly PG, that, he says, "glorifies not what is seamy and sordid and violent but what is good, beautiful and noble." He wants to combat the "white witchcraft, black magic and satanic worship" he sees behind astrology, UFOs, Zen and New Age religions, and he wants to encourage a strictly patriarchal view of marriage: "Christ is the head of the household, and the husband is the head of the wife." He wants to save the world, but first and mostly he wants to save America.

Precinct by precinct, district by district, his Christian Coalition has assembled a national political machine. He wants school boards, town councils, city halls, state legislatures, Congress and the White House, and with those he can start reshaping the godless liberal judiciary as well. And he has a plan.

"There are 175,000 precincts in the country, and we wanted ten trained workers in each one of them," Robertson told members of the Christian Coalition in an off-the-record speech at its annual Road to Victory conference in September 1997. "That's about enough to pretty much take the nation. But we're talking about a very simple thing. When you get it down to the school board races and the city council races and the legislative races, it is amazing. A few thousand votes make the difference. Sometimes the total vote in a state legislative race won't be more than 4000 or 5000. So if you have a couple thousand people, you can do wonderful things. This was the power of every machine that has ever been in politics--you know, the Tammany Halls and Frank Hague and the Chicago machine and the Byrd machine in Virginia and all the rest of them."

Such talk panics Robertson's enemies, who see him poised to merge church and state. But it also delights them because it shows the raw practical ambitions of his religious organization, which must limit its participation in partisan politics if it wants to stay tax-exempt. The Federal Election Commission has sued the Coalition for violating election laws, and the Internal Revenue Service is still reviewing the group's request for tax-exempt status. Last spring, the IRS dropped a fine on CBN and revoked its tax-exempt status for 1986 and 1987 for contributing to Robertson's presidential run. After gleefully publicizing a bootlegged tape of Robertson's remarks (in which he also told any reporters present to "please, shoot yourselves, leave, do something"), the Americans United for Separation of Church and State portrayed the speech as a smoking gun, proving that Robertson may be, as they have labeled him, "the most dangerous man in America."

"He's a man far more interested in power and politics than in Providence," says Barry Lynn, Americans United' executive director. "His goal is the political takeover of this country, and that ambition dwarfs his moral pursuits."

Occasionally goofy? Yes. An effective right wing political leader? Yes. But Robertson is no corrupt political boss seeking only power. By all indications, Robertson is sincere. It would have been a lot easier in 1988, when he ran for the Republican presidential nomination, for him to sell himself as a candidate by explaining his two-way chats with God and his propensity for speaking in tongues as excesses rooted in the early fervency of his conversion. But Robertson didn't. He stood up for the most bizarre features of his beliefs, even when his advisors knew he was talking himself out of the mainstream. There is no reason to disbelieve that his goal all along has been exactly what he says it is.

And there is little chance Robertson will pull off a political takeover of this country. For one thing, Pat Robertsons have been with us since the Puritans were denouncing witches. A century ago it was the wildly popular Dwight Moody, who told his followers, "I look on this world as a wrecked vessel. God has given me a lifeboat and said, 'Moody, save all you can.'" Then there were William Jennings Bryan, Billy Sunday, Aimee Semple McPherson, Gerald Winrod, Charles Coughlin and Gerald L.K. Smith, whom H.L. Mencken called "the damnedest orator ever heard on this or any other earth." The wall between church and state still stands.

The political strategy Robertson described at the Coalition's 1997 conference is not exactly top secret stuff. Robertson likely learned it at the knee of his father, Absalom Willis Robertson, who served in the U.S. Senate from 1946 to 1966. Descended from a signer of the Declaration of Independence, the son of a successful Virginia politician father and a devoutly Christian mother, Pat Robertson is much the man he was raised to be. He was groomed for establishment leadership--attending Washington and Lee University and Yale Law School, and serving in the Marines during the Korean War. He graduated from the New York Theological Seminary but was always inclined to go his own way. He wasn't too constrained by traditional family values to have gotten his wife, Dede, pregnant with their first son, Tim, before they were married. Robertson had founded an electronics-component company with several law school buddies, and was chairman of the Staten Island Adlai Stevenson for President campaign, living the life, as he would later put it, "of sophisticated New York swingers," when a voice first spoke to him in his mid-20s.

"God has a purpose for your life," the voice said. Robertson's spiritual journey took him into the Christian ministry and then into charismatic circles, where worshippers shouted out prayers in what sounded like gibberish, but which the faithful believe is a special language of the Holy Spirit. This "gift" came upon Robertson one night after his son was lifted from a bad fever.

"I felt waves of love flow over me as I began to give praise to Jesus," he wrote in his 1972 autobiography. "'Praise your holy name!' I shouted. 'Praise you, Jesus.' It was in this moment that I became aware my speech was garbled. I was speaking in another language. Something deep within me had been given a voice, and the Holy Spirit had supplied the words."

To understand Robertson's sometimes confusing opinions (his strong support of Israel, for instance), it's important to know the basic outline of his beliefs. The God of the Fundamentalists is a wrathful, jealous God, not the benevolent, forgiving ruler embodied by Jesus Christ. The Jews are his chosen people, and the Second Coming will not occur until Zion (Israel) is restored as a Jewish state and a Jewish temple is erected in Jerusalem on the site of the Dome of the Rock (a sacred Muslim shrine). The world will be destroyed soon in a great conflagration called Armageddon. Only the faithful will be spared. Jesus will lead his forces back to earth and defeat the forces of Satan. His faithful will then reign on earth with him for a thousand years.

To become one of these sheltered faithful, one must be reborn in the spirit, accepting Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. Believers see the U.S. as a nation founded on Christian principles but given over to godless secular humanists who banned the Bible from public schools and public life, and who form powerfully entrenched central bureaucracies to enforce such blasphemies as abortion rights, the teaching of evolution and tolerance of homosexuality.

Ever since Pat Robertson's conversion some 40 years ago, he has seen the hand of God in his every move. He has complete faith in everything he says and does, because he believes he is divinely guided. "I know you're not supposed to read the back of the book first, but I did, and we win," he assured his supporters in 1997. "I'm on the side of victory because I serve the victor."

That righteousness has survived some major disappointments. Gerard Thomas Straub, a former CBN producer who worked with Robertson for two and a half years and was dismissed after having an adulterous affair, struck back with the book Salvation for Sale. In it Straub recounts an eerie lecture Robertson gave to his staff on New Year's Day 1980, in which he predicts the imminent conflagration. Robertson explained that in his conversations with God, he asked for a general prediction about what the next year would bring. In all previous years, he said, the Almighty predicted good things. In that year the answer was different: "And he said, 'It will be a year of sorrow and bloodshed that will have no end soon, for the world is being torn apart and my kingdom shall rise from the ruins of it.' We're not going to have good years anymore."

Robertson went on to foretell of major war in the Middle East, followed by seven years of tribulation, Armageddon and Jesus' return. Instead, 1980 brought the election of President Ronald Reagan (a development Robertson would later call "the direct act of God," in a good sense), inaugurating a giddy era of deficit spending and illusory prosperity. The U.S. fought in the Persian Gulf in 1991, but the ground war lasted less than a week. Instead of escalating oil prices, financial collapse, unemployment, riots and starvation, nearly two decades later America has experienced the most aggressive financial growth since World War II. Unemployment and inflation are lower than they have been in decades, the federal deficit has been replaced by a surplus, violent crime rates are down, illegal drug use is falling, divorce rates have slowed, the Soviet Union is no more, gasoline prices in the U.S. hover at just over a dollar a gallon, and life expectancy is up. Robertson either was hearing God wrong or wasn't hearing God at all.

Like all determined prophets of doom, however, Robertson is unfazed by fizzled forecasts. He simply adapts. His views on working reform in this sinful world, and in this reprobate country, have mellowed. It's sometimes hard to see how much Robertson has tempered his views because they remain, from a mainstream perspective, extreme. At the time of that dire homily Straub recorded in 1980, Robertson had yet to enter the political arena. He saw other Fundamentalists and Evangelicals banding together with Jerry Falwell to start a movement for restoring Christian values in American life, and he opted out. Eight years later, Robertson wasn't just politically active, he was running for president. God told him to do that, too. Early returns during the primary season seemed to suggest Providence. Robertson put up a strong fight in Michigan, and scored a major upset by finishing second in Iowa, establishing himself as a serious candidate. Yet as his political stature grew, his charismatic roots began to show. His religious zeal, which had brought him into politics, began to work against him. Many conservative religious voters who shared his basic values balked at his more-bizarre beliefs.

His Midwestern organization was built on an emerging framework of Christian activism, much of it growing out of the anti-abortion movement. But those activists, many of them Catholic, not only didn't share Robertson's charismatic faith, they found it embarrassing. Reporters dug up an incident from The 700 Club, in which the future candidate claimed to have turned away a hurricane from the Virginia shoreline with prayer. (Never mind the folks up in Long Island, where the storm came ashore.)

"I was never that concerned with his extreme beliefs, because I never felt he really would be president of the United States," says Marlene Elwell, a Detroit Catholic who as a political director with Robertson's campaign was a big part of his surprising early success in 1988. "I saw Pat as a vehicle for the movement. He is a brilliant man, and I thought he was a wonderful voice for Christian concerns about the moral fiber of our nation, but I didn't get involved in his campaign to see him elected president. I became an important spoke in that wheel, but that's not why I joined."

Elwell sometimes found it difficult working with the charismatics and Fundamentalists around Robertson during that campaign. "I'm Catholic, and we're much more tolerant of other people's faiths," she says. "Robertson's people would look at me and say, 'You know you're not saved.' I struggled with it. I thought, My gosh, I'm here working as hard as I can for this man, and every day I'm with these people with whom I have to defend my faith. It was quite an experience. I was the token Catholic in the inner circle. Eventually, I found it to be fun. I would give it right back to them, standing up for what I believed. When they would become judgmental, condemning this group or that one, I'd tell them, 'You talk about your love for Jesus, but this isn't the way he did things.'"

Elwell says she found Robertson to be the most open-minded fundamentalist Christian involved in the campaign.

"He really opened up to others," she says. "By the end of the campaign we had many more Catholics and mainstream Protestants involved in key positions. He realized that political success demanded coalition and compromise."

After early successes in small states and those with caucuses, Robertson's campaign sputtered and stalled. Another of God's plans hadn't worked out.

Today the religious right has more clout than it did in 1988, but Robertson's influence appears to have waned. The Christian Coalition's importance diminished in 1997 with the resignation of Ralph Reed, who is credited with bringing a shrewd professionalism to the group's grassroots activism and with broadening and somewhat moderating the group's base.

"He can still probably turn people. He can aim his troops in a given way, but his power and influence have been defused," says William Martin, author of With God on Our Side. "Reed's departure was a sign that the Christian Coalition had peaked. Reed was growing and he felt himself pinched between Robertson above him and the membership below: Robertson was unpredictable and the membership was less adaptable than necessary. The basic problem is that politics is the arena of compromise, and compromise is anathema to staunchly religious people."

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Early success emboldened Robertson. He saw himself as the one to usher in the end of the ages. It may be hard to view a man with the Midas touch as a failure (witness Robertson's near-miraculous $1.9 billion sale of International Family Entertainment to Rupert Murdoch; see sidebar on page 84), but Robertson has never been primarily about moneymaking. His goals are far grander. Measured by his own standards and prophecies, he has tasted defeat.

But he's not out of the game yet. Robertson's influence was felt in last year's midterm elections. His convictions and money were behind an expensive national ad campaign against homosexuality, featuring Green Bay Packers star and throwback social theorist Reggie White. The campaign indirectly supported Republican congressional candidates who oppose legislation that would protect the civil rights of gays and lesbians. Homosexuality is an especially shrewd choice of issue. Most Americans are heterosexual and uncomfortable with the alternative. So the ad campaign was true to Robertson's agenda, but it also played comfortably in middle America.

Visiting Robertson's complex in Virginia (CBN's headquarters, the Founders Inn and Regent University) is more like a trip to a tidy college campus than a visit to a charismatic theme park. The architecture is Georgian, traditional redbrick mostly devoid of overt religious display. The young woman behind the counter at the Inn is no bubbly charismatic Kewpie doll; her nails are painted black and she has rings through parts of her ears where rings have not traditionally gone. She seems appropriately frazzled by a crush of arrivals and departures. The hotel room (apart from an absence of salacious video offerings) is no different from that of a Holiday Inn.

At CBN's main office building, Patty Silverman, the network's public relations director, descends the staircase with a smile.

"We consider Playboy to be pornographic, and pornography a sin," she says sweetly. "It would violate our principles to lend support to a story that would appear there. I talked to Pat about it, and that's how he feels."

"If Playboy is a sinner's magazine, he might want to consider going where the sinners are."

"Believe me, I thought about that," Silverman says. "But we feel it would be inappropriate."

Robertson is not one to go where the sinners are. In writing about his early experiences as a minister in Brooklyn, he didn't disguise the horror he and his wife felt living among the unwashed. As they fled for the safer grounds of Virginia Beach, Robertson wrote, "God had lifted from me the fear that one day he might send me to minister in a slum." He's about the opposite. He's about creating a comfortable home for middleclass Christians everywhere. That's why there's nothing overtly religious about the Founders Inn, and why the good Dr. Pat doesn't drop to his knees and begin pealing off gibberish on The 700 Club.

"Robertson is a wolf in sheep's clothing," says Barry Lynn, of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. "He hides the nature of his agenda as much as possible. When you hear him talking about restricting third trimester abortions, sounding reasonable, he doesn't tell you his final destination is off the cliff somewhere. He doesn't tell you he believes states should have the right to recriminalize birth control. Ralph Reed was good at stopping Pat from going off the deep end, so don't be surprised if you see Robertson showing his true colors more often now."

Perhaps. Robertson slips up now and then, and his enemies keep diligent track. On a 700 Club segment he once appeared to suggest that those who believe in flying saucers and space aliens should be put to death. Robertson explained that the funny-looking creatures described by those believers were, in fact, demons: "Can a demon appear as a slanty-eyed, funny-looking creature? Of course he can, or it can." He quoted Deuteronomy to the effect that those who worship false gods ought to be stoned to death. He has voiced a sometimes alarming fondness for God's tendency to wipe out entire classes of sinners. Comparing the godless secular humanists in power to "termites," reported New York magazine in 1986, Robertson called for a "godly fumigation."

One hopes he was speaking figuratively, but his enemies believe he meant it literally. The American political system, despite its many failings, leaves fanatics on the fringes. So Robertson tones down his rhetoric and urges compromise within the ranks of the religious right. But his fundamental course is set. He wants a presidential candidate enough to the right to please God and, hence, carry the day. What many less doctrinaire members of the religious right believe, however, is that to nominate anyone who fits that description is to play doormat to Vice President Al Gore, whom Robertson derides as Ozone Al.

But Robertson has no such doubts. Day after day, The 700 Club features stories of those who embrace his message, pray with him, accept Jesus and, if you believe the slick corporate segments CBN produces, see all the pain and suffering in their lives instantly fall away: cancer, alcoholism, sexual perversion, bulimia, depression--you name it. "In a matter of seconds, my whole life changed. I stopped with the heroin and cocaine, and I had a desire to get off the methadone," says one blissful convert, whose HIV infection, Robertson tells us, "has remained benign." He offers an alternative vision of modern life, in which the poor, misguided, suffering masses, tormented by demons and their own sinful natures, exist far apart from the happy, blessed few. Why wouldn't a country want some of that, too?

"In Jesus there are no losers," Robertson says. "Jesus Christ says, 'You're special!' God says, 'I love you.' What you've got to do is change and come into his covenant." He chuckles to himself over the obviousness and joy of it. Eyes clenched, smiling, reaching with an open hand, he pleads, "Just pray with me, right now."