What we can learn from the disgraceful life of Pat Robertson

The 93-year-old Christian influencer is dead, 27 years shy of how long he expected God to let him live

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Pat Robertson is dead at 93 and the world is a slightly less awful place with him out of the picture. The cause of death, which wasn’t given, probably wasn’t a heart attack because there was never any evidence he had one.

Pat Robertson during his final show in 2021 (screenshot via YouTube)

For decades, Robertson was one of the most influential and best-known conservative Christians in the country, using his platform on The 700 Club and through the Christian Coalition to promote homophobia, anti-Muslim bigotry, sexism, and conspiracy theories. He lied about how much he could leg-press—2,000 pounds!—and how long he would live—120 years old!

He said feminism led women to “leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.” He called for the assassination of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. He said towels carry AIDS, that mass shootings could be blamed on godlessness and liberals, and that he’s being dominated by homosexuals.

After his brother-in-Christ Jerry Falwell blamed 9/11 on pagans, “abortionists,” feminists, gays, lesbians, the ACLU, and People for the American Way, Robertson chimed in with “I totally concur.”

He said so many batshit crazy things that, sometimes, he made news for making sense.

Consider how he was never on board with Young Earth Creationism. He said for years that Creationists’ belief in a young Earth “wasn’t inspired by the Lord,” that “you have to be deaf, dumb, and blind to think that this Earth that we live in only has 6,000 years of existence,” and that trying to rationalize a young Earth “just doesn’t compute.” Sometimes the defense got weird. He once claimed that God didn’t create the Earth in six “literal 24-hour days” but rather six “galactic” days... whatever that means. (He reiterated that bizarre claim in 2020.)

He also said marijuana should be legalized, proving true that old adage about a broken clock.

If we’ve learned anything from Robertson, though, it’s that if you give right-wing Christians a platform for long enough, they’ll very quickly and very often say things that will come back to haunt them—and hurt their own cause. When the Christian Broadcasting Network first came on the air in 1960, the nation was roughly 67% Protestant. That percentage today is 34%. In that same time span, the “Nones” have gone from 2% of the country to 21%, and that’s on the rise.

Robertson didn’t do that alone, but he sure as hell helped. And when his show became available online, to a wider audience than just on CBN, far more people were able to see how devout faith could lead to utterly absurd conclusions.

We should consider ourselves lucky that he lost the Republican presidential primary in 1988, though he’s responsible as much as anyone for linking together the Republican Party with the Christian Right.

Robertson’s legacy may be that he was symbolic of the worst kind of Christian: Someone who attains a massive platform, then uses it to harm people who are already marginalized. He was the sort of Christian that even other Christians wanted no association with because he was a legendary embarrassment. Even today, just about every single obituary you’ll read about him includes a laundry list of the most awful things he ever said—not near the bottom as an afterthought, but near the top, because Robertson was ultimately most famous for making Christianity more cringe-worthy.

Even Christianity Today couldn’t escape that. In that publication’s writeup, the fact that Robertson was “among the most influential evangelicals of the 20th century” appears in paragraph four. Paragraph three notes how he “stirred controversy with his off-the-cuff commentary characterizing disasters like hurricanes, earthquakes, and the 9/11 attacks as God’s judgment.”

(Perhaps the only obituary to ignore Robertson’s past statements was the one posted by his son Gordon on CBN’s website.)

If nothing else, pour one out today for all the folks at Right Wing Watch who kept tabs on so many of his bizarre utterances for much of the past two decades, making sure Robertson’s legacy would include many of his own words, verbatim, instead of whatever else his résumé said.

Most of us will never have the kind of reach Robertson had at his peak. But most of us would never use the platforms we do have to spread deranged lies and hurt other people in the name of some broader principle. We know better than to emulate someone like Pat Robertson. There’s no reason to praise the movement he created without acknowledging the groups of people he sought to harm.

If there’s any consolation today, it’s that Pat Robertson isn’t looking down at us from above. (Nor is he looking up at us from below, though that would make one hell of an editorial cartoon.) He’s just gone. He won’t be able to make any other absurd statements. He won’t be able to hurt any more people.

It’ll be up to all of us to make sure the institutions he left behind lose their power and influence, too.

Happy Pride Month, everybody.

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