Pat Robertson, the bigoted Christian television host who spent years regaling the political right with racist, sexist, anti-gay and otherwise hateful rhetoric, has died.
Robertson technically retired from his longtime television show, “The 700 Club,” in 2021. At the time, MSNBC’s “The 11th Hour” put together this helpful mashup of Robertson’s lowlights as a host. This includes a tirade claiming Haitians had suffered a deadly earthquake after they “swore a pact to the devil” while overthrowing their French oppressors centuries earlier, along with a torrent of homophobia.
Lists ranking Robertson’s most deplorable bigotry are easy to find. And that’s his legacy in a nutshell: mainstreaming the sort of conspiratorial Christian hate-mongering that’s now common and openly encouraged in the conservative movement.
Barack Obama foresaw this in 2006 — when he was a U.S. senator — and I think his comments about Robertson in particular are more useful to reflect on today than anything Robertson said himself.
These comments were delivered during Obama’s keynote speech at a religious conference hosted by the liberal Christian activist Jim Wallis and his group Call to Renewal. The conference invited the freshman senator from Illinois to discuss ways to unite secular and religious Americans around social justice causes.
In his speech, Obama — who would eventually become one of Robertson’s most frequent targets — warns liberals against allowing extremists like Robertson to frame what it means to be a good practitioner of religion.
He said:
When we ignore the debate about what it means to be a good Christian or Muslim or Jew; when we discuss religion only in the negative sense of where or how it should not be practiced, rather than in the positive sense in terms of what it tells us about our obligations towards one another; when we shy away from religious venues and religious broadcasts because we assume that we will be unwelcome — others…
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