For many years, TV preacher Pat Robertson’s name was synonymous with the religious right political movement. Today, as NBC News reported, he died at age 93.
Pat Robertson, the conservative evangelist and media mogul who galvanized the modern Christian right, cultivated a massive national following and regularly drew criticism for his incendiary political statements, died Thursday, according to his official broadcasting network.
To know anything about Robertson is to recall his decades’ worth of hateful rhetoric toward, well, pretty much anyone who didn’t look, act and think as he did. My friend Rob Boston at Americans United for Separation of Church and State summarized the televangelist’s record in striking fashion this morning:
He repeatedly attacked non-Christian faiths, once calling Hinduism a “cult” that is “in touch with Satan and demon spirits.” In 1991, he penned The New World Order, a book anchored in antisemitic conspiracy theories. He once signed a fundraising letter asserting that feminism teaches women to “leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians.” In 1991, he asserted that you don’t have to be nice to Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists and others because they reflect “the spirit of the Antichrist.” In 1990, he asserted that being gay is “a pathology. It is a sickness, and it needs to be treated” and went on to assert, “Many of those people involved with Adolf Hitler were satanists, many of them were homosexuals. The two things seem to go together.”
Reading this brutal summary, it’s tempting to think someone who said and believed such things would be kept at arm’s length by major American political parties, elected officials and candidates who sought the public’s trust.
But as Robertson exits the stage, that’s what stands out most for me about his adult life: The TV preacher’s radicalism didn’t prevent him from becoming, at least for a time,…
Read the full article here