Televangelist Pat Robertson, who died on June 8 at the age of 93, occupied the cultural landscape as an incredibly influential, doomsaying extremist. The one-time Southern Baptist minister’s career in television spanned six decades, enabling him to espouse religious dogma layered in bigotry to millions of viewers on his long-running daily show, The 700 Club.
The man who turned his media empire, the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), into a vast, powerful political machine did so by going after every perceivable “enemy” of the church, from feminists and queer people to Palestinians and Haitian earthquake victims.
Through the CBN and The 700 Club, Robertson created the blueprint for decades of increasingly extreme right-wing media. Alongside other right-wing public figures and media personalities of the late 20th century, such as Jerry Falwell, Phyllis Schlafly, and Rush Limbaugh, he helped codify the language and rhetoric of that extreme, even as he later seemed to occasionally decry the culture he helped create.
As Tara Burton detailed for Vox in 2017, Robertson’s CBN was and arguably still is a powerhouse of religion and politics. Created by Robertson in 1961, the network became known for religious programming, which it eventually merged with news programming. At the height of its influence during the ’80s and ’90s, the CBN seamlessly presented political propaganda as religious doctrine to its millions of viewers. As we left behind the civil rights era and the feminist and countercultural movements, conservative anxiety expressed itself using televangelism as its mouthpiece.
So often, the dark things that lurked in white evangelical America’s collective subconscious first swam to the surface on The 700 Club. It platformed the views of anti-feminists like Edwin Louis Cole, who argued that Christian men should be masculine authorities over their wives and children; Cole’s 1982 book Maximized Manhood included a foreword written by 700 Club…
Read the full article here
