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Early Life and Background

Marion Gordon "Pat" Robertson was born March 22, 1930, in Lexington, Virginia, into a family where public power and private piety were never far apart. His father, A. Willis Robertson, was a prominent Virginia Democrat who served in the U.S. House and later the U.S. Senate, and the household moved in the orbit of courthouse politics, Southern civic clubs, and the postwar culture that treated Christianity as a civil language as much as a personal creed.

That setting also carried contradictions that would later harden Robertson's worldview: a region defending tradition against modernizing currents, and a political class comfortable with religious symbolism but wary of religious insurgency. As a young man he absorbed both the habits of elite persuasion and the anxieties of a changing nation - mass media, secular courts, and cultural liberalization - pressures he would later recast as a spiritual battle for America's identity. Robertson died June 8, 2023, after outliving many of the early leaders of the Religious Right he helped define.

Education and Formative Influences

Robertson attended Washington and Lee University, then served as a U.S. Marine during the Korean War era, experiences that reinforced discipline, hierarchy, and a Cold War moral frame; he later earned a law degree at Yale. Yet his decisive turn was religious rather than legal: after a born-again experience in the 1950s, he attended New York Theological Seminary and was ordained in the Southern Baptist tradition, converting his patrician political inheritance into a sense of personal commission - less to broker compromise than to call a nation to repentance.

Career, Major Works, and Turning Points

In 1960 Robertson founded what became the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) in Portsmouth, Virginia, building a pioneering religious media empire that married televangelism to modern fundraising and programming. The flagship show "The 700 Club" turned his pastoral persona into a daily presence for millions, while ventures such as Regent University (founded as CBN University in 1977) aimed to train lawyers, journalists, and policymakers inside an explicitly Christian institutional world. His 1988 run for the Republican presidential nomination, though unsuccessful, proved catalytic: it created donor lists, volunteer networks, and a template for mobilizing evangelical voters that flowed into the Christian Coalition, a major force in 1990s GOP politics. Robertson also published widely, notably "The New World Order" (1991), blending spiritual warfare themes with geopolitical interpretation; across decades he remained a lightning rod for controversy through televised remarks on disasters, sexuality, Islam, and domestic politics that fused pastoral certainty with partisan heat.

Philosophy, Style, and Themes

Robertson's inner life, as it surfaced in his broadcasting, was marked by a persistent sense that modernity was not neutral but adversarial. He spoke in the cadences of a preacher yet argued like a political strategist, treating courts, media, and universities as arenas where spiritual commitments must fight for survival. His public theology was intensely civilizational: he saw law and national identity as downstream from religious allegiance, insisting that the Decalogue was not merely church teaching but civic foundation - "The Ten Commandments are the most visible symbol because these commandments are recognized by Christians and Jews alike as being the foundation of our system of public morality". The psychological undertone is defensive confidence: a man convinced that consensus is fragile, and that yielding in one domain invites collapse in all others.

That defensiveness also produced sweeping antagonists and moral absolutism. On-air, Robertson often framed pluralism as coercion against believers - "And it's one thing to give people freedom and something else to deny the rights of Christians to assert their faith in order to keep Hindus from feeling upset". His most infamous rhetoric about gender politics showed how readily he converted cultural change into apocalyptic indictment: "Feminism encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians". Such lines were not stray barbs but expressions of a governing style: hyperbolic moral theater designed to rally the faithful, simplify complex social shifts, and preserve a clear boundary between an embattled in-group and a threatening outside world.

Legacy and Influence

Robertson's enduring impact lies less in any single book or campaign than in the infrastructure he normalized: religious television as a parallel public square, Christian higher education aimed at professional power, and a voter-mobilization model that translated church identity into partisan discipline. Admirers credit him with giving voice to believers who felt excluded from elite culture; critics argue he sharpened polarization by turning theological certainty into a political weapon and by mainstreaming conspiratorial, culture-war interpretations of events. Either way, American religion and politics after the 1970s are difficult to imagine without his template - a media-savvy clergyman who treated the nation as a congregation, and the ballot box as one more instrument of revival.