Politics & Power Quote by Pat Robertson

Robertson’s move here is less sermon than civics lesson with a punchline: the American legal order, he suggests, is basically a dressed-up version of the Ten Commandments. Calling those prohibitions “foundational” does rhetorical double duty. It flatters the listener’s sense that the country is morally coherent, and it frames contemporary law as borrowing legitimacy from divine source code rather than from messy democratic compromise.

The phrasing “laws we enjoy” is telling. It casts law not as constraint but as a consumer benefit, something pleasant and protective, which makes the implied argument easier to swallow: if you like the safety and stability of modern life, you’re already living off religious capital. That’s the subtextual pivot from description to prescription. Once the audience accepts that the moral bedrock is biblical, any push to expand religious influence in public policy can be pitched as restoration, not revolution.

There’s also careful selectivity in the commandments he chooses: murder, theft, perjury. These are broad, near-universal prohibitions with obvious legal analogs, strategically avoiding the more culturally combustible rules about idolatry, Sabbath, or sexual conduct. By spotlighting the least controversial items, Robertson can smuggle in the larger claim: that secular governance is not truly secular, just forgetful.

In context, this fits a decades-long Christian Right project: translate faith commitments into national identity. The intent isn’t to debate constitutional history; it’s to make the listener feel that resisting religiously inflected politics is not neutrality, but ingratitude toward the very order that keeps society from sliding into chaos.