Politics & Power Quote by Pat Robertson

Robertson’s line is less an argument than a maneuver: it drapes a modern political demand in the costume of archival inevitability. The key verb is “cite.” He’s not inviting debate about what early Americans believed; he’s asserting that the record itself has already rendered a verdict, and that his book is the courtroom transcript. “Countless examples” does double work: it signals authority while discouraging verification. If the evidence is infinite, disagreement starts to look like bad faith.

The phrase “foundational documents” is the rhetorical jackpot. Americans are trained to treat “founding” language as sacred text, so Robertson collapses the messy, contradictory colonial archive into a single, coherent intent. “Colonial period” also widens the net: by reaching before the Constitution’s explicitly secular architecture, he can spotlight Puritan sermons and charter piety while sidestepping Enlightenment skepticism, denominational diversity, and the founders’ deliberate refusal to establish a church.

The subtext is political triage. If the nation was “intended” to be Christian, then secular governance becomes not a legitimate choice but a betrayal, and policies aligned with conservative Christianity can be framed as restoration rather than imposition. It’s a claim designed to flip the burden of proof: defenders of church-state separation must explain why they’re defying the founders, instead of Robertson explaining why a pluralistic republic should answer to one religious tradition.

In context, this fits Robertson’s late-20th-century project: turning cultural anxiety into constitutional certainty, and turning history into a mandate.