by Zev Chafets
IF LIBERTY UNIVERSITY is a hotbed of evangelical populism, its neighbor to the south, Pat Robertson’s Regent University, is the home of elite Pentecostalism. Located in Virginia Beach, four hours east of Lynchburg, Regent is half the size of Liberty University and twice as grand. Falwell’s school seems to be growing wild out of the mountains and overflows with energy. The Regent campus is as mannered and manicured as a country club. The architecture is Georgian, hand-hewn brick and arched windows; the interiors glisten with polished mahogany and marble.
Visitors to Regent don’t stay at the local Sleep-Inn, either. The university’s Founders Inn is a high-end spa and resort. Its boutique sells Italian fashions, not evangelical souvenirs. And, despite the protests of some of Robertson’s supporters, fine wines are available in the Hunt Room.
In his autobiography, Falwell contrasts his own humble origins with “my friend Pat Robertson [who] traces his roots in Virginia from the chaplain of the first permanent English-speaking settlement in the new world, through a signer of the Declaration of Independence, an officer on George Washington’s staff, two American presidents, and his own father, our distinguished, long-term Senator from Virginia.”
Falwell was being polite. Robertson’s father, A. Willis Robertson, served in the House of Representatives from 1933 to 1946, and then in the Senate until 1966, and it is hard to point to a single word or deed of his that could be fairly called distinguished. The old man was a standard-issue Southern Democratic segregationist: no worse than the others and no better. This hasn’t stopped “The Pat,” as the students call him, from honoring his father by naming the Regent School of Government after him.
YOU DON’T JUST drop in on Regent University. There is a guard at the gate who directs you to the administration building, and if you have business on the campus you get a guide. Mine was a friendly woman named Diane, who led me to meetings with members of the faculty. When I snuck off to browse through the student bookstore, a call from the suspicious saleswoman brought Diane running.
But the salient aspects of Regent University are evident to even the supervised eye. The campus is dominated by powerful television transmitters and Robertson’s magisterial home, complete with stables and horses. Regent is a Virginia plantation that grows and exports Pentecostalism, and business is good. Robertson recently opened a second campus near Washington, D.C., and he has far-flung charities. Still, the Big House at the center of the Virginia Beach campus is the heart of the enterprise. When I visited, Robertson was holed up there (“He’s busy writing a book,” an awestruck administrator said), although he could be spotted riding in the mornings.
Robertson was born a fortunate son, but he made his own money. After a stint in the Marine Corps, where he was, by all accounts, a hail-fellow-well-met, he graduated from Yale Law School, flunked the bar exam, got converted by a Dutch preacher named Cornelius Vanderbreggen, was ordained as a Baptist minister, and, in 1960, bought a little UHF station in Portsmouth, Virginia. Robertson parlayed this into the Christian Broadcasting Network and became America’s first great evangelical television mogul. In 1997 he sold International Family Entertainment, including the Family Channel, to Fox Kids Worldwide for $1.9 billion. He kept the 700 Club, which continues to pull in roughly a million viewers a day.
As a TV host, Robertson can be genial and engaging, but erratic. The day of my visit, the voters of Dover, Pennsylvania, had turned out schoolboard members who favored teaching intelligent design. This infuriated Robertson. “I’d like to say to the good citizens of Dover, if there is a disaster in your area, don’t turn to God. You just rejected him from your city,” he said on TV. “Pat does pop off,” Regent professor Joe Kickasola said ruefully. “But that’s just Pat being Pat.”
ROBERTSON HAS A long history of making bizarre claims, like controlling the weather and healing tonsillitis over the tube. He’s famous for saying nasty things about homosexuals, the prophet Muhammad, Hindus, mainline Protestants, liberals, feminists, political rivals, and foreign leaders who have offended him. In the summer of 2005, he called for the assassination of the anti-American president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez. Robertson’s critics have always thought he was out of his mind, but now a lot of evangelicals think so too.
The faculty of Regent is discreet, as befits men and women who live on the goodwill of the Big House, but the students, most of whom have never met him, seem almost proud of his eccentricities, like kids with the craziest uncle on the block.
JEWS ARE ONE of the few groups that Robertson approves of. In his 1988 presidential run, he promised that all his appointees would be either Christians (by which, presumably, he meant religious Christians) or Jews (degree of religiosity unspecified). When he was challenged on this, he simply said that America is a Judeo-Christian country and people who didn’t like that would have to learn to live with it. He might have added that no president has ever appointed a Hindu, a Muslim, or a Buddhist to a cabinet position, but he wasn’t making the point that there is a lot of hypocrisy in the theory and practice of political diversity; he was simply defending his belief that the United States is a Christian nation, and that Christianity flows from Judaism.
ROBERTSON WAS ONE of the first evangelists to offer the Judeo-Christian bargain to American Jews. And, like Falwell, he also reached out to Israel. “Looking back thirty years, I’m convinced that evangelical support for Israel wouldn’t have been so broad without Pat Robertson,” says Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews. “He and Jerry Falwell were the first to really stand up. When the time came to sign ads against the American sale of advanced warplanes to Saudi Arabia during the Reagan administration, Billy Graham wouldn’t sign but Robertson and Falwell did. Because of them, Christian support for Israel went from a tendency to a movement.”
But movements can get out of hand. In January 2006, Robertson demonstrated that there’s such a thing as being too pro-Israel, even for Israelis.
Following Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s incapacitating stroke, Robertson told the audience of the 700 Club that the Israeli premier had been struck down for giving up biblical Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip and northern Samaria. “He was dividing God’s land. And I would say, ‘Woe unto any prime minister of Israel who takes a similar course to appease the EU, the United Nations, or the United States of America. God says, ‘This land belongs to me. You better leave it alone.’”
The Israeli government reacted with ostensible fury. In fact, nobody was too shocked by Robertson’s comments; right-wing Israeli rabbis had been saying similar things for years. Not long before, a small band of Israeli fanatics had even put a pulsa d’nura—an ancient kabbalistic curse—on Sharon’s life (this is the same curse that was cast on Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin before he was assassinated by a fanatic yeshiva student in 1995).
Still, Israeli politicians from Sharon’s recently formed Kadima Party felt the need to respond to Robertson. The prime minister had gone into a coma politically intestate. His potential heirs needed to defend his good name.
The minister of tourism, Avraham Hirschson, had, for months, been trying to involve Robertson and other evangelical businessmen in a project to develop a tourist center on the northern banks of the Sea of Galilee, near the Mount of Beatitudes and Capernaum. The Americans were supposedly putting together a $50 million investment, a tidy sum by Israeli standards, but Hirschson, a close ally of prime minister-to-be Ehud Olmert, publicly pulled the plug. “We will not do business with [Robertson],” he said, through his spokesman. “We will deal only with other evangelicals who don’t back these comments.”
In reality, there were no other investors. The whole deal was still in the talking stage. But the slap from Jerusalem stung Robertson, who sent a letter of apology to Sharon’s sons. “I ask your forgiveness and the forgiveness of the people of Israel for remarks I made at the time concerning the writing of the holy prophet Joel and his view of the inviolate nature of the land of Israel,” he wrote. “I pray for the
future of your country, and when I speak it is always as a friend.”
The apology was accepted. By this time it had become clear that Sharon wasn’t going to wake up and be offended by Robertson’s comments (he wouldn’t have been anyway; Sharon was an amused connoisseur of crazy Israeli political clerics). Hirschson let it be known that he might even be willing to reconsider letting Robertson invest.
THE SIMPLE FACT is that, nuts or not, Robertson is a man with his own university, an army of lawyers, and a million viewers a day. In short, he’s a good man to have on your side. At a conference in Israel, in 2003, he spelled out the rationale for the evangelical love of Israel he has spent a career fostering.
Of course, we, like all right-thinking people, support Israel because Israel is an island of democracy, an island of individual freedom, an island of the rule of law, and an island of modernity in the midst of a sea of dictatorial regimes, the suppression of individual liberty, and a fanatical religion intent on returning to the feudalism of 8th Century Arabia. These facts about modern day Israel are all true. But mere political rhetoric does not account for the profound devotion to Israel that exists in the hearts of tens of millions of evangelical Christians.
You must realize that the God who spoke to Moses on Mount Sinai is our God. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are our spiritual Patriarchs. Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel are our prophets. King David, a man after God’s own heart, is our hero. The Holy City of Jerusalem is our spiritual capital. And the continuation of Jewish sovereignty over the Holy Land is a further bulwark to us that the God of the Bible exists and that His Word is true….
We are with you in your struggle. We are with you as a wave of anti-Semitism is engulfing the earth. We are with you despite the pressure of the “Quartette” and the incredibly hostile resolutions of the United Nations. We are with you despite the threats and ravings of Wahabbi Jihadists, Hezbollah thugs, and Hamas assassins.
We are with you despite oil embargos, loss of allies, and terrorist attacks on our cities.
We evangelical Christians merely say to our Israeli friends, “Let us serve our God together by opposing the virulent poison of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism that is rapidly engulfing the world.”
It is easy to dismiss Robertson as a crank. And it is true that he, Falwell, and the generation of Christian Zionists they have produced lack the style and nuance of liberal Christians and secular intellectuals. On the other hand, Robertson has had no trouble recognizing Islamic radicalism when he sees it, and no hesitation about confronting it. There is something to be said for ideology that produces this kind of clarity and courage. There is certainly something to be said for it by Jews at a time when the Jewish state is under attack not only by Islamic holy warriors but by liberal Christian fellow travelers as well.
SIX
REVENGE OF THE MAINLINE
It’s hard to remember, but during World War II, Zionism was a popular left-wing Christian cause. In 1942, celebrity theologians Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich joined the liberal Christian Council on Palestine (meaning, in those days, Jewish Palestine) in arguing that the establishment of a Jewish state was both an urgent humanitarian need and an act of justice. In 1949 Niebuhr opposed a demand by the Vatican that Jerusalem be internationalized (Israel considered the city its capital). Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the firebrand liberal pastor of Harlem’s mammoth Abyssinian Baptist Church, actually appeared at a Madison Square Garden fund-raising rally for Menachem Begin’s Irgun faction.
But when Zionism went from theory to fact, it started to trouble liberal Christians. The newly formed World Council of Churches’ first statement on the subject, in 1949, was a masterpiece of double-talk. “On the political aspects of the Palestine problem and the complex conflict of ‘rights’ involved we do not undertake to express a judgment. Nevertheless, we appeal to the nations to deal with the problem not as one of expediency—political, strategic or economic—but as a moral and spiritual question that touches a nerve centre of the world’s religious life.”
It was downhill from there, and things hit bottom after the Six-Day War of 1967. Liberation theology, just coming into vogue, saw Western societies as colonialist oppressors, and the Jews of Israel received a post–World War II racial upgrade for the purpose of guilt-sharing. Many liberal Christians—in Europe even more than the United States—were pleased to conclude that, given half a chance, Jews would behave just as badly as everyone else (and worse, really, because the Jews should know better).
This hostility to Israel struck American Jews—who saw the Six-Day War as a great victory and a huge relief—as a hard blow. Liberal Protestants were their social role models and political allies. They had marched together in Selma and against the war in Vietnam. As David Elcott of the American Jewish Committee put it, mainline Christians were “rational Americans, whom we respect in so many ways, who were educated in the same schools as we, knew the facts we presented [about the Arab-Israel conflict] and saw the whole scene differently.”
As evangelical support for Israel grew, and the Catholic-Israeli relationship improved during the papacy of John Paul II, who visited the Holy Land and called Jews “our elder brothers,” activists in the mainline churches became constant critics of Israel. Jewish lobbyists like Elcott, who worked with Christian liberals for years on every item of the domestic agenda, found themselves suffering through long, strained silences when the subject turned to the Jewish state.
Several factors explain this split. One, perhaps the most important, is theological, centered around the nature of the Second Coming.
All conventional Protestant denominations recognize Jesus as the Messiah and believe he will return. They differ, however, over two critical questions: When is he coming, and why?
Liberals tend to believe that Jesus will return as a result of mankind’s efforts. When people are sufficiently virtuous, a messianic age will be ushered in. In this view, known as postmillennialism, every house built for Habitat for Humanity, every hot meal served at a downtown soup kitchen, every human rights document signed at the United Nations, helps speed up the arrival of the Messiah. Good deeds are not simply a moral imperative, they are an instrument of meta-history.
Evangelicals see things differently. It says in the Bible that the Messiah is returning, and while even the most pious evangelicals tend to be agnostic about when, they have no doubt he’s on his way. “I believe Jesus is coming to clean up all the messes,” says Jerry Falwell. In the evangelical, premillennialist worldview, Jesus is the agent of perfection, not its beneficiary. He will come in his own good time, a schedule that can’t be hurried along by human efforts.
For many years this belief caused evangelicals to turn inward. What was the point of trying to change things, after all, if Jesus was going to do it anyway? What mattered was individual salvation, getting right with God. When the burst of evangelical political activism represented by 1920s Prohibition failed, conservative Protestants retreated to their churches, where they were taught that religion and politics don’t mix.
Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson changed that. They believed that whatever God had planned for the End of Days, people had a right to live in the here and now according to their own values. Politically they began as Democratic segregationists, but by the time they reached political maturity they had become integrationists (evangelical churches today tend to be far more racially mixed than upper-class Protestant denominations) and Republican. Their conservatism was expressed mostly on family issues, especially opposition to abortion and what they regarded as libertine sexual practices.
As evangelicals moved to the right, the mainline churches, once known as “the Republican Party at prayer,” grew more politically liberal. By the start of the 1970s liberal Christian activists were an integral part of the Democratic coalition. This partisan reversal was accompanied by a demographic shift. Since the 1930s, mainline churches had dominated Protestant life. When Billy Graham brought his crusade to New York in the mid-1950s, he was osten
tatiously snubbed by Reinhold Niebuhr. But such snobbery was only effective so long as the evangelicals were a quiescent minority. When they began voting as a bloc, it became apparent that they were more of a political force than the mainliners. By the mid-1970s, when the Gallup Poll first asked, “Would you describe yourself as born-again and/or an Evangelical Christian?” about 40 percent of Americans answered affirmatively. Now it was the mainline denominations that were on the defensive, and they didn’t like it.
AMONG THE MANY issues that separated the evangelicals and the mainliners was their attitude toward Israel (and, by extension, Israel’s Jewish supporters in the United States).
A few born-again figures, such as Jimmy Carter, Florida televangelist D. James Kennedy, and “progressive” Jim Wallis, took the Palestinian side of the dispute, but were, and remain, a distinct minority among the pro-Israel evangelicals. The social action wing of the mainline churches, on the other hand, grew ever more hostile to Israel through the 1980s and 1990s.
Just how hostile became apparent in the fall of 2000, when the second Palestinian intifada erupted. That summer, at Camp David, President Clinton and Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered the Palestinians a deal they thought Yasir Arafat couldn’t refuse—an independent state in most of the West Bank and Gaza. Arafat surprised them by turning it down and starting a war, the second intifada. Arafat represented not just the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza but the entire Palestinian people, a large number of whom did not live in the occupied territories. They were in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and beyond: refugees (and their descendants) of the 1948 War of Independence, displaced from pre-1967 Israel. Their demand was for a “right of return” to their old homes, not in the West Bank and Gaza but in Israel proper. This would have potentially created an Arab majority in Israel or, put another way, the end of Israel as a Jewish state. Obviously, Israel couldn’t say yes, and didn’t. But many of the mainline activists supported this Palestinian demand.