Stealing Jesus: how fundamentalism betrays Christianity

by Bruce Bawer

  The history of the Church of Law is populated by lawyers. Saint Paul was a lawyer. John Nelson Darby went to law school (but never practiced law). And so did a certain senator's son who, after attending Yale Law and failing the bar, didn't really know what to do with his life.

  This may be hard to believe nowadays, for Pat Robertson seems almost to have been born to be a TV preacher. Yet there were several stops along the way. A former Golden Gloves boxer and Marine Corps officer, Robertson worked for a time as an overseas "troubleshooter" for W. R. Grace and as an electronics entrepreneur before ministry beckoned. And in fact his TV manner today reflects something of all these elements of his background: The pugilist's punch-happy pugnacity combines with the marine's steady, steely glint; the company man's polish blends with the small businessman's go-getter zeal. And of course in Robertson, the politician is fused inextricably with the clergyman: Leaning forward in his chair, the white-haired, square-faced Robertson relates his political views with the twinkly-eyed smile of a family preacher on a pastoral visit; standing on the 700 Club stage in suit and tie, he spins out his appalling End Times theology with the slickness of a politician delivering a stump speech. Like Ronald Reagan, he's a man with a worldly, privileged past who has acquired an aw-shucks, folksy persona that appeals to middle Americans; like many legalistic preachers, he's a man with a thin coating of warm-and-fuzzy gentleness and a hard core of ruthless, rigid authoritarianism. His constituents take comfort from his refusal to compromise with the mainstream culture; opponents find his manner bullying and threatening, and find much of his rhetoric anything but godly.

  Raised as a Baptist, Robertson wasn't particularly religious until 1956, when he met a dynamic Dutch mystic named Cornelius Vanderbreggen. Years later, when Robertson described their first encounter in his autobiography, the part that seemed to have impressed itself most strongly on his memory was Vanderbreggen's lesson that a man of God can live well. "God is generous, not stingy," Vanderbreggen told him as they dined at an elegant hotel. "He wants you to have the best." In a 1995 Sojourners article, Michael Smith notes that Robertson's "theology of capitalism" is founded on the parable (Matt. 25:14—30) in which a servant who puts his master's money into a business and makes a profit is praised, while a servant who buries the master's gold in the ground is rebuked. Robertson has never appeared to find any conflict in a theology that preaches a God who wants him to live in luxury yet who will condemn most human beings to everlasting torment.

  But then, Robertson's autobiography consistently portrays him as God's chosen instrument and routinely implies that people who have gotten in his way, or who have seen things differently than he does, are agents of Satan. Exposed to the charismatic revival at its start, he responded immediately to the movement's powerful sense of the world as a battleground between God and Satan and did not take long to begin seeing himself as God's generalissimo. Soon after his conversion, spending several weeks at a "religious camp" where he sought to discern God's will for his life, Robertson received a letter from his wife, Dede, summoning him home. "Was this God telling me to go home," he writes, "or was it Satan?" (That it may have been just Dede is apparently not a possibility.) Ever since then, Robertson has been convinced that God was sending personal messages to him through the Bible:

  "God, give me a word," I prayed. I let my Bible fall open. There on the page before me was his answer.

  I picked up my Bible and put it in my lap. "God, what do you want me to do?" I prayed.

  I opened the Bible and reached out and put my finger in the middle of one of the pages. I read the verse I was pointing at.

  When Dede too became a charismatic Christian, Robertson rejoiced in "her willingness to submit herself to my spiritual headship." Robertson recalls: "I reached over and pulled her to me, thanking God for this surrender." Presently God led him to Tidewater, Virginia, where Robertson bought a dilapidated TV station. "In 1959," Robertson writes,

  the Tidewater area of Virginia was literally a spiritual wasteland. For years it had been in the grip of demon power. Virginia Beach was advertised as the psychic capital of the world. It was the headquarters of Edgar Cayce and the Association for Research and Enlightenment (ARE). Mediums, clairvoyants, and necromancers flocked to Virginia Beach saying the vibrations in the air made their work easier. These Satanic vibrations, which traverse space and time, are the communications channels to which sensitives or mediums must attune themselves, and Virginia Beach was renowned as the prime receiving station of the Universal Transmitter (Satan).

  Robertson changed all that in 1960 when he founded the Christian Broadcasting Network directly under this "umbrella of Satanic oppression." The empire that Robertson built on the foundation of CBN would play a huge role in elevating the Church of Law to a position of ascendancy in America. "As much as anybody," observes Tim Stafford in a 1996 issue of Christianity Today, the flagship publication of New Evangelicalism, Robertson "has put his stamp on American Christianity as it approaches the third millennium." He has, Stafford notes, "shaped three major religious developments: the charismatic renewal, Christian TV, and evangelical politics." Indeed, Robertson was instrumental in mainstreaming all three of these developments and tying them together. Identifying with both the charismatic and evangelical movements (he calls himself a "Spirit-filled evangelical"), he helped "shape the charismatic movement as a wide, ecumenical, and comfortable phenomenon" that brought "Pentecostalism closer to the mainstream of American life" even as he did much to "transform evangelicalism from a small, defended backwater to the leading force in American Christianity."

  The 1976 election to the presidency of a born-again Southern Baptist, Jimmy Carter, drew Robertson into serious political involvement. Yet when Carter's administration proved too liberal for him—and for other legalistic Protestants as well—Robertson began organizing religious conservatives in hopes of forming a counterforce to Washington liberalism. This political involvement eventually led to the 1989 founding of the Christian Coalition, which by 1997 had a national network consisting of thousands of local chapters, tens of thousands of precinct and neighborhood coordinators, and a total membership of 1.5 million. In the 1994 elections, Christian Coalition workers made over half a million phone calls to get out the vote; in 1996 they distributed 46 million voter guides through more than 126,000 churches. Meanwhile CBN prospered, as did other Robertson properties (some of which he sold to Rupert Murdoch in 1997 for over $100 million) ranging from the Family Channel, MTM Entertainment, and the Ice Capades to the Founders Inn hotel chain and Regent University.

  Since the Christian Coalition's founding in 1989, the average American's sense of who legalistic Christians are and what their lives are about has been increasingly shaped by Robertson—and even more, perhaps, by Ralph Reed, who served as the Christian Coalition's executive director from the outset. (Reed announced in April 1997 that he would step down from that position in September to head up a new political consulting firm that would work for right-wing candidates at both the national and local levels.) There has been a clear division of labor between these two men: While Robertson speaks to his constituents (mainly on The 700 Club), Reed addresses mainstream America on behalf of that constituency. The difference between the two men's messages is dramatic—and instructive.

  Those messages are summed up in two recent volumes. One of them is Robertson's Collected Works, a thick 1994 volume that includes his books The New Millennium (1990), The New World Order (1991), and The Secret Kingdom (1982, 1992). Taken together, the three books (which I will refer to for convenience's sake as a trilogy) amount to a summary of Robertson's theology and politics, which are inextricably connected with each other. The other book is Reed's Active Faith: How Christians Are Changing the Soul of American Politics (1996).

  It doesn't take long to notice the general differences between Robertson's and Reed's books. Robertson's trilogy centers on theology, though he is constantly connecting his religious views to political propositions; Reed's focus is on
politics, though he tries not to let religion get too far out of the picture for too long. Robertson is writing for his constituents—for "conservative Christians" who look to him for instruction in scripture, history, and prophecy; Reed's book, by contrast, is aimed chiefly at the mainstream reader—at mainline Christians, Jews, and secular Americans whose unease about his movement he is at pains to quell. Both men clearly aim to help strengthen the Christian Coalition's power: While Robertson seeks to solidify his constituents' loyalty to him and to bring their religious beliefs and political objectives more into line with his own, Reed labors to pacify the coalition's opponents and perhaps even win their political alliance, if only on pragmatic grounds.

  These differences are understandable, given the difference between the audiences for which the two men's books are intended. But there are more striking variances—indeed, outright contradictions— between Robertson's trilogy and Reed's book. An examination of these volumes, of the ideas that they present, and of the ways in which they contradict each other can go a long way toward illuminating the reality of the legalistic Christian worldview—and the outrageous distinction between that reality and the thoroughly phony image that the Christian Coalition seeks to project to outsiders.

  Robertson's trilogy offers a bizarre account of biblical prophecy that is in the direct line of Darby, Scofield, and Lindsey Like Lindsey, Robertson offers a twisted account of history and current events by way of supporting his biblical prophecy. The principal difference is that Robertson places more emphasis on the political lessons and prescriptions that he draws from that prophecy. Like Lindsey, Robertson relies on the fact that his readers know little about the history he is manipulating. One illustration of that ignorance is a glaring error that appeared in The New Millennium in 1990 and, astonishingly, remained uncorrected when that book was reprinted as part of The Collected Pat Robertson four years later. I am referring to Robertson's condescending reference to "Henri Beyle (pronounced baal), who wrote under the name of Voltaire" and who "was essentially an atheist." In fact Marie-Henri Beyle—whom Robertson here tries shamelessly to link with Baal, the Canaanite deity whom the Israelites identified with Satan—was the birth name not of Voltaire (whose birth name was Arouet) but of the French novelist Stendhal. What is to the point here is not the error itself—which I have never seen pointed out anywhere—but the fact that it went unnoticed and uncorrected in the four-year period between the book's initial publication and its appearance in the Collected volume. The perpetuation of this error only indicates how little Robertson's readers know about most of the things he writes about—and how manipulable they therefore are. Robertson can distort history to an outrageous extent, yet his readers will accept the conclusions he draws from the historical record because they don't realize how much he is distorting it.

  The perpetuation of this error also underscores the fact that Robertson's readership is almost entirely confined to the Religious Right. Members of the mainstream media, intelligentsia, and political establishment—people, that is, who might notice slipups like the one about Voltaire and call them to the attention of his publishers—don't read Robertson's books. Few of them even look in on The 700 Club occasionally to see what America's most politically powerful Republican is up to these days. Consequently these mainstream opinion makers have only the most rudimentary acquaintance with the theological ideas of the man at the Christian Coalition's helm. If you asked many of these opinion makers, some of whom cover the Christian Coalition on a regular basis, they would probably say that the coalition members' theology is not their affair and that they are interested only in the movement's political manifestations. Yet because they take this attitude, Reed has been able to go on TV and routinely soften the coalition's image without the other participants recognizing the extent to which he has been doing so. Robertson and Reed, then, have made a highly efficient team: One of them distorts history and the Bible by way of fashioning a theology for his followers, and the other misrepresents that theology by way of fashioning a viable national political movement.

  As I have noted, one way in which Reed has softened the Christian Coalition's image has been by insisting that the Christian Coalition stands for tolerance and pluralism—that it doesn't view America as a Christian nation and isn't trying to make it one. Robertson's books make it clear that this is absolutely not the case. America, he writes, is undergoing a war between "Christians" (that is, legalistic Christians) and "secularists" (which, in Robertson's lexicon, includes nonlegalistic Christians as well as people of other faiths). Robertson declares, for instance, that the Anglican Church is full of "liberals" who are "fighting to secularize the Anglican creed." The people to whom he refers are, of course, Christians, but because they believe differently from Robertson, he calls them secular.

  "From its inception," Robertson writes, "secularism has focused intently on the overt de-Christianizing of America. It starts with dialogue about 'pluralism' and 'tolerance' and 'relative values,' as it did in France 200 years ago, but it always ends with an outright assault on Christianity and the Church." By contrast, Reed, in Active Faith, denies "that our movement is ... morally intolerant" and claims that "the religious conservative community has greatly matured in recent years by broadening its message and narrowing its aspirations to those that are appropriate for any other group in a pluralistic society." Reed's affirmation here of tolerance and pluralism is precisely the sort of thing that Robertson criticizes as secular "de-Christianizing." Reed's tendency to dish out "pluralistic" rhetoric to mainstream readers explains his shaky position in the hearts of hard-core Christian Coalition activists, who have had it drilled into them by Robertson, Hal Lind-sey, and their local preachers that "pluralism" and "tolerance" are euphemisms for compromise with the Devil.

  Reed writes about "people of faith" in such a way as to suggest that he feels a sense of kinship with anyone who belongs to some religion. ("We want to give people of all faiths—-Jewish, Christian, or any other faith—a voice in government," he said in a January 1997 interview on MSNBC.) Robertson, by contrast, virulently condemns religious traditions other than his own. He describes Hinduism, for example, as offering "a chilling and joyless vision of life" and maintains that it "has, as its origin, demonic power." He charges that Jehovah's Witnesses and Christian Scientists belong to "cults which claim to be Christian" but whose doctrines contain falsehoods that will "bring down the wrath of God upon their own heads." He characterizes meditation as "at best... absurd" and "at worst . . . demonic" in that it opens people up "to evil powers and spirits." And he calls Islam "a Christian heresy."

  Many secular Americans read such things and shrug. "Well," they sigh, "that's what it means to be religious, isn't it? You're obliged to feel that what you believe is right and what other people believe is wrong." No. Even the Roman Catholic Church, that most dogmatic of institutions, has stated that there is some degree of truth in all faiths, that people are entitled to follow their consciences, and that adherents of different religions should respect one another. Traditional Baptist doctrine, as we have seen, stresses freedom of conscience. More liberal Christian bodies have asserted that nobody can pretend to know the whole truth of God, that what different faiths offer is not so much competing truths as different ways of understanding a single overarching truth, that Jesus taught us to be less concerned with theological particulars than with our love for God and humanity, and that people from diverse traditions can learn much from one another about the nature of God. This is not a specifically modern or liberal or "secular" way of thinking; as we know, our founding fathers took much the same view, and five centuries before them Francis of Assisi prayed with a Moslem in a mosque, saying, "God is everywhere." He did not say, "My faith is correct and yours isn't." He recognized the Moslem's faith as genuine, meaningful, and good; he saw that they both were praying to the same God and were brothers in God's sight.

  Though Robertson says little in his books about God's love or about Christians' obligation to love people
of different faiths, he has much to say about God's wrath, a subject about which he is extremely enthusiastic. "Bible history tells us," he reports, "that because of their hardness of heart, God scattered the Jews time and time again. The Egyptians and the Babylonians and the Assyrians were allowed to make slaves of them. However, God eventually brought down His wrath upon those nations and eradicated their empires." Robertson loves the parts of the Bible that depict God as avenging, punishing, destroying; he loves the scriptures' Sturm und Drang. Yet the gospel passages about love seem lost on him. He rarely quotes from them. Indeed he avoids them almost entirely, choosing instead to focus on Old Testament law and prophecy and New Testament evangelism and prophecy, giving special attention to everything lurid, vicious, and ugly.

  When Robertson is not focusing on these parts of scripture, he is often busy setting forth lurid, vicious visions of his own. He enthusiastically imagines, for example, the death of those whom he considers enemies of "true Christianity," writing that "if homosexuals continue in their homosexuality, they will commit genocide." AIDS aside, he argues, "homosexuality is nothing short of self-extinction and suicide," for if gays "continue their self-destructive lifestyle, sooner or later their share of the population will die out." Robertson repeats this comment twenty pages later: "Certainly homosexuality should die out since the homosexuals are unable to reproduce themselves." He says much the same thing about those who commit abortion: If they keep aborting their fetuses, they will disappear, too. The fact that homosexuality has always existed, and that people have been aborting fetuses from the dawn of time, seems not to enter into his calculations. (It is ironic, by the way, that though Robertson continually reminds us how evil homosexuals are, he also approvingly cites works by gay writers with great frequency, presumably without knowing that they are gay. One of these writers is Allan Bloom, whose book The Closing of the American Mind Robertson admiringly represents as an argument for Christian education, even though Bloom—in addition to being homosexual—was a secular Jew.)