by Bruce Bawer
In connection with his condemnation of homosexuality and abortion, Robertson cites Leviticus, saying that it contains "a catalog of offenses so heinous that they will not only cause a society to fall but will cause the land itself to 'vomit out' its inhabitants. The list includes homosexuality, adultery, bestiality, and the sacrifice of children. Every one of these offenses, with the exception of bestiality, is now rampant in America." Robertson purports to take that "catalog" seriously. Yet also included in it, though Robertson omits it from his version of the list, is having intercourse with a woman during menstruation. If he means to be consistent in his devotion to Levitical law, presumably Robertson considers this act as heinous—and as deserving of the death penalty—as he does the others in the catalog.
What Robertson is doing here is making selective use of an ancient tribal code that has no application to life in America today. To read the Levitical laws in context is to be struck by how specific they are to their own time and place. Consider the first several chapters of Leviticus, which set forth in detail how the Israelites should present animal offerings to the Lord. It is directed therein that if a priest inadvertently sins, he must bring a bull to the entrance of the Tent of Meeting, put his hand on its head, slaughter it, bring its blood into the tent, dip his finger in the blood, sprinkle it seven times before the sanctuary curtain, smear some of it on the horns of the altar, pour out the remainder at the base of the altar, and do various other things with the bull's fat and its hide. What does Robertson have to say about the contemporary relevance of this passage? Nothing, of course. Further Levitical laws prescribe at length, among other things, the brutal ways in which the community should treat people with skin disorders. These prescriptions would nowadays be considered utterly cruel, and one cannot imagine a modern church endorsing them. Leviticus also contains elaborate rules about cleanness, rules that nobody now would take seriously. Among the rules are these:
When a man has emitted semen, he must bathe his whole body in water and be unclean till evening. (Lev. 15:16)
When a woman has her discharge of blood, her impurity will last for several days; anyone who touches her will be unclean till evening. (Lev. 15:19)
Leviticus prescribes extreme punishments for a variety of acts. "When a priest's daughter makes herself profane by becoming a prostitute, she profanes her father" and "must be burnt" (Lev. 21:9). The high priest "must not enter the place where any dead body lies. . . . He is to marry a woman who is still a virgin" (Lev. 21:1 Iff). The blind and lame are not permitted to make offerings at God's altar (Lev. 21:18). All these statutes carry the same penalty: "if you .. . fail to obey all my commandments," Leviticus 26 quotes God as saying, "I shall bring upon you sudden terror, wasting disease, recurrent fever, and plagues that dim the sight and cause the appetite to fail. . . . Instead of meat you will eat your sons and daughters. ... I shall pile your corpses on your lifeless idols ... I shall make your cities desolate." The point is clear: This punishment holds for violation of any Levitical rule. Yet Robertson quotes these rules very selectively (and the only one that any modern church really takes seriously is the one about men lying with men).
Consistent with Robertson's preoccupation with the more barbaric scriptural passages is his routine use of brutal turns of phrase in situations where such language seems inappropriate. He speaks, for example, of the Christian Broadcasting Network's ability to "blitz an entire nation for Christ." Blitz is, of course, the German word for lightning, and for most people it recalls, above all, the Nazi term blitzkrieg: "lightning warfare." This is, to say the least, a disturbing way to refer to the act of spreading the gospel—and it underscores dramatically the extreme divergence between the gospel of Jesus Christ and that of Pat Robertson. Indeed, Robertson is a man with a repulsive vision, a picture of the End Times in which only fundamentalists survive and triumph. He may claim to be horrified by Nazi and Stalinist atrocities, but in his own division of the world into a holy "us" and an unholy "them," and in his bloody vision of "their" fate, he differs little from the most chilling totalitarian dictator.
Unsurprisingly Robertson's worldview is a deeply disturbing one. He sees the present day as suffering from vast social evils because "Christian America" has been undermined by "humanism and socialism." These evils are "family disintegration, unrestrained sex, a holocaust of abortion, an epidemic of drugs and alcohol, deteriorating educational standards, growing poverty amidst unrestrained opulence, business greed and fraud, and a runaway federal budget." Reed's book features a similar list: American society, he writes, has been "torn asunder by explicit sex and violence on television, rampant divorce, skyrocketing illegitimacy, epidemics of crime and drugs, and a million teen pregnancies every year." But "the most important issue ... is the culture, the family, a loss of values, a decline in civility, and the destruction of our children." The implicit assumption in both men's books is that life in America a hundred years ago, say, was much more "Christian" and better for children. Yet those good old days to which Robertson and Reed would presumably have us return were a time of institutionalized racism, segregation, and lynching, of robber barons, sweatshops, and child labor, of urban blight and rural tar-paper shacks without plumbing or electricity; it was a time when the federal government imposed no income tax on the fortunes made by the Fords, Rockefellers, and Vanderbilts and did nothing to help poor children or ailing senior citizens, nothing to regulate the quality of food and medicines, nothing to protect people from being fired or evicted for being (say) Irish or Jewish or black. The only reason why Robertson can get away with the argument that social conditions are incomparably worse now than they were in the past is that most of his readers, having little or no knowledge of American social history, have formed an image of "the good old days" that has everything to do with nostalgia and little or nothing to do with reality. (Reed's strong rhetoric about "the destruction of our children" is especially striking given the Christian Coalition's exceedingly unchristian efforts to eliminate federal programs to aid poor children; clearly, he makes a distinction between "our children" and their children.)
Among today's social evils, according to Robertson, is what he describes as the low quality of contemporary American education. He attributes this problem to the secularism of American schools. Yet he is vigorously anti-intellectual, writing that in a secular world, "the mind becomes a playground of ideas." This phrase might well have been plucked right out of The Fundamentals, in which, as we have seen, the early-twentieth-century "modernists" were accused of turning the Bible into "a plaything for the intellect." In Robertson's view, this presumably infantile thirst for ideas "is the hunger for the apple all over again; the lust for the knowledge of good and evil; the desire to attain what Satan promised, 'y°usnall De as gods.'" In short, to want to know, to want to understand as much as possible about how the universe works, is evil. To be open to ideas, to refuse to reject them out of hand before weighing them against one's reason and experience, is to turn the mind into a "playground." Yet this is precisely what education is about; it is what the human mind was made for; it is what distinguishes humans from animals (a crucial distinction to legalistic Christians, who rebel at the idea that they are mere primates). What Robertson is lamenting here, in reality, is not the low quality of American education but the fact that what is indeed taking place in America's public schools, by and large, is education and not indoctrination into Robertson's brand of religion.
Over and over again, those who respond most positively to Robertson's rhetoric about education have made clear that they do so not out of a real concern for educational excellence but out of a worry that teachers are filling their children's heads with ideas that might challenge their own "values" and "beliefs." Especially guilty of a pernicious interest in knowledge, Robertson charges, are "the Liberal Jews" who "have actually forsaken Biblical faith in God, and make a religion of political liberalism." Accusing these Jews of seeking "to undermine the public strength of Christianity," he warns darkly that "one day
a vote against Israel will come in the United Nations when the United States neither abstains or [sic] uses its veto in the Security Council to protect Israel." As a result, "that tiny little nation will find itself all alone in the world. Then, according to the Bible, the Jews will cry out to the one they have so long rejected." (This brutal, retributionalist vision of the conversion of the Jews, of course, comes straight out of premillenni-alist theology.) In a footnote in Active Faith, Ralph Reed quotes a claim by the political writer Michael Lind that Robertson, describing Jews as "spiritually deaf" and "spiritually blind," stated that many of them would be converted to Christianity in the End Times. Reed's comment: "Robertson never made such a statement." What he fails to acknowledge is that Lind's characterization of Robertson's theology is perfectly accurate.
A standard element of legalistic Christian rhetoric is the claim that scientists whose discoveries contradict legalistic theology are not just objectively pursuing truth but actively seek to destroy Christianity. About Marx, Darwin, and Freud, for instance, Robertson says that "each of these men—in company with a cadre of German theologians who emerged on the heels of the Revolution—were [sic] committed to debunking the Bible, turning against the supernatural, and teaching their own rationalistic theory that man and all the creatures of the animal world are mere products of blind evolution." This is true enough of Karl Marx, who attacked religion as the opiate of the masses, but not of Darwin or Freud. Charles Darwin was a Christian whose insistence that his discoveries did not challenge any key tenet of his belief was basically ignored by fundamentalist churchmen. Sigmund Freud, for his part, was a scientist whose desire to understand how the mind works led him to make discoveries and posit theories that some Christians saw as a threat to their faith; unlike his colleague Carl Jung, he disdained religion, which he considered a neurotic manifestation, but it is misleading to suggest that his driving motivation was a desire to destroy faith and debunk scripture. In reply to Robertson's charge against scientists, one can only quote the New York Times editorialist who noted that
The real plot against him, if he only knew it, is the existence of the spirit of scientific inquiry. . . . This motive he interprets as a secret but cooperative endeavor to break down revealed religion. To him the idea of rejoicing in scientific investigation for its own sake and of delighting in free inquiry, carefully tested, as a means of arriving at the truth, is utterly incomprehensible.
The above comments appeared in the Times on July 21,1925, and were written about William Jennings Bryan. Yet they apply equally well to Robertson today, whose comments on science and learning reflect a profound discomfort with any kind of intellectual curiosity that is not tightly yoked to his own narrow, absolute version of Christianity.
If he is suspicious of free intellectual inquiry and artistic creativity, and is a committed enemy of anything remotely socialistic, Robertson adores capitalism, which he sees as not only consistent with the gospel but also implicit in it. "There is only one system of economics in the history of mankind that truly makes sense and leads to the prosperity and well-being of the people," Robertson writes (in bold print), "and that is the free-market profit-oriented economic system we know as Capitalism." He quotes Jesus: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." This is, of course, a call to selflessness—but not for Robertson, whose gloss is staggering: "In that statement," he writes, Jesus "recognized individual self-interest as being a very real part of the human makeup, and something not necessarily bad or sinful." Robertson says of God, indeed, that "enlightened self-interest was . . . obviously His plan. So the profit motive, per se, the desire for economic betterment, is not at all contrary to scripture." This claim is utterly at odds with the gospel. There is no hint here of the selfless love that Jesus preached—and certainly no hint of Rauschenbusch's concern about the excesses of capitalism. Indeed, in the hands of Robertson (who elsewhere refers to Tom Peters's Thriving on Chaos as "the best management book that I have read, other than the Bible"), Jesus sounds uncomfortably like the writer Ayn Rand, who argued that selfishness is a virtue.
If Robertson (himself a wealthy man) celebrates the accumulation of wealth with the same zeal that Jesus devoted to preaching against it, he can sound heartless when referring to poor individuals and nations. "The poorest countries," Robertson complains, "contribute less than one-hundredth of 1 percent of the United Nations budget" yet enjoy the same voting power in the General Assembly as the United States. Robertson, who seems to view poverty as something not to be ameliorated but punished, explains Christianity to his followers in such a way as to encourage their financial self-interest, and to reinforce in their minds the idea that if they sign on with Jesus, they will reap monetary rewards for doing so. Given Robertson's ardor for "enlightened self-interest," it was hardly surprising when, in late April 1997, the Associated Press reported that planes flown to Zaire as part of Operation Blessing—a CBN project publicized often on Robertson's 700 Club as exemplary of Religious Right humanitarianism—had in fact been "used almost exclusively for his diamond mining business." Nor is it a surprise that he considers liberation theology, by contrast, to be "nothing short of communist repression dressed up as social reform." Speaking of the clergymen and women who, inspired by that theology, have sought at great personal peril to help improve the lives of oppressed people in Latin America and elsewhere, Robertson expresses the hope that people in the church will "either reform the reformers" who practice liberation theology "or cast them from the temple." So much for Reed's pretense that the Christian Coalition believes in tolerance and pluralism, and so much also for Reed's attempt to represent the Religious Right as "the social and political heir of the Social Gospel, with its focus on the least among us."
To read Pat Robertson, as I happened to do, with the 1996 Republican National Convention on television in the background is to get a crystal-clear picture of where much of that party's recent rhetoric has been coming from. I had noted, in preceding weeks, the Republicans' constant deprecatory references to the Democratic "bureaucracy" and their equally frequent celebratory references to "family." The ideology was hardly unprecedented, but what did seem rather new was the incessant pairing of these two words and the concomitant implication that the coming election would be a contest between bureaucracy, a Democratic evil, and family, a Republican virtue. Where, I wondered, did this odd oppositional linking of bureaucracy and family come from? Then I read these two sentences (also in boldface) by Robertson: "Bureaucracy is unnatural and ineffective. The institution created by God for development and nurturing is the family."
The family? Yes, the family is about development and nurturing. But this is hardly an exclusively Christian concept. All civilizations and religions have recognized the role of the family and have honored family ties. The Gospels, by contrast, powerfully challenge the primacy of those ties. Our earliest post-Nativity picture of Jesus is of him leaving his parents at age twelve to go to the temple and rebuking his mother when she questioned him. Years later, Jesus did something else that no good Jewish son would have done: He left his parents to travel with a group of men and women who, though not his biological relatives, were, in a very real sense, his family—though one could hardly imagine Robertson and most Christian Coalition members acknowledging such a group as a family.
"If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, even his own life," Jesus said, "he cannot be a disciple of mine" (Luke 14:26). It was a typically hyperbolic statement: One does not feel that Jesus really wanted anybody to hate, but one recognizes that he considered such strong words necessary to get the point across that one's ties to other human beings transcended the traditional boundaries of family and tribe. "Mother, behold your son," Jesus said to Mary from the cross, speaking not of himself but of his beloved disciple. "Son, behold your mother" (John 19:26,27). The message is clear: Love, not blood, makes a family.
The rhetoric that comes out of today's major Religious Right institutio
ns—not only the Christian Coalition but Focus on the Family and Promise Keepers, among others—centers to a huge extent on the value of family love and devotion. Over and over these organizations tell America that family, above all, is what Christianity is about. Devotion to one's family is, indeed, a wonderful thing. Yet it is hardly something to brag about. For all except the most pathologically self-absorbed, love for one's parents, spouse, and children comes naturally. Jesus did not make it his business to affirm these ties; he didn't have to. Jews feel them, Buddhists feel them, Confucians and Zoroastrians and atheists feel them. Christianity is not about reinforcing such natural bonds and instinctive sentiments. Rather, Christianity is about challenging them and helping us to see all of humankind as our family. It seems clear that if Jesus had wanted to affirm the "traditional family" in the way that Pat Robertson claims, he would not have lived the way he did.
Yet to read Robertson, you would think that Jesus' main cause was the "traditional family." Jesus, according to Robertson, taught us that "instead of always looking out for number one, we must care for others, particularly those who look to us for affirmation and support." But the purpose of Jesus' ministry was not to tell us that mothers need to care for their children. The whole point of his words on the cross to Mary and his beloved disciple is that mothers should try to see all children as their children, and people should try to see all mothers as their mothers. Jesus strove constantly to persuade his disciples to look with love upon those most different from themselves, and to see them not as threatening foreigners but as fellow children of God. This position could hardly be more different from that of Robertson, who is fixated on the danger supposedly posed to America by cultures that differ from our own, and who encourages his followers to see themselves as being engaged in a culture war with people who do not live in "traditional American families."