ROBERTSON MIXES POLITICS, RELIGION

Preaching politics. . . .

The morning show you shouldn’t miss is not ABC’s “Good Morning America,” NBC’s “Today” or “The CBS Morning News.”

The not-to-be-missed morning show is Pat Robertson’s “The 700 Club,” seen here weekdays at 7 a.m. on KTLA Channel 5. (It can also be seen weeknights at midnight on KDOC Channel 56.)

While the news media rush to Jerry Falwell, who jumps at every chance to speak for the Religious Right, many more TV watchers may be heeding the slicker and shrewder Robertson.

Why should anyone care about “The 700 Club”? Because Robertson has been mentioned as a possible presidential candidate, and because his show represents the classic merging of church and politics.

There he was one recent morning interviewing a Republican bigwig about the party’s presidential possibilities for 1988. After ticking off the obvious names, the party man also cited Robertson.

That was no news to Robertson, whose name had been mentioned for some time. He chuckled, innocently--as if to say, “Who, me ?”--and went on with the interview.

Ministers--even those with large TV constituencies--are not usually thought of as good bets for the White House. If not President, though, maybe President- maker .

Not that the mixing of church and politics is necessarily evil, anymore than it was evil for the clergy to participate in the civil rights or anti-Vietnam War movements of years past. Morality and politics should be inseparable.

It’s only that “The 700 Club” is a political wolf in sheep’s clothing, presenting points of view under the umbrella of news. The line is blurry. “The 700 Club” is either a political religious program or a religious political program.

The religion is a brand of fundamentalism, the politics highly conservative. Robertson professes balance and objectivity, but you somehow get the feeling, watching his program, that the Republicans are the party of God and the Democrats are in league with you know who.

“The 700 Club” is the centerpiece of the sprawling and growing Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), which Robertson created and heads. It beams its programs from a massive, state-of-the-art communications complex in Virginia Beach, Va.

CBN is the most powerful and influential element of an electronic church establishment that pays stations to carry its programs. In other words, monster profits are on the line. That means that secular broadcasters have a big financial stake in keeping CBN and the rest of the electronic clergy healthy and wealthy enough to keep buying air time.

As in Los Angeles, “The 700 Club” airs in many cities on independent stations, opposite the morning shows on ABC, CBS and NBC--the very shows that it’s patterned after. It is, in its own slanted way, every bit as newsy as they are, relying on its domestic, foreign-based and roving reporters to cover topical and breaking stories.

Viewers of the network morning shows learned that the Italian luxury boat Achille Lauro had been hijacked, for example, no earlier than viewers of “The 700 Club” learned of the story from Pat Robertson.

“The 700 Club” news packages are professionally produced, the reporting reasonably straight. But then it’s back to the studio, where Robertson applies topspin, placing events in a religious context coinciding with his interpretation of the Scriptures.

He is also a master at earnestly asking a loaded question:

“Well, there it is,” he told his viewers with a friendly grin after a recent tape story on American trade policy. “You have to decide for yourselves. Do we go down the same slide as the British empire, or do we continue to go forward under Reagan?”

You have to admire the way the 55-year-old Robertson works. He usually avoids ponderous preaching and money pitches until the politics are out of the way.

Unlike such other TV clerics as Falwell, the hat-in-hand/house-on-the-beach Jim Bakker and the hard-swinging Jimmy Swaggart, Robertson has the exquisite gift of subtlety.

Light chat, heavy message.

Although he is a Yale-trained lawyer in addition to being a fundamentalist-style minister, Robertson comes on like the kind of harmless, gee-whizzing, wide-eyed old fudd you’d find whittling a stick on the courthouse steps. He makes Huck Finn sound like Moammar Kadafi. Yet he is an extremely smart and well-informed communicator who can speak with erudition on many subjects.

How much clout does Pat Robertson have?

Influence is hard to measure. Yet one recent morning, when the three networks were quoting President Reagan secondhand on a Washington story, “The 700 Club” was airing a lengthy, one-on-one taped interview with the President.

The interviewer? Pat Robertson.

There they were, grinning at each other in the Oval Office, Ronnie and Pat, blue suit to blue suit, a fusion of minds. The President was on a roll. Robertson hurled question after question right down the middle of the plate. And, one after another, Reagan knocked them out of the park.

When the subject turned to the President’s upcoming summit meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, you knew judgment day had come.

That grinning, good ol’ boy, Robertson, put the question to the President with one of his folksiest chuckles: “Is the American press--and a free press is so important in our society--but is it, from time to time, being manipulated by the Soviet Union to sort of stack the deck against you in this summit?”

Reagan met the question head-on, with a chuckle of his own. “I did get the feeling there for a while,” he replied, “that they’d be rooting for the other side.”

Well, there you have it: America’s Commie-leaning press. And there you also have another folksy morning in the life of Uncle Pat and “The 700 Club.”