Robertson Tries to Distance Self From TV Clerics

The day after Jim and Tammy Bakker broke their silence about a scandal that would make an Elmer Gantry blush, Republican Pat Robertson was deftly sidestepping queries over whether the peccadilloes of his fellow television evangelists could undermine his presidential ambitions.

First off, he was a “religious broadcaster,” not a TV minister like Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart or Oral Roberts, the courtly, ever-smiling Robertson told businessmen here last month.

Furthermore, Robertson said, the Christian Broadcasting Network he built from scratch into a $182-million-a-year conglomerate with charitable, inspirational and profit-making aims is a hard-nosed business that goes out of its way to allay fears of fiscal shenanigans by regularly publicizing its balance sheet.

Not ‘Chief Pastor’

“I am not running for chief pastor,” Robertson declared, seeking to deflect concerns over his background as a scion of the religious right. “I am running for President.”

Liberal skeptics may have a hard time accepting such a disclaimer from the country’s foremost Christian TV entrepreneur, a 57-year-old charismatic who pioneered the formula of mixing cash pleas with lively religious talk, lessons, entertainment and political lectures on his daily “700 Club” talk show, the jewel in the CBN crown.

But, in mounting an uphill drive for the GOP presidential nod, Marion G. (Pat) Robertson is out to prove himself different from the pack, whether the pack be seen as Bible-thumping opportunists or lackluster conservatives. Even if he fails to win the nomination, opponents acknowledge that strong backing from the religious right could guarantee Robertson a healthy chunk of convention delegates and a major voice in shaping the party’s platform.

Building from a base of zealous charismatics, Robertson has scored early coups in preliminary delegate-selection contests in Michigan and South Carolina. He has also amassed a $7-million campaign war chest, and is weighing a plan to forgo federal matching funds and the strings on spending that go with them.

Image of ‘Hustler’

Still, “people think he’s a hustler on TV trying to steal some old lady’s money,” acknowledged Constance Snapp, the campaign’s communications director. “But, when they see him and hear him, they’ll understand he’s something else.”

Politically, there is no doubt that Robertson is different. He shares much of the agenda of other Republicans in the race, calling for balanced budgets, tougher judges, school prayer and a hard line against Soviet expansionism. But, moved by what he sees as a moral, spiritual and patriotic drift in the nation, he frequently goes beyond the standard conservative line.

Robertson is not just against abortion. He favors measures to promote an increase in the national birthrate. He does not just support aiding anti-Sandinista guerrillas in Nicaragua. The United States should recognize the insurgent movement as the legal government there, and then, possibly, aid its cause with a blockade of Nicaraguan ports, Robertson suggests.

Using the Bible as his political compass, Robertson views the courts, schools and power structure as being ruled by an atheistic elite that must be curbed. In books and television appearances, he has portrayed the world as being in a constant struggle between the forces of God and those of Satan, with evidence of the Antichrist lurking from such disparate forces as world communism, the European Economic Community, data-coded credit cards and the celebration of Halloween.

His fervent belief in faith healing and miracles has led him to claim responsibility for praying hurricanes away from CBN’s home base of Virginia Beach, Va., with one such diversion helping to strengthen his resolve to run for the White House. “If I couldn’t move a hurricane, I couldn’t move a nation,” Robertson said on CBN last year, referring to 1985’s Hurricane Gloria, which skipped Virginia but then plowed into Long Island and New England, killing 16 persons and causing an estimated $1 billion in damage.

Soft-Pedaling Supernatural

Shuttling through New Hampshire recently, Robertson soft-pedaled talk of the supernatural or spiritual. He repeatedly referred to himself as a “television analyst” and stressed that, although he is an ordained Baptist minister, he heads no formal congregation. Still, there is no escaping the campaign’s strong religious undertone.

“If Pat becomes President, we would have a moral man in office,” declared Gina Fava, the wife of an Assembly of God pastor who attended a campaign coffee. “Unless the Lord laid it upon his heart, he wouldn’t be running. . . . I’d like to see somebody in there who is a Christian.”

Such devotion highlights both the promise and dilemma of Robertson’s presidential bid. He can boast the campaign’s most highly motivated corps of supporters, mostly newcomers to politics anxious to enlist in a grass-roots drive to elect someone they see as God’s choice. However, he may frighten more traditional Republicans who fear Robertson would seek to blur church-state distinctions.

Robertson vehemently denies such intentions. But he raised eyebrows last year by hailing campaign developments in Michigan in a fund-raising letter that began: “The Christians have won . . . what a breakthrough for the Kingdom.” He later said the phrasing was misunderstood, but then told reporters that he felt that “born-again” Christians “maybe feel more strongly than others do” about religion, patriotism and traditional family values.

A survey of the opinions of 3,200 Republican donors prepared by political scientists at Furman University in Greenville, S.C., found that even conservative Republicans consider Robertson backers to be ideological purists with extreme positions on many issues. “Mainstream Republicans are quite hostile to Robertson,” said John C. Green, one of the authors of the study. “They don’t like him at all.”

Highest Negative Response

Robertson consistently gets the highest negative rankings among the major candidates in media preference polls, a recent Cox survey of Southern states and a nationwide Los Angeles Times poll showing that seven of 10 respondents would not consider voting for him.

Even support among evangelicals is shaky. At its March convention in Buffalo, the National Assn. of Evangelicals polled 177 denominational leaders, pastors and others in attendance. Among Republican hopefuls, Kansas Republican Sen. Bob Dole was picked by 34% of the delegates, New York Rep. Jack Kemp by 23%, Vice President George Bush by 21% and Robertson by only 13%.

“A lot of them feel like the farmer did when he looked up and saw his billy goat on the track trying to butt a train as it was coming,” explained the Rev. Robert Tenery, editor of the conservative Southern Baptist Advocate. “ ‘Billy,’ the farmer said, ‘I admire your courage but I don’t have much to say for your judgment.’ ”

Despite the numbers, however, opponents decline to count Robertson out, noting that the proliferation of candidates and crazy quilt of caucuses and primaries put a premium on organization and inspiration--Robertson’s long suit.

“He’s a communicator in the league of President (Reagan) and comes across as being pleasant, reasonable and nice, even though, if you listen to his words, he’s not,” said John Buchanan, chairman of the liberal People for the American Way, which combats the political activities of the religious right. “. . . He is in a win-win situation. No matter how the campaign comes out, he will end up with a whole new coterie of support and a greatly improved mailing list.”

Donations Affected

The Bakker fiasco appears to have affected donations to CBN operations--one-third of the staff has been laid off--but campaign aides insist that they have seen no corresponding slump in contributions. One top Robertson strategist opined that “Bakker may have made the public realize that these fellows are different. The foundation has been laid that they’re not just one homogenized, pasteurized group.”

Robertson’s conduct has not been scrutiny-free. Over the last year he has been hit by charges that he used political influence to avoid combat while a second lieutenant in the Korean War (he denies it and has sued his accusers for libel) and by charges that Robertson-linked, tax-exempt groups spent heavily to further his presidential ambitions. (Robertson says the activities of the groups have simply been misunderstood.)

Robertson lives in a posh, stable-equipped, CBN-owned estate near his Virginia Tidewater birthplace and most observers believe he runs a tight ship at the ministry. But on the campaign trail, Robertson sometimes shoots from the hip. At a recent New Hampshire coffee, Robertson expressed interest in naming controversial Texas tycoon H. Ross Perot as his secretary of defense should he win the election. But Perot, reached later by telephone, said he had never met Robertson and knew nothing about him. “My theory is that, if the guy had ever met me, he wouldn’t offer me a job of that importance.”

Although he made his mark in religion, Robertson comes by politics naturally. His father was A. Willis Robertson, a powerful conservative Democrat who served Virginia in the U.S. Senate for two decades.

Studied Law

Pat Robertson specialized in tax law at Yale Law School, although he never passed the Bar after graduation. He married Adelia Elmer, a nursing student he met at Yale, and the couple have four children and four grandchildren. After Yale, he worked briefly as a financial analyst for W. R. Grace & Co., an episode Robertson now highlights to emphasize his business credentials, and also chaired a local New York campaign committee for Democratic presidential hopeful Adlai E. Stevenson in 1956, something left off the official biography these days.

Robertson says the change in his life came shortly after the Stevenson campaign, when he had dinner with a Dutch evangelist at a ritzy Philadelphia restaurant. He said he began to realize how empty his life was, and that led him to give his life to Jesus. He then enrolled in the New York Theological Seminary.

Ordained as a Baptist minister, Robertson embraced the growing charismatic movement, characterized by a belief in an intense, personal relationship with God and what are known as his “gifts”--supernatural powers enabling the faithful to speak in tongues as well as cure the sick and accomplish miracles through prayer. Illnesses from cancer to blindness to broken bones have been healed through his ministry, Robertson has written.

God gives him frequent guidance, Robertson says. “I was praying one day in 1969, and the Lord spoke plainly to my inner man: ‘The stock market is going to crash,’ ” Robertson wrote in “The Secret Kingdom,” published in 1982. “This was startling, for I hadn’t even been thinking about the stock market. Then he added, ‘Only the securities of your government will be safe.’ In 1969 the stock market went to pieces. . . .”

Other predictions have not borne out quite as well. A Robertson newsletter predicted world financial chaos in the early 1980s followed by a 1982 nuclear war. The newsletter was discontinued in 1982.

Instructions From Above

Robertson also says he was following instructions from the Almighty in 1959 when he bought a run-down, debt-ridden television station in Portsmouth, Va., and created the first religiously oriented channel in the country. Over the years it grew into CBN.

Although he no longer appears regularly, Robertson long used the “700 Club” show as a pulpit. There is little candidate Robertson talks about these days that he has not preached for years on television.

A prominent theme is America’s drift into a valueless society, with absolute standards of right and wrong considered passe.

Robertson insists that he is not out to Christianize the nation. Nevertheless, “it’s amazing that the Constitution of the United States says nothing about the separation of church and state,” Robertson told the Conservative Digest in a 1986 interview. “That phrase does appear, however, in the Soviet constitution. . . . People in the education Establishment, and in our judicial establishment, have attempted to impose Soviet strictures on the United States. . . . “

In “The Secret Kingdom,” Robertson details a lengthy scenario for the world’s future based on his reading of the book of Ezekiel, which says a regathered Israel will one day be invaded by countries from the north and east. Robertson identifies these as possibly the Soviet Union, Ethiopia, Iran, Somalia or Libya and countries of Eastern Europe.

‘A Great Shaking’

He says God will then intervene on Israel’s behalf with a “great shaking,” possibly earthquakes and volcanoes, and “a fire falling on the land of Magog.” He interprets that to possibly mean a nuclear bombing of the Soviet Union.

“At the same time,” Robertson wrote, “the Book of Revelation appears to point to a successor kingdom to the Roman Empire that could roughly parallel the current European Economic Community.” This could be a forerunner “of what is called the Antichrist,” he wrote. “Presumably, this group will make a league with Israel and then turn on her and begin to oppress her.”

Robertson blames much of the suffering of the world on the forces of Satan. For example, his 1984 book, “Answers to 200 of Life’s Most Probing Questions,” says schizophrenia in certain individuals could be caused by demon possession. And, in the same book, he warns that international interfund bank transfer systems as well as so-called “smart cards,” a new generation of credit cards encoded with personal and financial data, could be a manifestation of the Biblical warning that the Antichrist will stamp his mark on everyone during his reign on Earth.

In 1982, Robertson called for a boycott of Halloween, which he decried as “a satanic ritual.”

Robertson advocates a strongly interventionist foreign policy, calling, for example, for the formation of an elite hit squad to eliminate terrorists who threaten or kidnap Americans. Anti-communist movements and governments are deserving of strong U.S. backing, Robertson says.

Quarantining AIDS Victims

Robertson says the medical Establishment is misinforming Americans about the AIDS crisis and predicts that quarantining of AIDS victims will eventually become necessary. “The only true solution to AIDS is sexual abstinence outside of marriage and fidelity within marriage,” Robertson says.

Divorce contributes to poverty among women and illiteracy and should be avoided except in cases of extreme cruelty or abuse, Robertson says. And, in marriage, he says the Bible teaches that a man is to be the “priest” of the home. “But, as long as the husband is following the mandate of the Lord, the wife should submit to his leadership, even though she may disagree with it,” Robertson wrote in “Answers.”