Robertson Runs Wild Behind Our Deference to Religion

You would have to be a saint to keep from laughing at some of the things that Pat Robertson has said. After all, this is the founder of the Christian Broadcast Network who, in a staff meeting of his “700 Club” televangel show, predicted that the world would end in 1982 and asked one of his producers for ideas about how to televise the second coming of Christ. This is the man who prayed a hurricane away from his Virginia Beach headquarters. “Skeptics may offer other explanations,” Robertson writes in a book aptly titled “Beyond Reason,” “but I know it was God’s power that spared this region and our CBN tower.” Skeptics would have to take out a new lease on wonder to credit Robertson’s account of how he decided to buy his UHF television station in the first place: “God came to me while I was praying and said, ‘Congress is going to pass a bill requiring all television sets to be equipped with UHF.’ ”

Not all of God’s tips to Robertson were that good: “Don’t fire Jim Bakker,” he advised Robertson back when Jim and Tammy Faye were learning the ropes at the Christian Broadcast Network.

Secularists are likely to feel two conflicting reactions to such anecdotes:

1--That Robertson is either an utter fool or a smarmy con man, preying on the credulity of people so hard up for hope that they will believe in tacky miracles.

2--Or that it is wrong to have reaction No. 1 because belief should not be mocked.

Reaction No. 2 is worth exploring. The prohibition on criticizing religious belief, no matter how crude its form, may be the last remaining taboo in American life. In recent years something of the same protection from abuse that surrounds ethnic and racial minorities--in public contexts, at any rate--has been extended to fundamentalists.

In the 1920s, the last time that the fundamentalist impulse was so strong in our American culture, the Scopes “monkey trial” brought public ridicule down on fundamentalism, frustrating its political agenda. Since the ‘20s, however, our secular culture has lost confidence. How can you believe in the beneficence of science, that ‘20s verity, after Hiroshima? How can you believe in progress after the Holocaust? Believing in nothing ourselves, who are we secularists to laugh at those who seem to believe in everything, including that God knows what Congress will do about UHF television? We have come to regard literal biblical faith not as something to be debated and challenged on its truth value but rather as something to be patronized in the name of tolerance. After all, we say, no one has a monopoly on truth. Thus does modern relativism help to preserve pre-modern faith. Praise the Lord and pass the irony.

So it is out of bounds to laugh at Pat Robertson or his followers (picture them as ethnics in doubleknits). Certainly Robertson’s rivals for the Republican presidential nomination are not laughing at him. Instead, they are pandering to him, because they know that once the caucus states are out of the way (he didn’t win in Michigan, but fears persist that a “secret army of Christians” will swamp the Iowa caucus) Robertson will probably have to withdraw from the race, leaving his supporters up for grabs.

The pandering of the other candidates reflects a sea change in American politics. In the 1950s, when a religious person was as likely to vote Democratic as Republican, religion was just not a predictor of voting behavior. Now, according to political analysts, churchgoing is among the strongest predictors of a Republican vote. Long on America’s side, God has now apparently thrown in his lot with America’s Grand Old Party. That’s why Robertson’s rivals, recapitulating the attitude of the secular culture toward fundamentalism, won’t dare challenge him.

Besides the cultural reasons for not laughing at Robertson (he’s just doing his own thing) and the political reasons (the 35 or so million born-again Christians out there) there is the matter of what his campaign stands for. Robertson gives lip service to fighting communism and unchaining our shackled entrepreneurs, but these are Republican cliches. His real message is a lament born of nostalgia for an America that no longer exists: one in which divorce does not end half of all marriages, in which more than 1 million “therapeutic” abortions do not take place every year, in which teen-age pregnancy is not epidemic among inner-city girls, in which drugs are not an inevitable rite of passage for affluent and poor youth alike, in which homosexuality is still the love that dare not speak its name and not just another “life style.” Except for his slurs against homosexuals (Robertson has said that AIDS can be spread by sneezing--a disgraceful and ignorant inducement to social panic), it is hard to laugh at his lament for that lost America.

Robertson’s nostrums for our moral ills, however, are mostly pathetic Band-Aids (appoint Right-thinking justices to the Supreme Court) when they are not unconstitutional (elect only believers to office). Still, at a time when national self-flattery is almost a duty for politicians, he concentrates our minds on the unholy mess that we seem to have made of the promise of American life.

“Everything that’s solid melts into air.” That could be Pat Robertson decrying the value-destroying pace of change. In fact, it is Karl Marx, describing the revolutionary nature of capitalism, its power to transform, release, create and destroy. Much that was once solid in American society--marriage, the sanctity of life, the innocence of childhood--has melted into air. The fundamentalist critique of America is right on that point. But you won’t hear Robertson say a word against the force responsible for much of that melting--market capitalism, which through advertising, to cite one example, has accomplished the sexualization of an entire society. Pat won’t knock materialism. His is a gospel without the Sermon on the Mount. Thus he can deplore contemporary decadence while celebrating its chief cause.

Perhaps it’s unfair to expect coherence from the author of “Beyond Reason.” One can wish, though, that he were a little more, well, upright. He has repeatedly denied saying things that he did say, including that only Christians and Jews should be allowed to hold government office. In a less righteous man (or a less protected one) these denials would be called lies. In a libel trial that is scheduled to begin on Super Tuesday we will find out whether Robertson also lied about his service in Korea. He is suing Pete McCloskey, the former California congressman, for saying that Robertson’s father, then a U.S. senator, pulled strings to keep his son out of combat in Korea. McCloskey, a fellow Marine officer, says that he is sure of his ground. The jury will decide.

One thing is certain. If the jury rejects Robertson’s libel charge and he is branded both a liar and a slacker, the ensuing scandal will not be a new Scopes trial, bringing televangelism under withering public ridicule. We had our Scopes trial last year, in the grotesque shape of the Bakker scandal, and this year Bakker’s old colleague is running a virtually uncriticized race for President. The abiding significance of the Robertson candidacy may be this: Secular culture has not only lost the authority that it had in the ‘20s; it also has been replaced by a culture of celebrity in which everything is permitted. God help us.