Pat Robertson Quits as Chief of Coalition

Pat Robertson, the evangelical minister who catapulted his family values and television audience into a muscular political movement, announced Wednesday that he is retiring as president of the Christian Coalition.

His departure is likely to further dim from the spotlight an organization that, in its heyday of the 1990s, delivered a newly empowered group of conservative Christian voters to the Republican base.

“He put a massive organization together of people who’d not been traditional Republicans before,” said GOP operative Edward J. Rollins, who handled President Reagan’s 1984 reelection campaign. “He never elected a president, but he made Christians part of the Republican Party base.”

Robertson, 71, provoked furor recently when he suggested after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that God “had lifted his protection from us” because of the nation’s lack of morality. The comment came on his television program, “The 700 Club,” where fellow evangelist Jerry Falwell said blame for the attacks had to be shared by liberals, gays, the American Civil Liberties Union and advocates of abortion rights.

“God will not be mocked,” Falwell said. “And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad.”

Robertson distanced himself from Falwell’s remarks, but the damage was done.

Robertson had already been under pressure to resign from some quarters on the right, who resented his comments to CNN in April condoning China’s one-child policy as a necessary measure of population control. “It is time for the grand old man of the religious right to retire,” wrote conservative commentator Doug Patton.

Robertson has talked about returning to the ministry for several years. “My heart is on missions and on getting people into the kingdom of God,” he told Newsweek during the 2000 presidential campaign, months after GOP candidate John McCain had castigated him as the Louis Farrakhan of the right.

Now, Robertson says, he wants to spread his influence not through politics but through the ministry, particularly in some of the 90 countries where his Christian Broadcasting Network operates.