Writing about Pat Robertson, much less attempting to assess his legacy, is a formidable challenge. Most people know him for his controversial, off-the-cuff comments—the claim to have turned aside Hurricane Felix by prayer or blaming the 9/11 tragedy on feminists and gay activists—or as the genial host of his cable television program the 700 Club. But as David Edwin Harrell's biography amply demonstrates, this notoriety is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Over the past fifty years, Robertson has assembled an enormous media empire, founding the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) in the early 1960s, and pioneering the use of cable and satellite telecommunications. In 1978 he launched CBN University, which became Regent University in 1990, complete with five accredited graduate colleges and its own law school. Robertson is an international force as well, adapting the 700 Club format into a variety of other cultural settings, from Hispanic and Filipino to Hindi and Indonesian. In the 1990s CBN also launched a highly successful humanitarian outreach; by 2008 its Operation Blessing was one of the one hundred largest American aid organizations, with annual revenues close to $280 million.
And of course, Robertson ran for president in 1988. His early primary successes in Michigan and Iowa shocked the political establishment, and demonstrated for the first time the electoral potential of the conservative evangelical grass roots. After finishing a respectable third behind George H. W. Bush and Bob Dole, Robertson became a genuine Washington power broker. He was the one who deputized a young graduate student, Ralph Reed, and founded the Christian Coalition, solidifying his campaign euphoria into a much more permanent evangelical political presence.
Throughout his career, Robertson has insisted that he is not an evangelist or “TV preacher” but a businessman and an entrepreneur, and certainly Harrell's book provides ample justification for that claim. He emerges as a shrewd, sometimes tough manager of people with an eye for talent and an unsentimental willingness to dispose of incompetent staff when necessary. The son of a Virginia senator and graduate of Yale Law School, Robertson bears little resemblance to the popular stereotype of the slick television fundraiser. He entered the ministry after a charismatic conversion and took his first post in New York's poverty-stricken Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. CBN began in a rickety old radio station in Norfolk, Virginia, dependent on meager donations from a handful of listeners. But clearly Robertson knew in his bones how to parlay one success into something more. In 1997, his cable station, offering a string of family-friendly situation comedies, game shows, and of course the 700 Club, was sold to Fox Kids Worldwide for somewhere around $1.9 billion, providing generous financing for many new Robertson ventures. Behind the folksy 700 Club persona is a well-educated man of privilege with enormous personal drive and uncommon entrepreneurial skill.
While Harrell does not avoid mention of Robertson's often grandiose spiritual claims, he is careful to portray him as a centrist figure. To the average unchurched American he might appear as a dangerous buffoon, claiming to have healed a 700 Club viewer's back spasms through prayer or inciting right-wing fears of homosexual agendas. But Harrell is careful to place Robertson's career within its larger religious context, paralleling the rise of a dynamic, worldwide charismatic movement with plenty of its own rough edges. “If Pentecostals and charismatics constitute a lunatic religious fringe,” Harrell writes, then “lunacy has become a worldwide epidemic” (352).
Harrell's page-turning narrative of Robertson's career is must reading for anyone hoping to understand the reach and power of the charismatic movement, both in the United States and abroad. It is essential political history as well, documenting the internal workings of the 1988 campaign in fascinating detail. In 2007 Robertson himself granted Harrell unprecedented access to all of the institutional files of the Christian Broadcasting Network, and to all of his personal correspondence. In addition, Harrell was able to interview Robertson in depth, as well as various family members, his associates on four continents, and many of his critics. There is no doubt that this book will stand for a long time as the definitive account of the evangelical movement's resounding success within the telecommunications revolution of the late twentieth century.
Fully assessing Robertson and his legacy is another, far more complicated project. Harrell is an experienced biographer, having produced a definitive account of Oral Roberts's career as well as an earlier campaign biography of Robertson in 1987; he is also a leading interpreter of American pentecostal and charismatic movements. Despite his personal associations with Robertson, Harrell is careful to insist that he is not an “insider,” but a sympathizer who speaks the language of the charismatic movement and understands its mindset. Certainly he treads delicately through personal matters, including Robertson's anguish over press reports of his son Timothy's premarital conception during the height of his 1988 presidential campaign. He also gives free voice to Robertson's critics, most notably Barry Lynn of Americans United for Separation of Church and State; but critical voices from within the CBN empire are relatively few.
Perhaps it is just too early for a full assessment of Robertson's legacy. Now barely two years out from the Bush administration and in what appear to be the early days of the Tea Party movement, the long-term significance of American evangelicalism is probably anybody's guess. Robertson's enormously successful media empire is one part of the story, but the much more difficult task ahead is to evaluate the full cost of his religious and political career to intelligent, tolerant social discourse. Robertson is certainly not the “wacko” his detractors have constructed; he is a man of enormous importance in American political and cultural history, and there will still be ample opportunity for future scholars to chart the true dimensions of his impact.
