Influential minister, broadcaster, and politician Pat Robertson passed away Thursday at the age of ninety-three. As of this writing, no cause of death has been given, but he is survived by his four children, fourteen grandchildren, and twenty-four great-grandchildren.

Robertson is best known for his roles on The 700 Club and his political involvement, which continues to shape the relationship between evangelical Christians and the Republican party.  In his later years, Robertson tried to focus more on the gospel than other issues, telling Fox News in 2021 that “God is not a Republican” and that he felt led to focus on “eternal matters and not secular politics” at that point in his life. However, politics remain an important part of his legacy.

Given his family history, though, perhaps that should not come as a surprise.

How Pat Robertson’s life led to The 700 Club

Pat Robertson was born on March 22, 1930, and his given name was Marion Gordon Robertson—the moniker of “Pat” came from his brother. His father served in Congress for thirty-six years as a representative from Virginia in the House and Senate while, on his mother’s side, he was related to both William Henry Harrison and Benjamin Harrison, respectively the ninth and twenty-third presidents of the United States.

Robertson went to military school as a child and served with the Marines in the Korean War, though he never saw combat, with some speculating that his father’s influence ensured that he never got too close to the fighting. After the military, he attended Yale Law School, where he did well but failed to pass the bar exam after graduation. While there, though, he met his eventual wife, Dede, who was a nursing student at the time.

Pat spent much of the early years of their marriage in clubs and gambling until an encounter with a traveling evangelist led him to Christ. Shortly thereafter, he went to seminary and graduated with a Master of Divinity in 1959.

While living in a rundown parsonage next to a brothel, Robertson purchased an old, off-air UHF television station in Portsmouth, Virginia, and moved his family there in order to start the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN). Their first show aired on October 1, 1961, as WYAH-TV, an homage to the name of Yahweh. However, the station took off when, five years later, he started The 700 Club.

Over the following decades, both the show and the station rose in prominence, and the influence of Robertson—who served as The 700 Club‘s primary host—rose along with it.

“The most influential figure in American politics” in the 1990s

By the 1970s, Robertson was interviewing global figures like Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, as well as future presidents like Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. That pivot into the political sphere would intensify when Reagan became president and culminated in Robertson making a run at the Republican nomination in the 1988 election.

While most discounted his chances in that race, he finished second in the Iowa caucuses, ahead of then vice president and eventual nominee George H. W. Bush.

Bush eventually pulled ahead and secured both the nomination and the presidency. However, the experience gave Robertson the legitimacy and clout to secure the Christian Coalition, which he started in 1987 to support his campaign, and which gave him a prominent seat at the table of Republican politics throughout the 1990s and beyond. As William Martin said of Robertson’s campaign, “Christians really became mobilized. They had a cause now, they had a champion who was speaking to their pain, speaking to their hearts and was willing to speak out loud.”

That influence reached its peak in 1994 when “it helped to elect the first Republican Congress in decades,” and did so with “a budget of around $25 million and a membership of four million or more.” By the time Robertson stepped down as the Coalition’s leader in 2001, a case could be made that he was “the most influential figure in American politics in the past decade.”

After leaving the Coalition, he continued his work with CBN before entrusting its management to his son, Gordon, in 2007. He remained the primary host of The 700 Club until 2021 when, as part of CBN’s sixtieth-anniversary celebration, he announced that he would turn that responsibility over to Gordon as well. But despite the reduced involvement, Pat continued to be a prominent guest on the program throughout his final years.

When legacies have controversies

Pat Robertson’s influence on the development of evangelical Christianity in America and its relationship to politics is undeniable. However, that influence did not come without controversy. And that controversy points to an important lesson we would all do well to remember today.

Anyone who spends the better part of sixty years as the host of a daily television program is going to say some things that are wrong. Robertson was no exception.

Among the most egregious was his agreement with Jerry Falwell’s statements that 9/11 happened, at least in part, because Americans had grown more accepting of homosexuality, abortion, and a host of other unbiblical positions. Blaming the earthquake that devastated much of Haiti in 2010 on a pact previous generations made with the devil and promising that “God himself” would intervene to keep former President Trump in office following the 2020 election are other examples of false and defamatory claims about God and his purposes.

There were more instances as well. And, while Robertson often walked those statements back in the aftermath, spoken words can never be fully retracted. Those controversies are as much a part of his legacy as the people he helped and the ministries he started. They do not, however, define that legacy.

And the same is true for us as well.

It can be tempting, at times, to compound our mistakes by giving them too much weight and allowing them to diminish the effectiveness of our lives for God’s purposes. That’s not to minimize the consequences of our faults or excuse the severity of sin, but we sin again when we allow guilt over past mistakes to keep us from fully experiencing God’s redemption when it takes place.

So repent when you know you’ve acted or spoken in error, but don’t allow regrets or sins of the past to determine what God can do with your present and future.

He sees more in you than your worst moments and wants to help you do the same.

Will you let him?

Denison Forum

Whether it’s the Great Commission or Christ’s final command prior to his ascension to heaven, Scripture makes clear that our fundamental job as Christians is to help people in every culture know Jesus and follow his word.

Far too often, however, we make the mistake of underestimating how creative God can be in accomplishing that task.

Take, for example, the work of the Bible translation ministry unfoldingWord and their partnership with the Church Growth Project of Chad (Projet Croissance des Eglises au Tchad, or PCET).

Muslim Bible translators are converting to Christianity

The work of the two groups in Chad is unique in that the majority of their translators are Muslim.

Perhaps that should not come as a surprise considering the majority of the population there is Muslim, but they did not necessarily start out with that goal in mind. Rather, their model relies on hiring locals to take on the work of translating Bible stories into their native tongue instead of training outsiders to accomplish the same task. As a result, when they put out the advertisement asking for workers, most of those who responded just happened to be non-Christians.

However, as Rachel Pfeiffer describes, they “noticed that Muslims quickly latched on to the projects for reasons beyond the financial incentive. PCET and unfoldingWord were clear that the materials for translation would be Christian, but Muslim participants saw some of the stories, such as those about Abraham, as part of their religion, too.”

It turns out that many of the same villages and people groups that lacked Christian resources in their native dialect lacked a Qur’an that they could read as well. As such, these stories resonated in a way that went beyond their theological differences.

As Eric Steggerda, field operations manager for unfoldingWord, described, “Many of these languages are struggling for importance in the world, as it were. There’s not much that’s actually in their mother tongue, so they rejoice when they find things that are, because it really speaks to them of the importance of their language . . . . They’re very receptive to the idea of the Bible stories, for example, translated into their mother tongue.”

Along the way, PCET brought in pastors to help ensure that each group’s translations were accurate and free of theological errors, but it was rare for the difference in religion to be an issue. And the work has already begun to bear fruit in amazing ways.

At least two of the Muslim translators converted to Christianity over the course of their work, and many of the imams in the area have been surprisingly open to engaging with the groups in reading the stories to their villages once they’re completed. As a result, the faith has grown, and, as one Chadian leader described, people have come to see that Christianity is not just “a Western product. When they can listen to [the] Word of God in their own language, that changes the narrative.”

However, remote villages in Chad are not the only ways in which God is working to change the narrative about his word.

The Visual Commentary on Scripture

Many of history’s greatest artists have chosen religious themes and stories as the inspiration for their work. However, as the culture grows increasingly secular, the biblical understanding necessary to fully appreciate those works is often lacking. Ben Quash, the chair in Christianity and the Arts at King’s College London, hopes to change that.

To that end, he established the Visual Commentary on Scripture, an open-access online resource that relies on historians and theologians to choose three works of art from any time period to illustrate parts of the Bible.

As Anna Somers Cocks describes, the project invites people to “write a short art-historical commentary on each work and then a longer comparative text discussing their relationship to the biblical passage.” She goes on to note that “many of the art historians who have contributed to the VCS are new to theology, which does not mean expressing subjective religious feelings, but rather using the Bible to provide a scholarly interpretation of the art.”

The result is “an imaginative exercise in reading the Bible as religious people read it and also seeing how art can make the texts and questions of faith come alive again without your needing to be religious,” Quash says. He adds that “what I find most encouraging is that the more progressive and adventurous curators are up for engaging with religion, while the ones who think that it’s terrible or dangerous are the ones who are stuck in the mud.”

So far, the VCS has entries for roughly one-third of the Bible and hopes to finish the rest in the next five years.

Until then, it will continue to open doors and minds to the truth of God’s word, often among those who would never think to open a Bible.

How will you translate the Bible today?

When we talk about segments of the population not having a Bible in their language, our thoughts usually gravitate toward remote villages and local dialects. However, language is about more than just the words that are spoken. Ultimately, translating the Bible is about making God’s word relatable in a way that fosters understanding and encourages people to explore a closer walk with him.

And while there is something unique about the way God communicates through his word, our lives are meant to preach the gospel message as well.

Jesus promised that people would know we are his disciples when they saw his love lived out in us (John 13:35). The religious leaders recognized that Peter and John had been with Jesus because of the passion and power with which they shared the gospel. And the church in Antioch represented the Lord so well that the lost around them came to call them “Christians,” which can be translated as “little Christs” (Acts 11:26).

Every one of us is called to translate the Bible to the people we meet by spending each day as a living embodiment of its message. But what that looks like in your life may be vastly different than what it looks like in mine or anyone else’s.

Ultimately, God is the only One who gets to make that call.

Just don’t be surprised if he does so in a more creative way than you might expect.

Denison Forum