The Americans United for Separation of Church and State has also long been monitoring Robertson’s assorted publications and The 700 Club. In 1996 Robert Boston, assistant director of communications for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, published The Most Dangerous Man in America? Pat Robertson and the Rise of the Christian Coalition. From this account, and from my own knowledge, Robertson seems to possess all the key characteristics of a Double High authoritarian.[*]
According to Boston, Robertson’s domineering personality was apparent from the earliest days of his born-again experience, when he headed off to a month-long religious retreat in Canada while his wife was seven months pregnant. Despite the fact that she had another small child to care for and the family was desperately poor, Robertson insisted on taking the trip. Later, when he went to purchase the UHF television station that would become the base of his operation, “with considerable bluster, Robertson confronted the owner…with the announcement, ‘I’m Pat Robertson. God has sent me here to buy your television station.’”[69] Since 1987, Robertson has been calling for the government to assassinate foreign leaders he does not like. For example, he has said, “I know it sounds somewhat Machiavellian and evil, to think that you could send a squad in to take out somebody like Osama bin Laden, or to take out the head of North Korea. But isn’t it better to do something like that, to take out Milosevic, to take out Saddam Hussein, rather than to spend billions and billions of dollars on a war that harms innocent civilians and destroys the infrastructure of a country? It would just seem so much more practical to have that flexibility.”[70]
As with most Double Highs, Robertson does not view women as equals. On one occasion he proclaimed, “There’s never been a woman Grandmaster chess player. And if, you know, once you get one, then I’ll buy some of the feminism, but until that point,” he was having nothing to do with the female mind.[*] He contemporaneously issued a fund-raising letter declaring that the “feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians.”[71] Robertson has an unequivocal view of a woman’s true role: “The woman should be in submission to the man,” he declared flatly. On racial equality, Robertson remains silent. His father, Willis Robertson, who served fourteen years in the House of Representatives and twenty in the Senate, made a career of blocking civil rights legislation. He was one of nineteen senators to sign the infamous Southern Manifesto criticizing the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. Pat, a bit less blatantly, “supported the apartheid government in South Africa until the very end.”[72]
The most compelling evidence of his desire for personal power is his bid to become president of the United States. After purportedly being told by God, “I want you to run for president,” Robertson launched a somewhat less than heavenly campaign, but one certainly befitting a Double High. Boston reported that only days after he announced his candidacy, the “Wall Street Journal broke a story reporting that Robertson had been lying about the date of his wedding for years in an effort to conceal that his wife was more than seven months pregnant when the ceremony occurred.”[73] Robertson managed to sidestep the matter, though, excusing his own premarital sexual activity because it took place before he was born again. Robertson faced a similar criticism regarding inconsistent claims about his IQ, which at various times was announced as 159, then 139, and then 135, and many wondered how this Yale Law School graduate had been unable to pass the bar exam. When he lost his presidential bid—badly—Robertson formed what has become the most important of the religious right’s organizations, the Christian Coalition. He operated largely behind the scenes, hiring the less controversial Ralph Reed to run day-to-day operations. But Robertson’s desire for personal power has never waned, and with the Christian Coalition claiming millions of members and almost two thousand state and local branches, he now has a chokehold on the Republican Party.
Robertson again achieved dubious notoriety as a result of the statement he made about Ariel Sharon, shortly after Israel’s prime minister suffered a stroke. Robertson told his 700 Club viewers that the “prophet Joel makes it very clear that God has enmity against those who ‘divide my land.’ God considers [Israel] to be his.” Robertson insisted that Sharon’s withdrawal of troops and settlers from the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank “was dividing God’s land. And I would say woe unto any prime minister of Israel who takes a similar course to appease the EU, the United Nations, or the United States of America. God says, ‘This land belongs to me. You better leave it alone.’”[74] His remarks were met with understandable outrage. Time magazine, among others, suggested that Robertson issue an apology because he was undermining the efforts of a group of evangelicals who were planning to build a $50 million Evangelical Heritage Center on the Sea of Galilee. Israel has agreed to provide the land and infrastructure for the project, with the funding and the center’s details left to the evangelicals. Time explained that it is potentially a highly lucrative deal for both Israel and the evangelicals, for it is anticipated that the center will host as many as a million visitors a year, who will generate $1.5 billion in revenues.[75] Robertson apologized.
Although Robertson has long supported Israel, he has a history of making anti-Semitic remarks. “In Robertson’s evangelical end-time scenario, Jews are simply pawns who help usher in the second coming of Christ,” Robert Boston wrote. Robertson “believes that a mass conversion of Jews to Christianity will occur before Jesus returns to usher in the end of the world. In Robertson’s view, the creation of Israel was a necessary component in this eschatological drama.”[76] Robertson’s anti-Semitism surfaced in his New World Order book. In typical Robertson—and Double High Authoritarian—fashion, he has claimed on one occasion that the book was ghosted, and on another that he wrote it himself. Whichever the case, he has never disavowed the book’s contents. It is a bizarre tale of conspiracy, in which Robertson claims there is a secret plot afoot by the Freemasons, the Illuminati, the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Affairs, the Federal Reserve, and unidentified European bankers to create a world government under the United Nations. This new government will be taken over by the Antichrist, resulting in Armageddon, with half the world’s population being eliminated. The book made the New York Times best-seller list. Michael Lind wrote a two-part review of it in the New York Review of Books exposing the book’s anti-Semitic sources, which put Robertson on the defensive, and without explanation for his anti-Semitism. Maybe the most suitable review of New World Order was from Joe Queenan in the Wall Street Journaclass="underline"
The New World Order is a predictable compendium of the lunatic fringe’s greatest hits…. Mr. Robertson weaves a wild tale of international and extraterrestrial conspiracies, involving everyone from deposed Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza to Alger Hiss to Woodrow Wilson—an unwitting tool of Satan, whose role in the establishment of the Federal Reserve eventually resulted in the nation’s abdication to the most Machiavellian creature of all time: Paul Volcker…. Still, as paranoid pinheads with a deep distrust of democracy go, he’s a bit of a disappointment…. Where, for example, is the stuff about JFK’s secret meeting with Martin Borman in the Bermuda Triangle? Where is the stuff about extraterrestrials visiting the Mayans and telling them to give the Spear of Longinus to Elvis?[77]
*
While Robertson has many traits of social dominators and right-wing authoritarians, I am focusing only on those directly relating to the defining elements of social dominance, and indirectly to his right-wing authoritarianism. These elements are domination, opposition to equality, desire for personal power, and amorality.
*
At the time he made the statement, however, Zsuza Polgar, at twenty-one years of age, had already become the first woman ever to earn the designation Grandmaster, the World Chess Federation’s title for top-ranked players. She was followed the next year by Pia Cramling, and then by Zsuza’s little sister, who became the youngest Grandmaster at age fifteen.