Among other things, Pat Robertson changed our presidential elections.
When he ran for the Republican nomination in 1988, everyone knew that if you wanted to get elected president, you needed to build a huge direct-mail database. But Robertson didn’t build a direct-mail database in order to run for president, he ran for president in order to build his direct-mail database.
I’m sure Robertson would also have loved to have been president. He may have wanted to win, but he didn’t expect to win and he didn’t need to win. Winning was never part of his business model as a candidate. Winning wasn’t the plan. The plan was names, addresses, and phone numbers — millions of them.*
This is what Pat Robertson did, for decades: He collected names, addresses, and phone numbers. And then he sent mailings to all of those people, over and over and over again. These were fundraising letters, mostly, some political, some for support of his “ministry(ies),” although the line separating those things was always fuzzy.
Robertson also sold things to the millions of people on his mailing lists. Most of what he sold was garbage — monthly subscriptions to herbal supplements and “sentergistic” health shakes, commemorative coin schemes, precious metal investment scams, and the like. I suspect the income from those sales was less important to him than the information gathered from respondents’ willingness to buy such crap. That information helped to refine his lists, sharpening the pitch and modulating the frequency of his already frequent, incessant fundraising appeals.
The direct mail list Robertson collected from his idiosyncratic long-shot presidential bid became the basis for the “Christian Coalition,” the organization that shaped and dominated white evangelical political engagement for most of the 1990s. The Christian Coalition changed American politics, helping to make Newt Gingrich Speaker of the House in 1994, but that, too, seems like it was mostly a side-effect for Robertson. For him, the main thing the Christian Coalition did was bring in more names and addresses while providing a steady supply of hooks for years of direct-mail fundraising letters.
Again, this is who Pat Robertson was and it is what he did. He was also a niche media mogul and the longtime host of The 700 Club, but that program and the network he built and eventually sold mainly functioned in service of his primary business: direct-mail fundraising.
Pat Robertson was very, very good at this. That’s why he was worth more than $100 million when he died last week.
So why is Robertson often referred to as a “televangelist”** rather than, more accurately, as a “direct-mail fundraiser”? I suppose it’s because those are roughly synonyms. “Televangelist” is simply a euphemism for “direct-mail fundraiser.”
That’s not where the word comes from. An “evangelist” referred to a preacher whose message was focused on religious conversion, and a “televangelist” simply referred to such a preacher who employed the medium of television in an attempt to reach a wider audience of potential converts.
Before televangelism there was radio evangelism, which is where Robertson’s business model was first discovered and exploited. There were — and still are — plenty of radio evangelists who were primarily seeking to preach their gospel of conversion and not just soliciting contributions from the already converted. But those weren’t and aren’t the big names, and none of them could afford the leap to television. The most successful “radio evangelists” were/are — like “televangelists” and like Pat Robertson — people who primarily used the platform as a tool for raising the funds needed to expand the outreach of the platform. Actual “ministry” or “evangelism” in this model is always, at best, a secondary concern.
Having said that, I’m sure that somebody, somewhere, experienced some kind of genuine religious conversion as a result of Pat Robertson’s decades of “televangelism.” That’s probably happened dozens of times over the years. But the donors and monthly supporters of The 700 Club weren’t funding a missionary enterprise designed to seek and to save lost souls. They were funding a fundraising enterprise designed to seek and to soak anyone willing to write them a check.
The “700 Club,” after all, was not named because the goal was to win 700 souls for Jesus. It was named for an initial group of donors who committed to contribute $10 a month to enable Robertson to continue broadcasting so that he would be able to recruit another 700 monthly donors, and so on, and so on. That was what it was for.
The substance of Robertson’s message was consistently awful — politically, theologically, and morally. But that awful substance was also mostly a MacGuffin — a mere device in service of Robertson’s primary mission, which was always, always, always about getting people to write checks that he could cash.
Some worthwhile reflections on the life and death of Pat Robertson from elsewhere:
- Erik Loomis, “Pat Robertson is dead, mourned by no one who can be considered a decent American.”
- Jeet Heer, “Pat Robertson’s Genocidal God Has Called Him Home“
- David Corn, “Left Out of Pat Robertson’s Obits: His Crazy, Antisemitic Conspiracy Theory“
And some relevant past posts here worth revisiting on the happy occasion of Robertson’s death:
- “Dear Pat Robertson, STFU“
- “Untrustworthy spirits: Pat Robertson and Eliphaz“
- “Speaking truth of the dead“
- “The duty of speaking ill of the dead“
* Pat Robertson demonstrated the lucrative viability of campaigning as a business model and his approach has been imitated by dozens of “candidates” ever since. These aren’t “vanity” candidates caught up in the delusion that they have any chance of winning. They’re side-hustle candidates — people who aren’t trying to win, just to establish a public profile, a network, and a mailing list they can exploit for money-making opportunities that don’t entail the responsibility and accountability that would come with elected office. (In some cases, I suppose, they are vanity candidates, but they’re being used by political consultants as the basis for their own side-hustle. See: Carson, Ben).
** Kate Shellnut scrupulously avoids the term “televangelist” in her Robertson obit for Christianity Today, choosing instead to describe him as a “broadcast pioneer” and a “TV executive.”
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