Pat Robertson's pretensions [to be the 1988 Republican nominee for president] were greater than any other candidate.  "I have a direct call and a leading from God to run for president," he said.  Now the Republican primary voters had the opportunity to ratify God’s selection. But if God had decided, why should mere mortals have a veto? What did this say about God? What was He up to?

        America, according to Robertson, was in the throes of "moral death." It could be brought back to health only by the restoration of tradition enforced by the authority of a "Christian nation." But which tradition and which form of Christianity? Robertson admixed his Pentacostalism, the speaking in tongues and laying on of hands, regarded by most fundamentalists as anathema, with even more enigmatic beliefs, from Dispensationalism (the Cold War as nuclear Armageddon) to Reconstructionism (America as ancient Judea). Since Robertson represented a unique religious creed, he stood for only one strand of the religious right.

        His political emergence was a byproduct of the Republican ascendancy. Before the civil rights movement, the Republican Party in the South had been dominated by liberals and moderates, mainly residing in the border states, and almost exclusively belonging to the mainline Protestant churches. The transformation of the Southern GOP began in the Democratic Party. In 1948, Harry Truman set off a momentous chain reaction by openly courting black voters by deed and word. For the first time, the Democratic convention adopted a civil rights plank. The southern Bourbons, led by South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond, split off, forming their own party, the Dixiecrat (or States Rights) Party. Still, the black attachment to the party of Lincoln was not easily broken, even after Roosevelt and Truman. In 1960, Richard Nixon won almost one-third of the black vote.  Four years later, as the debate about civil rights legislation moved toward its climax, the GOP nominated a fierce opponent, Barry Goldwater, who justified his stance with the rhetoric of minimal government, states rights and liberty.

        In 1968, Richard Nixon secured his nomination by forging an alliance at the convention with Thurmond, now converted to the Republican Party. Nixon pursued what was called the "Southern Strategy," campaigning through the use of euphemisms about law-and-order that the voters viscerally understood. But the virulent reaction to civil rights was truly voiced by Alabama governor George Wallace, who railed against "bloc voting" And appealed to ordinary white folks against the "pointy headed" liberal establishment. His independent candidacy, which swept most of the South, almost threw the election into the Electoral College. In 1972, Wallace, running in the Democratic primaries, was removed from the contest by an assassin, who permanently crippled his quarry. In 1976, Wallace served history as a foil to Jimmy Carter, the born-again Christian, whose victory over Wallace was received with enormous relief and gratitude within the Democratic Party. Carter represented the South that had accepted the Second Reconstruction. His triumph was widely seen at the time as a way to put the nation's divisive past behind it.

        Carter's outspokenness about his religion and about the place of morality in public life also galvanized the evangelicals, most of whom initially supported him. Then, in 1978, the Internal Revenue Service denied tax exemptions to white "Christian academies" that had emerged as the alternative to integrated public schools. The cadres of the new right saw their opening. An unknown minister from Lynchburg, Virginia, Jerry Falwell, was recruited in 1979 by Howard Phillips, who is Jewish, to head up anew organization to press the new right cause.  Another new right leader, Paul Weyrich, a Catholic, had come up with its name: Moral Majority. Phillips assured Falwell, who did not want to enter a risky business, that through the miracle of computer-driven direct mail, great sums of money could be raised.

        The strategy of the Republican right was to use social issues to separate the evangelicals, mostly southern Baptists, from their historic allegiance to the Democratic Party. Evangelicals believe that the world  is a sinful place and that souls must be saved out of it. It was precisely on these grounds that most evangelicals kept themselves at a distance from the profane realm of politics: they saw themselves in the world, but not of it. The religious right, however, did not accept this direction; the leap of faith landed in a political position. Sin was redefined as liberalism, or "secular humanism," an antireligious religion; modernity was seen as the form of the anti-Christ.  Everything that the religious right considered part of the fall from grace – from premarital sex to the separation of church and state, from divorce to crime – was  attributed to the demonic power of liberalism.  Redemption from modernity could come only trough the intervention of another worldly force.

        The leaders of the religious right did not try to reconcile their radical theology to the predominant southern Baptist faith. Instead they took over the religion itself and changed the faith to fit the ideology, which was ultimately a justification for the grasping of power.  The key takeover target of the religious right was the Southern Baptist Convention [SBC].  For two decades, since the 1962 Supreme Court prohibited prayers in  public schools, the SBC had endorsed the decision.  With virtual unanimity, he SBC in 1971 supported the right to an abortion.  But in 1979 a tightly organized and well-financed movement of the religious right seized control of the SBC. In 1980, this conservative faction elected as SBC president Bailey Smith, who declared: "God does not hear the prayer of a Jew." In 1982, the SBC condemned the right to legal abortions.  The resolutions committee, which hammered out the language, was in constant touch by telephone with a new right leader, Morton Blackwell, who was at the time a presidential assistant serving in the White House.

        Ronald Reagan’s links to the religious right were forged in the 1980 campaign, when he appeared before a gathering of the of the leadership hastily organized by a new group called the Religious Roundtable.  "You can’t endorse me," he said, "but I endorse you."  His courtship of them was part of his grand Southern Strategy." His first speech in the fall campaign was in favor of states rights, delivered in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights, workers had been brutally murdered during the "Freedom Summer" of 1964.  In his bid for reelection, Reagan offered further encouragement.  At the 1984 GOP convention, he attended a prayer breakfast hosted by the Reverend W. A. Criswell, a patriarch of the religious right, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Dallas, the largest in the country, who had campaigned against John F. Kennedy in 1960 because he was a Catholic, and whose church was a never center in the takeover of the SBC.  Reagan’s effort to shift the evangelicals into the Republican column seemed to be working.  In 1980, 41 percent of southern Baptist ministers considered themselves Democrats and only 29 percent Republicans' in 1984, 66 percent identified themselves as Republicans and 25 percent as Democrats.

        Throughout his presidency, Reagan paid lip service to the social issues of the religious right -- abortion, school prayer, pornography -- while his staff and the Republican leadership of the Senate quietly prevented them from coming to a head. For Reagan, it was the best of all possible worlds. In the meantime, a galaxy of television ministries, operated by a host of right-wing charismatic stars, lit up millions of screens. As the 1988 campaign approached, the religious right had spun out of the control of the conservative movement and was orbiting in its own profitable sphere.

        Marion "Pat" Robertson identified his destiny with the unfolding of an inexorable political scenario: mastery over the religious right would lead to mastery over the conservative movement which, in turn, would dominate the Republican Party and sweep the nation.

        But Reagan had made no prophesy about his successor. He left that to the Republican voters. Also, Robertson's background was very different from Reagan's.  If anything, it most resembled that of George Bush, another senator's son and graduate of Yale. Willis Robertson of Virginia,  in fact, served in the Senate with Prescott Bush, though on the other side of the aisle. . . .

        Willis Robertson was a squire of the Virginia gentry, a stalwart of the local Democratic machine and a domineering and distant father who had mapped out every detail of his son’s life. Pat was sent to Washington and Lee and then Yale Law School; kept out of a combat zone in Korea while in the marines; placed on the staff of the Senate Appropriations Committee; and introduced to appropriate young women of the Tidewater elite — all in the expectation of a political career. Thus began what Hendrik Hertzberg has called Pat Robertson's "oedipal drama." He rebelled by flunking his bar exam and impregnating working-class Catholic girl, whom he married ten weeks before the child was born. He moved his family to a poor black neighborhood in Brooklyn, where he went into business selling audio equipment. Through his mother, a reclusive evangelical, he was introduced to a preacher named Cornelius Vanderbreggen, who taught him how to commune with God by speaking in tongues. "No longer did I remember was the son of a senator," wrote Robertson in his autobiography I was the son of the King."

        It was then that he began to hear the voice of God and have visions.  The first command he received was to leave his wife, eight months pregnant with their second child, and go to the Canadian woods to meditate,  "I'm a nurse," she told him. "I recognize schizoid tendencies when I see them, and I think you’re sick." Her entreaty did not stop him from obeying the voice he heard from on high, then or thereafter Robertson’s God made no demands on him. He was a benign and convenient God, who appeared whenever Robertson happened to be making a decision. He had plans for Robertson, but they always turned out to be the plans Robertson had already made. Unlike his own, God was a permissive father.

    God, for example, told Robertson to buy a bankrupt UHF station in Portsmouth, Virginia, which his mother had informed him was for sale. It was this station that grew into Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network kingdom, complete with the CBN University a collection of Red-brick colonial style buildings, right off the interstate highway (Accordng to Robertson, God, very precisely, said: "l want you to build a school there for My glory, as well as the headquarters building you need, ) It was God who told Robertson not to fire the host of CBN’s kids’ puppet show, Jim Bakker, who had proved to be unreliable. It was God who told him not to pay more than $2.5 million for new electronic equipment. And God told Robertson, even though he had built up a sizeable following through CBN, not to endorse his father’s bid for renomination to the Senate, "I yearned to get into the fray and start swinging" wrote Robertson "but the Lord refused to give me the liberty, ‘I have called you to my ministry,’ he spoke to my heart. ‘You cannot tie my eternal purposes to the success of any political candidate . . . not even your own father.’ " Senator  Robertson narrowly lost. With the counsel of the Father, the father was struck down.

        As the host of his talk show, "The 700 Club," on CBN, Robertson spoke as if his average viewer were a small child. He chuckled nodded his head at any remark he approved and always concluded with an ingratiating smile. He was smiling through the apocalypse.  The second coming of Christ and the end of the world, he believed, would be ushered in by the battle of Armaggedon, to be fought in Israel, sometime soon. "Various people," he wrote in his 1982 book The Secret Kingdom. "have been viewed as Gog and Magog throughout history -- the Goths, the Cretans, the Scythians -- but indications are that this great power from the north may be the Soviet Union, for that nation occupies land specified by Ezekiel." On his television show, when asked if the Bible foretold the future, Robertson answered, "It sure does," and elaborated that it "specifically, clearly, unequivocally [says]. . .that Russia and other countries will enter into war and God will destroy Russia through earthquakes, volcanoes, etc."

        By 1986 Robertson’s visions began to sound like political scenarios. "God’s plan, ladies and gentlemen, is for his people to take dominion," he announced on the May 1 edition of "The 700 Club." "The evangelicals," he said two weeks later, "[are] a force that nobody else really has been reckoning with, but they're going to be one to be reckoned with because God is establishing this." A month later, at a rally, he said: "It was no coincidence that Ronald Reagan was elected president.  It was the direct act of God. . . . The Republican takeover and reversal of direction in this country is no coincidence."

        God, who had instructed Robertson not to get involved in politics, not even his own father's campaign, now directed him to run for president. "Who Is This Man?" was the title of his half-hour campaign video distributed to supporters. It was a collage of images: the Statue of Liberty, the Capitol, golden farmlands.  Suddenly, Robertson appeared interviewing contras.  "Did they kill anybody in your family?" he asked a boy. On the background soundtrack, gunfire crackled. Then, at a rally, Robertson pledged to "decolonize the fringes of the Russian empire." Then, a surreal flood of images: naked women, the covers of pornographic magazines, the marquees of X-rated movie theaters, rock-throwing students from some foreign land and, filling the entire screen with red, simply the word "AIDS." "Moral leadership," promised Robertson.

        But even before Robertson announced his candidacy, his sacred mission was tarnished by profane events. Jim Bakker's righteous empire was now collapsing due to financial chicanery and sexual hijinks. It was Armageddon for the religious right, with lurid revelations of devilish doings spilling out over a period of months, while Jimmy Swaggart (Gog?) and Jerry Falwell (Magog?) battled for control of Bakkers’ PTL remains.  Spirituality had turned into materialism. And the community of virtue and harmony was exposed as an arena of sin and conflict.

        By June 1987, the repackaging of Pat Robertson was furiously under way. A poll in the Atlanta journal and Constitution in March had showed that 69 percent of southern voters would "not consider" voting for Robertson. Focus groups conducted by Robertson's campaign revealed that voters could not distinguish him from Falwell or Swaggart. The voice of God offered no advice, so Robertson turned to Madison Avenue. Constance Snapp, former director of marketing for Wunderman, Ricotta & Kline, a division of Young and Rubicam, who was an evangelical herself and had handled the CBN account, was brought into the campaign. No longer was Robertson to identify himself as an evangelical or as a minister. According to Snapp’s spin, "the Rev. Robertson" was now "Mr. Robertson" and the "television evangelist" was a "Christian broadcaster." Above all, he was to be referred to as a businessman. A new campaign flyer listed his resume: "author lecturer, educator, broadcaster, news commentator." In September he quit his ministry. Religion was officially expunged from his campaign On December 14, he announced, I’ve never been an evangelist in my life

        By claming to be a mere businessman, Robertson demoted his visions. But he had already gambled them when he decided to run.  By sitting on a stage with the other contenders he was casting his visions into a lottery. After all, he was the prophet of God. Who were the other candidates?  If God had selected him, why should the people decide who should have the job?  The danger was especially grave for the faithful; Robertson had turned God into a party boss. Either he trivialized God or made too much of the Republican Party. And if God could not deliver, what did this say about His powers? More, if God was right then the voters who failed to heed Him were flouting His will.  Who were they the instrument of? And what did that make George Bush? What force was leading him?

        To the degree that Robertson’s prophetic mission was not undermined by his own contradictions, it was undone by Ronald Reagan.  Robertson believed that a visionary politics on the right had been mandated by Reagan. He did not understand that only one vision was allowed at a time. And Reagan’s had changed. The apocalyptic one of the religious right was underwritten by the Cold War. Falwell for example, testified in 1983 to the "sad fact" that in a nuclear war the Soviets  would kill 135 million to 160 million Americans, and the United States would kill only three to five percent of the Soviets." Reagan stimulated such talk by his occasional conversations with evangelical visitors in which he appeared to give some credence to Armageddon theology. But with the signing of the INF Treaty, the earlier revelations of the Reagan presidency passed.

        The complications raised by Robertson in setting himself against Reagan were fundamental.  If Reagan was president due to a "direct act of God, then why did he make the treaty? In the edenic scene that Robertson painted, Reagan played Adam and Nancy Reagan played seducing him to bite the apple. "My wife," Robertson told a GOP gathering on October 18,  1987, " does not like Communists. I want to set your minds at ease. She has never suggested that I make an accommodation to the Soviet Union in order to win the Nobel Peace Prize. "

        Robertson began to speak as if the Reagan White House were under the sway of a subversive, possibly satanic, power. In a cassette tape distributed by his campaign, entitled '"What I Will Do as President," Robertson said: "I don't believe that conservatives should be a hunted and endangered species in the White House." He named the enemy within as the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission, who were "propping up communist tyrannies with loans and credits. . . . I make an absolute pledge that I would appoint people who are absolutely free of CFR influence."

        In Iowa, Robertson's antiestablishment theme matched the political context.  The caucuses were beautifully designed for small-scale organization; the anger against the Reagan administration for farm and factory failures ran high; the loss of economic control was often translated into resentment over social permissiveness. In Robertson, 15 percent of the Republican caucus participants saw their salvation. He finished second, ahead of George Bush. Even so, Robertson had not overcome the perception that he had something to do with religion. He bought two full-page ads in the Des Moines Register, featuring his portrait next to John F. Kennedy's, as if they were equivalent figures, hoping to dispel negative connotations of the religion issue.

        Flushed with the Iowa results, Robertson promised that an "invisible army" would suddenly appear to sweep him to greater victories. The invisible worlds of Pat Robertson, seemingly banished by his new vita, now surfaced; the special effects started to get out of hand. In the New Hampshire debate, he claimed that the INF Treaty had a loophole that omitted those Soviet medium-range missiles that were now stationed in Cuba. Peacemaking was leading to war. We were teetering on the brink again. When Robertson finished with his extraordinary revelation, a prophecy of the imminence of World War III, the other candidates smiled and moved on, as if he were a street-corner evangelist.  The next day the White House issued a statement calling Robertson "rash" and "wrong." At a press conference, the president described Robertson's remarks as "strange." His effort to sustain the Cold War by means of political hallucinations was short-lived.

        Robertson also professed to know the location of the American hostages in Lebanon, claiming that "they could have been freed." Unfortunately, he produced no evidence.

        Then Jimmy Swaggart, who had endorsed Robertson, was revealed to have regularly frequented prostitutes. Robertson accused the Bush campaign of timing this disclosure to destroy his campaign.   "Knowing the quality of the people surrounding George Bush," he said in a press conference, "there is nothing that I would not believe they wouldn't do sleazy." To which Bush told reporters, "It's crazy."

        In the South Carolina primary, Robertson donned another identity.  He was now the southern cavalier, in the succession of Confederate leaders, unfurling the symbolism of the Lost Cause. On the edge of Columbia, on February 22, he mustered his remaining troops for his staging of Pickett's Charge into the steel of the Bush campaign. The encampment was at the brand-new Embassy Suites Hotel, a monument to the new South, an island of concrete and glass encircled by highways. In the fern-filled atrium, at the brass and marble bar, young professionals unwound after work with white wine spritzers, cracking jokes about Swaggart's sexual kinks. They seemed oblivious to the five hundred Robertson faithful dutifully filing past them into the ballroom.

        "Recapturing the Greatness of America through Moral Strength" read the banner strung across the platform. Suddenly, the audience was plunged into darkness. A klieg light shone on a local beauty queen. A symphony orchestra of violins played on tape, then a humming male chorus, then bells. The beauty queen sang "The Star Spangled Banner," with curious new words added at the end: "See freedom's dream!"

        The theme song from Rocky boomed. From the rear of the room, Robertson entered. "I was the only one born in Stonewall Jackson's birthplace," he said. "I'm the only one who went to the school where Robert E. Lee was president." He launched into a tirade against the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission. "I intend to preside over Uncle Sam, not Uncle Sucker!" He left to the strains of Rocky.

        But the effort to recreate the Dixiecrat Party within the GOP languished. Robertson could not master the feat of time travel. In the end, the only base that held for Robertson was narrowly religious: the Pentacostals and Charismatics. Other evangelicals rejected him, often on religious grounds; about 70 percent voted against him. On March 5, in South Carolina, he finished third, with just 19 percent of the vote.  He had failed to escape from his image. The Republicans were determined to show that the GOP was their party, not Robertson's. He was George Bush’s salvation in the South.