Jesus Christ said, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God” and Marion Gordon “Pat” Robertson had an estimated net worth of $100 million at the time of his death.
Robertson turned a tiny Virginia station into the global Christian Broadcasting Network, advocated a conservative Christian ideology and helped make religion central to Republican Party politics in America through his Christian Coalition, died today. He was 93.
The Baptist minister used mass communitcation to turn evangelicals into a powerful political constituency and convince religious Christians to support a Republican Party whose aims are antithetical to the philosophy and principles espoused by Jesus Christ.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently responded to an advertising campaign funded in part by the family behind Hobby Lobby, as well as other Christian groups and anonymous donors, which plans to spend $2 billion over several years.
“Something tells me Jesus would not spend millions of dollars on Super Bowl ads to make fascism look benign,” wrote Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter.
Robertson persuaded religious Christians to back Republican goals that contradict the beliefs and standards taught by Jesus Christ, but it became one of the most powerful political organizations in America.
After segregationist parents refused to relent and side-stepped Brown v. Board through self-titled “school choice” that made it possible for parents who were allowed to maintain their racist values by sending their children to private Christian academies, they became central to the GOP’s ‘Southern Strategy.’
Critics have argued that Christian nationalism promotes racist tendencies, male violence, anti-democratic sentiment, and revisionist history. Christian nationalism in the United States is also linked to political opposition to gun control laws and strong cultural support for interpretations of the Second Amendment that protect the right of individuals to keep and bear arms.
Today’s so-called parental rights activists have adapted from the scripts of old racist and homophobic ideas, conspiracy theories asserting Marxist indoctrination and a dash of QAnon rhetoric, accusing political opponents of attempting to groom and sexualize children—just like works of the Devil that Robertson cultivated in the garden of conservative Christian nationalism.
That essentially envisions a pure American body that is heterosexual, white, native-born, that speaks English as a first language, and that is thoroughly patriarchal.
Florida governor Ron DeSantis, Doug Mastriano—who has called the separation of church and state “a myth”— along with Congresswomen Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert and Mary Miller are prominent figures in the fundamentalist Christian nationalist movement.
“People in the grip of these delusions, cherry-picking their way through Holy Scripture without a shred of context to justify their hate, do indeed have a powerful belief system,” according to American Studies professor S. Jonathon O’Donnell. “But it has less to do with Christianity in any recognizable form than with the sanctification of entirely secular cultural passions with the unshakable faith owed only to God given to politicians.”
Political analyst Jared Yates Sexton has said: “Republicans recognize that QAnon and Christian nationalism are invaluable tools” and that these belief systems “legitimize antidemocratic actions, political violence, and widespread oppression”, which he calls an “incredible threat” that extends beyond Trumpism.
As longtime political observer Ed Kilgore wrote, “It’s probably about time to conclude once and for all that Christianity and nationalism are essentially incompatible because the latter always swallows the former. It was true in the Spanish Civil War, when priests blessed fascist murderers on the grounds that their ‘godless’ victims would enjoy eternal life if they confessed before being shot. It was true in Nazi Germany, when the Faith Movement of German Christians tried to excise Jewish influences from the Bible. It’s true in Russia, where the criminal regime of Vladimir Putin has managed to fuse Stalinism with religious orthodoxy, to the cheers of American Evangelicals who admire Putin’s homophobia and ‘manly’ virtues.”
Christianity and nationalism are incompatible, but burying one of the prime instigators is not going to end this widespread dreadful affliction.
Pulitzer Prize winning author Chris Hedges pointed out that the Supreme Court is relentlessly empowering Christian fascism by ending the constitutional right to an abortion, forcing states to finance religious enterprises, allowing employers to deny birth control coverage, ruling that discrimination laws do not apply or that a Catholic social services agency could refuse to let same-sex couples take in foster children.
These are the fruits of Robertson’s assault on American values which were made using the cross as a blunt instrument and the Bible as a pack of lies.