Conservatives Without Conscience

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 Journal: