Pat Robertson’s death June 8 in Virginia was something of the end of an era. The 93-year-old was described by one source as “an American media mogul, …  broadcaster, political commentator, presidential candidate, and Southern Baptist minister.” The attributes might have been listed in alphabetical order, but my guess is that those weren’t necessarily how Robertson himself might have ranked them. 

He was a minister. Yes, he was a Yale-educated law graduate, but he never practiced law. Though he was a businessman, even his businesses had a Christian focus. His detractors might say he sold Christianity. But perhaos spreading the Christian message means using the things of the world—mass media, networks, and politics—to help do just that. 

If I had to identify what about Pat Robertson stood out the most for me as a Catholic, I’d say it was his impact on the pro-life movement — an impact with consequences far beyond pro-life activism. 

For those of us old enough to remember the early years after Roe v. Wade, the pro-life movement had a very strong Catholic flavor. “Keep your rosaries off our ovaries!” didn’t originate with pro-abortion students at Georgetown who make pro-lifers run their gauntlet at each January’s Cardinal O’Connor Conference for Life. It was a regular feature of bigotry co-opted by pro-abortionists who back then were trying to stoke anti-Catholicism (including its gases left in Protestantism) to marginalize the right-to-life cause. 

Protestant pro-lifers were not visible, but they were there. Lots of people forget that, in November 1972, just three months before Roe was handed down, referenda to legalize abortion went down handily to defeat in Michigan and North Dakota. Neither state had Catholic majorities in 1972. 

In early 1976, as Southern Baptist Jimmy Carter’s presidential star was rising, he was still making noises suggesting discomfort with Roe. I think lots of people — Protestants and Catholics — thought he might do something to rein in the abortion license. (Gerald Ford was only in favor of sending the abortion issue back to the states). 

As Carter’s presidency unfolded, it became clear his administration was firmly advancing a pro-abortion agenda. By 1978, Protestant evangelicals — feeling betrayed by Carter — started organizing politically. Jerry Falwell and, later, Pat Robertson played no small part in that effort. 

Evangelicals, hitherto largely content to express their convictions at the ballot box on Election Day, started getting politically active. Today’s religiously pluralistic right-to-life movement (which also now includes Muslims and atheists while always having had smaller contingents of Orthodox Jews and Christians) is the result.

Those men seized a moment. Until that time, American literature painted a caricature of Evangelical and fundamentalist Christians as illiterate Appalachian hicks hooting at the Scopes trial, or followers of religious frauds like Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry, or political panderers like Matthew Harrison Brady in Inherit the Wind.

Robertson and Falwell broke that stereotype. To some degree the road was easier because, as Father Richard Neuhaus noted, the Protestant “Mainline” — Episcopalians, Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans and some Baptists — had become the “old line,” whose cultural influence was waning in direct proportion to their accommodation to “modernity.” Robertson and company argued Christianity’s mission was not to bless the zeitgeist but to challenge it.

By joining pro-life efforts, Robertson helped devise something of a “moral ecumenism.” Rather than battling others with dueling biblical references, Evangelicals discovered they could make practical common cause with Catholics, and that followers of the “papal antichrist” might sometimes also be the good guys. It was a development not lost on Pope St. John Paul II, who spoke of the value of common moral witness even when doctrinal differences remained.

The fact that, in 1994, an informal grouping of people from both sides could produce the document “Evangelicals and Catholics Together” — a document Robertson endorsed — would probably not have happened absent that practical spadework. It was the spadework that happened in marches for life and the “getting to know each other” that mutual cultural challenges in the 1980s brought about.

Robertson is probably most remembered for his Christian Broadcasting Network, though CBN dated back to the 1960s. Television in that era was dominated by the networks: ABC, CBS and NBC. They occupied the limited (channels 2-13) VHF TV dial. Niche broadcasters — CBN or the emerging Hispanic-focused Telemundo — were consigned to the snowy channels of UHF.

Robertson (like EWTN’s Mother Angelica) saw the potential for Christian programming in the mass media and, later in the 1980s, in the shift from over-air broadcasts to cable television. His CBN and 700 Club both normalized the appearance of religious programming and capitalized on the possibilities of broadcasting for religious discussion and debate. Compared to more “domesticated” and “official” programming, people like Robertson (and Mother Angelica) broke out of boxes and paved new ways to use media for religious ends.

What impressed me was the smile with which almost always Robertson welcomed his viewers. Critics might attack Robertson for fueling “culture wars.” Anybody who’s honest has to admit that, looking around at the world, we are in a battle for the culture, which is in a battle for the individual. The only people who deny that seem either willfully blind or prone to preemptive surrender. 

Love and sex are foundational to any society. Their meaning is not utterly individualistic or indeterminate, though many in our society would assert that. Writing about Robertson, Washington Post editorialist Karen Attiah claimed he stoked “hatred” and a “climate of hatred” by denying whatever the individual titled as “love” or love’s consequences. 

That is a fundamental cultural chasm. Christians, for whom “love” is measured by a true, life-giving, faithful God who is Love, seem to have a stake in the battle for what are ultimately questions about the truth of God and man.