Pat Robertson

Marion Gordon "Pat" Robertson was an American televangelist, media executive, and political figure who built one of the largest religious broadcasting operations in the world. He founded the Christian Broadcasting Network in 1960 and presented its flagship programme, The 700 Club, almost continuously from 1966 until 2021, making him one of the most familiar faces of American evangelical television for more than half a century.

Born in Lexington, Virginia, in 1930, he was the son of A. Willis Robertson, a long-serving United States senator. He took a law degree from Yale in 1955, failed the bar exam, and then experienced a religious conversion that turned him toward ministry. He was ordained as a Southern Baptist in 1961.

In 1977 he founded what became Regent University in Virginia Beach, and in 1988 he ran for the Republican presidential nomination, finishing second in the Iowa caucuses before losing to George H. W. Bush. The infrastructure built around his campaign was reorganised in 1989 as the Christian Coalition, an organisation credited with mobilising evangelical voters as a Republican voting bloc into the 2000s.

His broadcast remarks repeatedly produced political controversy, including statements blaming natural disasters and terror attacks on what he framed as American moral decline. He stepped down as CEO of CBN in 2007, handed daily presentation of The 700 Club to his son in 2021, and died at home in Virginia Beach in June 2023.

The forename Pat in his case is a short form of Patrick, here used as a pen and broadcast name rather than the legal Marion that appeared on official documents. Patrick comes from the Latin Patricius, meaning a member of the Roman patrician class, and his decision to use the shorter informal version reflected the conversational, plain-spoken register he cultivated on television.