“After, I think, 54 years of hosting the program, I thank God for everyone that’s been involved and I want to thank all of you,” he told viewers on Friday, adding, “It’s been a great run.”
His son, Gordon Robertson, who will replace him on the flagship program, released a statement saying, “‘Good and faithful’ doesn’t even begin to describe my father’s service to CBN for 60 years. His legacy and the example of his prayer life will continue to lead ‘The 700 Club’ in the years to come.”
But his CBN platform was much more than good television. Founding the Christian Broadcasting Network in 1961, the first Christian network in the United States, he shepherded his flock of white evangelicals to a position of unprecedented political influence within the Republican Party.
In 1987, Robertson, a Yale-educated lawyer, a Marine officer veteran and the son of a U.S. senator from Virginia, leveraged his fame into direct political action, something earlier Christian fundamentalists had shunned. That year he formed the Christian Coalition, later joined by Ralph Reed, the telegenic political strategist. Soon, other evangelical leaders, like the Rev. Jerry Falwell, jumped on their own electoral bandwagons.
Robertson’s personal political high point came in 1988, when he ran for the Republican nomination for president, finishing third in the Iowa primary, behind Bob Dole and George H.W. Bush. In the campaign he claimed, without proof, that the Soviets were hiding missiles in Cuba.
Two years later, in 1990, the Christian coalition introduced ostensibly nonpartisan Christian voter guides, also called “Christian score cards,” handed out at conservative churches or placed on windshields in church parking lots.
“He was very smart,” said Frances Fitzgerald, author of “The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America,” in a phone interview. “He turned his presidential campaign into this notion of organizing from the community base up. It’s what people have been doing ever since. You can’t always do it from a religion platform.”
He also wrote 20 books and founded Regent University, located across the street from CBN studios and headquarters in Virginia Beach, and the American Center for Law and Justice, a Christian activist organization led by sometime Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow.
Robertson’s firm support of former President Trump may well be the last memorable moment of his on-air career. After insisting for weeks that Trump had won, only to be cheated out of office by fraud, Robertson endorsed the Jan. 6 pro-Trump gathering at the Capitol in the run-up to the rally. After it proved to be a riotous attempted insurrection, Robertson stayed off “The 700 Club” for a week. When he returned, he acknowledged Biden’s victory.
