Pat Robertson

Pat Robertson is the founder, chairman and prominent public face of the Christian Broadcasting Network. As host of the CBN's long-running religious magazine show The 700 Club, he has been an outspoken proponent of conservative politics and evangelical Christianity in America. Robertson graduated from Washington and Lee university in 1950, served in the Marines during the Korean War, then earned a law degree from Yale (1955) and a masters degree from the New York Theological Seminary (1959). In 1960 he bought a defunct UHF television station in Portsmouth, Virginia, and the next year CBN went on the air. With the boom in cable television during the early 1980s, Robertson (like his colleague Jerry Falwell) gained a national and then international platform for his Christian proselytizing and unabashedly conservative activism. He ran for the Republican nomination for U.S. president in 1988 (a race eventually won by George Bush the elder) and the next year founded the Christian Coalition, a political organization widely credited with increasing the power of conservative Christians in American politics. Robertson has often been criticized for outlandish off-the-cuff statements, including his 2005 suggestion that the United States should assassinate President Hugh Chavez of Venezuela. Most of his criticism is reserved for the liberals in America who advocate for equal treatment under the law.