Pat Robertson

Marion Gordon Robertson was born March 22, 1930, in Lexington, Virginia, into a political family; his father served in both houses of Congress. Robertson graduated from Washington and Lee University, served in the Marine Corps Reserve, earned a law degree from Yale in 1955, and after a religious conversion studied at New York Theological Seminary, becoming an ordained Southern Baptist minister in 1961.

In January 1960, Robertson founded the Christian Broadcasting Network with a small budget and a single struggling UHF station, WYAH-TV, which began broadcasting from Portsmouth, Virginia, on October 1, 1961. He refused paid commercial advertising on principle, and when the network needed 7,000 dollars a month to cover its budget, a 1963 telethon appealed for 700 viewers willing to give 10 dollars a month. The format and the number stuck, becoming The 700 Club, the daily program that carried CBN's identity for the rest of the twentieth century and into the twenty first.

CBN grew from that single station into a national and eventually international satellite network, becoming, by most accounts, the first Christian television network established in the United States and a direct model for the ministries, including Jim and Tammy Bakker's early careers, that trained under Robertson before building networks of their own.

Robertson used CBN's reach to build a wider institutional and political footprint than any other broadcaster of his era. He founded Regent University in Virginia Beach, sought the 1988 Republican presidential nomination, finishing second in the Iowa caucuses before withdrawing, and founded the Christian Coalition in 1989, which became one of the most consequential grassroots organizations in the rise of the religious right in American politics.

For decades, Robertson's on air remarks on The 700 Club generated their own steady stream of news coverage independent of his institutional achievements, including comments linking natural disasters and terrorist attacks to divine judgment and remarks about other faiths and political figures that were reported and disputed contemporaneously across the news outlets covering the program. None of these remarks carried legal consequence; they are documented here as part of the broadcast record The 700 Club itself created, not as an assessment of them.

Robertson stepped back from daily hosting duties in his final years, handing The 700 Club to his son, Gordon Robertson. He died at his home in Virginia Beach, Virginia, on June 8, 2023, at age 93. CBN and The 700 Club continue to operate under Gordon Robertson's leadership.