{"id":63740,"date":"2023-06-19T16:23:26","date_gmt":"2023-06-19T20:23:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/?p=63740"},"modified":"2023-06-19T16:23:26","modified_gmt":"2023-06-19T20:23:26","slug":"direct-mail-fundraiser-pat-robertson-is-dead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2023\/06\/19\/direct-mail-fundraiser-pat-robertson-is-dead\/","title":{"rendered":"Direct-mail fundraiser Pat Robertson is dead"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Among other things, Pat Robertson changed our presidential elections.<\/p>\n

When he ran for the Republican nomination in 1988, everyone knew that if you wanted to get elected president, you needed to build a huge direct-mail database. But Robertson didn\u2019t build a direct-mail database in order to run for president, he ran for president in order to build his direct-mail database.<\/p>\n

\"\"I\u2019m sure Robertson would also have loved to have been president. He may have wanted<\/em> to win, but he didn\u2019t expect to win and he didn\u2019t need to win. Winning was never part of his business model as a candidate. Winning wasn\u2019t the plan. The plan was names, addresses, and phone numbers \u2014 millions of them.*<\/p>\n

This is what Pat Robertson did, for decades: He collected names, addresses, and phone numbers. And then he sent mailings to all of those people, over and over and over again. These were fundraising letters, mostly, some political, some for support of his \u201cministry(ies),\u201d although the line separating those things was always fuzzy.<\/p>\n

Robertson also sold things to the millions of people on his mailing lists. Most of what he sold was garbage \u2014 monthly subscriptions to herbal supplements and \u201csentergistic\u201d health shakes, commemorative coin schemes, precious metal investment scams, and the like. I suspect the income from those sales was less important to him than the information gathered from respondents\u2019 willingness to buy such crap. That information helped to refine his lists, sharpening the pitch and modulating the frequency of his already frequent, incessant fundraising appeals.<\/p>\n

The direct mail list Robertson collected from his idiosyncratic long-shot presidential bid became the basis for the \u201cChristian Coalition,\u201d the organization that shaped and dominated white evangelical political engagement for most of the 1990s. The Christian Coalition changed American politics, helping to make Newt Gingrich Speaker of the House in 1994, but that, too, seems like it was mostly a side-effect for Robertson. For him, the main thing the Christian Coalition did was bring in more names and addresses while providing a steady supply of hooks for years of direct-mail fundraising letters.<\/p>\n

Again, this is who Pat Robertson was and it is what he did. He was also a niche media mogul and the longtime host of The 700 Club,<\/em> but that program and the network he built and eventually sold mainly functioned in service of his primary business: direct-mail fundraising.<\/p>\n

Pat Robertson was very, very good at this. That\u2019s why he was worth more than $100 million when he died last week.<\/p>\n

So why is Robertson often referred to as a \u201ctelevangelist\u201d** rather than, more accurately, as a \u201cdirect-mail fundraiser\u201d? I suppose it\u2019s because those are roughly synonyms. \u201cTelevangelist\u201d is simply a euphemism for \u201cdirect-mail fundraiser.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not where the word comes from. An \u201cevangelist\u201d referred to a preacher whose message was focused on religious conversion, and a \u201ctelevangelist\u201d simply referred to such a preacher who employed the medium of television in an attempt to reach a wider audience of potential converts.<\/p>\n

Before televangelism there was radio evangelism, which is where Robertson\u2019s business model was first discovered and exploited. There were \u2014 and still are \u2014 plenty of radio evangelists who were primarily seeking to preach their gospel of conversion and not just soliciting contributions from the already converted. But those weren\u2019t and aren\u2019t the big names, and none of them could afford the leap to television. The most successful \u201cradio evangelists\u201d were\/are \u2014 like \u201ctelevangelists\u201d and like Pat Robertson \u2014 people who primarily used the platform as a tool for raising the funds needed to expand the outreach of the platform. Actual \u201cministry\u201d or \u201cevangelism\u201d in this model is always, at best, a secondary concern.<\/p>\n

Having said that, I\u2019m sure that somebody, somewhere, experienced some kind of genuine religious conversion as a result of Pat Robertson\u2019s decades of \u201ctelevangelism.\u201d That\u2019s probably happened dozens<\/em> of times over the years. But the donors and monthly supporters of The 700 Club<\/em> weren\u2019t funding a missionary enterprise designed to seek and to save lost souls. They were funding a fundraising enterprise designed to seek and to soak anyone willing to write them a check.<\/p>\n

The \u201c700 Club,\u201d after all, was not named because the goal was to win 700 souls for Jesus. It was named for an initial group of donors who committed to contribute $10 a month to enable Robertson to continue broadcasting so that he would be able to recruit another 700 monthly donors, and so on, and so on. That was what it was for.<\/p>\n

The substance of Robertson\u2019s message was consistently awful \u2014 politically, theologically, and morally. But that awful substance was also mostly a MacGuffin \u2014 a mere device in service of Robertson\u2019s primary mission, which was always, always, always about getting people to write checks that he could cash.<\/p>\n

Some worthwhile reflections on the life and death of Pat Robertson from elsewhere:<\/p>\n