10 months ago
32
By cultural convention, obituaries are supposed to tread lightly on all the worst things the newly deceased did in their lives. You can see that instinct playing out in the many obituaries for televangelist Pat Robertson, who died today at the ripe age of 93.
The obituarati play it straight and narrow, as much as they can, but there are no real claims that Robertson was a deeply spiritual man. He was the man who recognized television evangelism as a path to wealth and to political power both, and for half a century, Robertson was known to the world not as a vehicle of bottomless faith, but as a political voice, making political declarations while signing God's name to the bottom of them. He used his tele-religious empire to become a very rich man with a private jet, and died with enough money in the bank to count as a mortal sin (greed) no matter how you might look at it.
