Freedom Writer - December 1995 Pat's postmodern Armageddon By Edmund D. Cohen Almost as if

Freedom Writer - December 1995

Pat's postmodern Armageddon

By Edmund D. Cohen

Almost as if he were bored or disappointed with his 
enormous influence on American politics and world events, 
Pat Robertson has returned to making immediate preparation 
for Armageddon his principle focus. In 1980, he announced 
to his staff that God had revealed to him that the 
end of the world would follow a war in the Middle East 
in 1982. Robertson's 1988 presidential bid and the 
formation of the Christian Coalition and American Center 
for Law and Justice were all outgrowths of the distress 
Robertson experienced when the prophecy failed. About 
three years ago, Robertson settled on 2007 as his revised 
estimate for this world's last year. He reasoned that 
2007 makes forty years since the Six Day War and four 
hundred years since the founding of the Jamestown settlement 
in 1607.

In October, Robertson published his first novel, _The_
End_of_the_Age_. According to Robertson, this novel 
is a biblically correct and authentic representation 
of how the end of the world is likely to unfold in 
2007. Beaming with pride, Robertson read a comment 
from a contributor on "The 700 Club" saying that while 
God had given the revelation to John the Divine, He 
kept back its interpretation for Pat Robertson.

The novel comes off as a mishmash of Orson Welles' 
1938 "War of the Worlds" broadcast and camp science 
fiction from the 1950s. An advertising executive and 
his wife leave their drought-scorched garden in southern 
California for an Arizona vacation. They have no idea 
that they have just escaped the tidal wave, earthquakes, 
and volcanic eruptions soon to engulf the West Coast 
when a meteor crashes into the Pacific Ocean. It seems 
that God, in His love, is bringing these calamities 
to call mankind to repentance.

The president of the United States — unnamed and coincidentally 
resembling Bill Clinton — tearfully describes how, 
in order to prevent panic, he has delayed announcing 
the impending disaster until too late for an evacuation. 
He now rues having vetoed the conversion of Star Wars 
into a system for nuking bodies in outer space. Had 
he approved the program, the meteor could have been 
intercepted. On national television, the president 
takes out a pistol and blows his brains out.

The vice president who takes office is a Dan Quayle-like 
empty suit, who quickly cracks under the strain. An 
evil Middle Eastern financier, who is not a Moslem, 
but rather worships the goddess Shiva (working through 
the new president's wife, a New Age enthusiast), gets 
an obscure congressman — actually the Antichrist — 
appointed vice president. The financier then sends 
the president a gift package containing a vicious cobra. 
The Antichrist gets to be president. The chairman of 
the Federal Reserve is also killed by cobra bite, and 
the financier himself takes his place. 

Exploiting the worldwide turmoil resulting from so 
many natural disasters, the Antichrist is able to found 
and to make himself the dictator of a New World Order 
government, with its capital in Baghdad (i.e., ancient 
Babylon). The Antichrist has a giant Disneyesque animatronic 
statue of himself erected at the site of the temple 
in Jerusalem. The Antichrist is assassinated during 
a television speech and miraculously raised from the 
dead, on camera, by the financier. The Antichrist and 
the financier institute a worldwide cashless computer 
economy. Those who will not convert to Shiva worship 
and submit to the required barcode tattoo (i.e., the 
mark of the beast) are shut out from buying and selling, 
and reduced to vagrancy.

During the next five months — the final tribulation 
— God sends plagues like in the time of Moses. One 
of the plagues is debilitating demon oppression not 
affecting the saved. Thereafter one can positively 
distinguish the saved from the unsaved. That knowledge 
enables an American Christian general to organize a 
counter-coup d'etat. The general joins forces with 
a television evangelist — excuse me, religious broadcaster 
— who disseminates the only remaining uncensored news 
from an impregnable survivalist compound in the Colorado 
mountains. The general's threat to nuke Baghdad touches 
off a cataclysmic final war. Its highlights include 
a battle in the Great Plains where a brigade of angels 
wielding death rays assists the Christian general's 
forces, and the extermination of all Israelis with 
a neutron bomb dropped on Haifa. Then the trumpet blows, 
the rapture occurs, and the saved all rejoice in the 
superior sex appeal of their new, glorified superbodies.

When one considers that this lurid scenario is presented 
as serious instruction about a destiny more real than 
the here-and-now, and no mere fantasy or entertainment, 
the sheer madness of it becomes breathtaking. As with 
Robertson's earlier _The_New_World_Order_, validation 
of the delusions of various citizens' militia members 
and survivalists coming from what they must surely 
perceive as a reputable mainstream source are a seriously 
harmful side-effect. Shades of _The_Turner_Diaries_. 
At least, it is swarthy Asian people rather than Jews 
who are portrayed with fear and loathing this time. 
Even so, Robertson indicates no use for Jews except 
either to get them converted or else slaughtered in 
the final cataclysm. There can remain little doubt 
that getting into position to start a nuclear war and 
make good on his failed end-time prophecy were what 
Pat Robertson's 1988 presidential bid was about after 
all.

What is missing from the scenario is as telling as 
what it includes. There are no politically organized 
Christians until the scenario is nearly complete. The 
saved people in government are isolated and unaware 
of one another. The democratic process and the rule 
of law play no role whatsoever. Robertson's actual 
low regard for those core values recurs after a decade 
of assiduous concealment. If one adopts the viewpoint 
of this book, participation in politics to make the 
present world a better one becomes futile and irrelevant. 
Procuring conversions and digging in for the final 
tribulation are the logical responses if one takes 
Robertson's points.

In the past few months, there have been indications 
that Robertson's outlook has been changing, and that 
he does take his own points to some degree. At the 
Christian Coalition's fall conference, Robertson told 
_The_New_York_Times_ that he would endorse Dole. Robertson 
would never have released his leverage on the Republican 
presidential candidates so early if his interest in 
partisan politics remained as strong before. Then he 
traveled to Israel, and did a complete about-face from 
his former passionate opposition to the Rabin government 
and the Middle East peace process. Robertson had run 
his relationships with American Jewish leaders into 
the ground with that opposition. The Israelis rewarded 
him by arranging an exclusive interview with Yassir 
Arafat and a scoop. Arafat displayed genuine Israeli 
identity documents confiscated from Islamic extremist 
terrorists. These could only have been furnished by 
disloyal Israeli officials bent on sabotaging the peace 
process. In his eulogy for Prime Minister Rabin, Robertson 
called Rabin his friend. That was quite some stretch 
of the truth.

Reflecting on the Rabin assassination on November 14, 
Robertson said: "I believe that anyone who injures 
God's land — God's holy land — and blocks the flow 
of prophecy in that land is in great danger. And the 
Lord warned me years and years ago, 'You're coming 
into Israel, the land of the Bible. You don't make 
mistakes here because the prophecies will stand.' And 
however much God may love me, He'd take me out of the 
way...to keep me from interfering with prophecy." This 
was the first time in months that Robertson spoke against 
the peace process.

In his most recent "700 Club" telethon, Robertson offered 
advanced copies of _The_End_of_the_Age_ for $100 contributors. 
He solicited the contributions so that he can finish 
equipping his Lockheed L-1011 jet airplane as a state-of-the-art 
flying hospital making the first civilian use of certain 
military medical technology. It seems that Robertson's 
answers to the medical-care debate consist of faith-healing 
and prohibitively priced maximum care for a token few 
recipients who happen to be at the right place at the 
right time to be treated aboard that plane. Robertson 
also broadcast a week of pound-and-shout revival preaching. 
He was shown contentedly listening at the feet of Oral 
Roberts and James Robison, among others. Not long ago, 
Robertson would have taken his image far too seriously 
to do that.

Ten years ago, I wrote that I thought Robertson would 
come to resemble the late Herbert W. Armstrong more 
and more in his later years. It seems that my prophecy 
did better than Robertson's.

_Edmund_D._Cohen_has_monitored_the_activities_of_Pat_
Robertson_since_the_early_1980s._He_is_the_author_of_
The_Mind_of_the_Bible-Believer._Copyright_1995_by_Edmund_
D._Cohen._

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