Pat Robertson and the dreamers who rejuvenated Christian living

Bringing back memories

The announced passing of Pat Robertson at the age of 93 today brings to mind an aspect of my history I have barely touched in my many blogs until now.

In late 1982, I resumed admission at the Yaba College of Technology to study Electrical Engineering having made the switch from the Lagos State College of Science and Technology where I was reading Chemical Engineering not so much out of choice but by the influence of an old student who came to give a talk at my secondary school along with the poor career guidance help that was prevalent in those days.

I have many times argued with my mum who at that time was a principal of a secondary school that such showboating visits are not helpful in career guidance, rather they lead impressionable young people off on excursions of fantasy without any understanding of drive, passion, or reality of what they innately can do. However, that is another discussion.

I was missing in action

I was 16 years old, and I was suffocating under my parent’s roof having been in boarding school since the age of 10, my first year at YabaTech as it was called, passed uneventfully, I barely passed the year, I was mostly truant and my head was hardly in order as there were classes I attended that I could not say I was in that class or what we were doing. Maybe a professional assessment would have suggested I was clinically depressed.

My second year began uneventfully and this time I was squatting when I fell into a group of avant-garde art majors who intrigued all by their creativity and ability. A building at the end of a concealed and somewhat secluded road housed the Christian Union building and nothing about them was inviting as guilt and condemnation simply reinforced the idea of the God I had known from the time my mother to me to secret religious meetings from the age of 3 in England.

This is God?

God was a tough punishing deity that required more than sacrifice, tears, and blood to be barely appeased and was never pleased. One night, 3 art students invited me to follow them to this Christian Union building and my discovery? They began speaking in tongues and I was caught in wonderment.

Soon, I found there is a growing band of Christians mostly led by these art students who were giving the bible a new sense of meaning and relevance to our lives and even though my mind was messed up by many things, I was quite an effective student union representative and now, a budding born-again Christian. With that, a new frontline of war was opened on the home front that I did not have the wisdom to manage at that point.

A band of Christian musketeers

Along with this was how Bible study really looked like serious study and not of the Sunday School variety, and the first point of debate was grammar, semantics, and interpretation, whether women need to cover their heads, or their hair was already a covering. The contentions between traditional evangelicals of the brooding and appearing sad-to-be-humble type and the livelier, let’s take the world by the horns stuff, or even maybe more.

I could make a long story of this, Dake’s, Strong’s, Vine’s, Amplified, the lingo was Greek and sometimes Hebrew, the speech was soaring homiletics dispensing stranger-than-fiction hermeneutics and chief of them was the most talented artist of his generation. We had the Americans to give us speech, accent, and direction, we believed we were making God interesting and the slightly curious would find out more.

An American invasion was complete

Enter The 700 Club, which in the 1980s was the staple of Christian television that did not fill you was eschatological dread but a longing for a better experience of a loving and amazing God. The Christian Broadcasting Network founded by Pat Robertson amongst other influences seemed to fill us with daring, adventure, and boldness. Soon, we broke away from the Christian Union to form The Fellowship and there were extraordinary demonstrations of the power of God in our midst from albeit very flawed men, the grace of God remains a mystery even in its powerful expression when we yield to what God has purposed to do in and with us.

Whilst does not entirely read like a tribute to Pat Robertson, it is a tribute to a generation of influential and impactful Christian men and women of ministry who dared to dream seemingly impossible dreams and through their living, their testimonies, their sermons, and their books especially tried to teach others that they can bring these dreams out of the invisible and unseen realm into living present reality.

If we could only dream

These dreams, built broadcasting networks and outreaches, universities, campuses of almost enchanted living, even stupendous wealth, impactful businesses, and churches planted into regions that would have been impossible to reach changing lives so radically and fundamentally, you may not believe much of all this started from a simple dream.

Pat Robertson was one of such men and women who dreamed the impossible and for that, I commend him even if in the latter times of his years he became controversial to the point that whatever he said was dismissed.

God rest his soul.

Other Pat Robertson blogs

Blog - A fatwa in everything but name (2005)

Blog - Fatwa evangelist blurts out again (2006)

Blog - Thought Picnic: How Do They Launder Demons? (2013)

Blog - How God laughs at the thought of being a voter (2020)

Fatwa evangelist blurts out again

For publicity and against peace

One wonders if certain comments from religious figures are for the sake of just getting noticed or contributing to the whole cascade of world peace.

Over the last few months, from my observation, religious leaders have not spoken up for peace but for discord, for division, for difference and for their derision.

This is so evident from the fact that our societies at large are general secular even though the people that make up those societies could be deeply religious.

It also happens that except in countries where there is a state religion, proponents of different religions have to co-exist and be protected by civil society in the pursuit and affirmation of their faith.

For each adherent, there is probably no space for the accommodation of other principles, tenets or belief systems that differ from the core of their religions.

Society and community however has helped people to appreciate differences but allow similarities between peoples to build friendship and fellowship so that we may live peaceably with each other.

The things that divide us

This equilibrium of societal mechanics hits the buffers or the rocks when the so-called leaders of those religious leanings publish views meant to coalesce their followers by condemning the basis of other religions.

This does a number of thing

• Followers are forced to choose sides, usually with their leaders than objectively challenge views that bring conflict into community relations

• Non-conformists are aghast at the publication of those views but never find kinship with followers who have now to defend the indefensible if not downright stupid

• The aggrieved religion protests vehemently through their leaders who then gather their followers to battle by repeating the self-same kind of views that caused conflict in the original situation

• Government who are buffeted by the humanist separation of religion from state can only appeal for calm at best; else they tacitly support one view over the other

• Advocates of all sorts of freedoms forget to match the freedoms to critical accompanying responsibilities

Freedoms without responsibilities

None of these situations bode well for our communities where religious leaders seem to have a license to incite ever so subtly and enjoy immunity borne from religious expression.

When the religious leader owns the means of dissemination of those views, they are almost out of reach of the legal authorities that oversee and regulate broadcasting.

It is in this light that we hear again from Pat Robertson who for long has held sway on Christian right opinion and spurted intolerable commentary that does nothing to foster peace.

This once admired and respected man who is probably a very clever man has not evoked commentary that sound as praise to a court jester in recent times.

Just not right at all

First, he pronounced a fatwa on Hugo Chavez which could have read as sanctioning the execution of an elected president of another country.

Then, he opined that Ariel Sharon’s stroke was as a result of his vacating the occupied settlements of Gaza; by inference the punishment of God.

Now, he proclaims Islam is a demonic religion. That said, Islam has not really served itself well with its reaction to the cartoon saga of the last few months.

It does not exculpate Pat Robertson from such unfriendly, intolerant and outrageous comments. People of integrity, peace and honour should speak up and condemn such pronouncements.

Even so, it is not enough for the White House to just say the comments are inappropriate, they should come out strongly against such statements and people who could do well to make the quagmire in Iraq turn into a humongous maelstrom.

Bad attitude

Eventually, as he has recanted on all the other occasions we expect Mr Robertson to apologise to Muslims in due course.

This rotten attitude of constantly causing offence in anticipation of a future apology either is a ploy to make a statement regardless of the consequences or Mr Robertson is not a very wise man; a person who speaks before he thinks through and damns the consequences till condemnation leads to retreat.

When you begin to question the authority and integrity of a religious leader they bring the religion into disrepute, it does not bode well.

References

[1] Top US evangelist targets Islam

A fatwa in everything but name

The message

When one was in Nigeria in the 1980's viewing the 700 Club revealed an insight that Christianity never had to be sackcloth, ashes, sad faces and plainly surviving. The message albeit almost subliminal helped give rise to a sweeping Christian revival of the Pentecostal brand.

With that came the inclination to aver that we were conquerors of our circumstances, but then that in excess gave rise to practices of faith without commensurate discipline, commitment and devotion, though ecstasy, hysteria and emotion was in abundance.

People left commonsense things undone in favour of mental assent that things would just fall into place. Many then came to a rude-awakening and the fall-out began - not everyone really can handle this devotion without good guidance.

The most complex aspect of this is church government and the way discipline, order, doctrine and civic society is marshalled like a flock of sheep and how to weed out the goats, the shepherd which leads on authority from above but in the humility of service, commands, persuades and convinces his survey on the basis of this authority, to abuse it is great dereliction of duty.

The following commentary is made the in full context of my introduction.

Sometimes ...

I do sometimes wonder about some pronouncements I hear on television, but this did prick my ears, a Pat Robertson who was once a presidential candidate in the US [Read: People left commonsense things undone in favour of mental assent that things would just fall into place], he magnificently failed.

However, he did say in not some many words that the President of Venezuela be assassinated.

The United States does have a history of assassinating other heads of State but this was banned by President Gerald Ford in 1976, if that principle gets revived then that would be unfortunate.

Does that however, from the eyes of the Americans make everyone fair game and what world would be in if our elected officials get gunned down like they have in Serbia, Iraq, Lebanon and the United States? [OK, that was 1963].

That said

Any Muslim cleric of suitable authority can on the request on a follower offer a pronouncement of clarification on a wide range of matters, this is called a fatwa.

The most famous fatwa however was the one issued by the Iranian leader for the death of Salman Rushdie on the publication of the Satanic Verses which presumably denigrated the religion.

The commonly accepted meaning of fatwa is an ordered killing issued by a religious figure, I am at pains to separate Pat Robertson's statement from that basic principle.

He issued a fatwa against the President of Venezuela.

Standards and their doubling effect

The President of Venezuela is the duly elected representative of the Venezuelan people, even twice so. Not long ago there was a coup to unseat the president to which the United States responded with the muteness that would make a dumb man a class act.

If anyone anywhere had made a statement that was only published to one person about assassinating the President of the United States, all the force of the realm would be mustered to track the person and associates down and eliminate that threat.

As bastions of democracy, the flimsy denial rather than outright condemnation of Mr Pat Robertson's comments is a complete letdown on the part of the United States, smirks of double-standards; it is rather unfortunate and is typical of the cant that many now associate with the United States.

We face the anathema of a world policeman who is unjust, unfair, uncouth, impolite, garrulous and undisciplined.

Goodness is now a matter of degrees rather than the virtue of being good in itself. The countries listed below just show how inconsistency rules in policy - China, Cuba, Libya, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Syria, North Korea, Venezuela, Zimbabwe and Pakistan.

If Mr Pat Robertson had made those comments in the UK, he would have been subject to the immediate deportation litmus test of preaching hate and incitement to terrorism such that he would have been bundled out in the first plane to the United States and there are quite a few.

Leaders Untouchable

Conversely, Mr Pat Robertson being a religious leader of a big following put the government in a desperately difficult situation, I emphasise, but no religious leader is above the law, something must be done and be seen to be done.

References

CNN.com - U.S. dismisses call for Chavez's killing - Aug 23, 2005
http://edition.cnn.com/2005/US/08/23/robertson.chavez/index.html

World Hum - The Politics of Travel Warnings
http://www.worldhum.com/weblog/item/the_politics_of_travel_warnings_20050801/

Murder on their minds: Robertson not alone... [Media Matters]
http://mediamatters.org/items/200508230007

The 700 Club with Pat Robertson -- CBN.com -- The Christian Broadcasting Network
http://www.cbn.com/700club/

Fatwa - Wikipedia, the free encyclopaedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatwa