Pat Robertson is the leading religious broadcaster in the United States. His success has made him not only a television celebrity but also a successful media owner, a well-known philanthropist, and a respected conservative spokesman. Robertson experienced a religious conversion while running his own electronics company in New York, and he became increasingly certain that God wanted him to buy a television station to spread the gospel. Robertson brought his family to Portsmouth, Virginia, in November 1959, with only $70 in his pocket, and a year later he bought a bankrupt UHF station in Portsmouth for a mere $37,000 (the station was valued at $500,000). The station he bought was given the call letters WYAH-TV, for “Yahweh,” the Hebrew word for “God,” and Robertson called his enterprise the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN). CBN went on the air on October 1, 1961, with an evangelistic religious format.

In the fall of 1963, CBN held its first telethon asking 700 supporters to join the “700 Club” by pledging $10 a month to help meet the station’s monthly operational budget of $7,000. In 1966, after another successful telethon, Robertson started The 700 Club as a daily broadcast of prayer and ministry that encouraged a telephone response; toll-free 800 numbers were always displayed, and viewers could ring in for advice and prayer.

Robertson’s genius was to recognize early the importance of an Earth station that could uplink and downlink his programs to local cable operators; he made an application to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and then signed an agreement with Scientific Atlanta to purchase CBN’s satellite Earth station, and he also bought substantial air time on one of the U.S. domestic satellites. On April 29, 1977, CBN began 24-hour Christian and family programming; this was the beginning of the Family Channel. By December 1977, the CBN Satellite Network had become the largest syndicator of satellite programs in the United States. Two years later, in October 1979, CBN opened its new International Communications Center in Virginia Beach, Virginia. CBN has since expanded its broadcasts internationally, and in 2002 it broadcast to 180 nations in 71 languages.

CBN also affiliated with 33 U.S. Christian television stations to form the Home Entertainment Network in 1989. A year later CBN decided to sell its 24-hour Family Channel, whose most important function was to carry The 700 Club three times a day. The new company, called International Family Entertainment, was launched on the New York Stock Exchange and sold in 1997 to Fox Kids Worldwide for $1.8 billion, with CBN receiving $136.1 million from the sale. Under the terms of the sale, Fox carried The 700 Club twice a day, and the same conditions applied when in 2001 Fox Kids Worldwide was sold to Disney. The cable network is now called ABC Family, and it continues to carry The 700 Club daily.

Robertson, an ordained minister of the Southern Baptist church, resigned his ordination in 1986 in order to make a bid for the presidency of the United States. As a result of Robertson’s actions, CBN lost nearly 40 percent of its gift income in 1988, but upon Robertson’s return to The 700 Club in 1988, finances were restored. Robertson’s conservative political commentaries became an ever more important aspect of his program.

Robertson can claim to have built the popularity of the religious talk show format, a format that has proved consistently popular for more than 30 years. The 2002 version of The 700 Club talk show remains a mixture of news; in-depth feature reports on current ethical and moral issues such as school prayer; stories and commentary asserting the agenda of the new Christian right; and Christian evangelism with a charismatic flavor. The program is an important indicator of what evangelicals and Pentecostals believe about current moral and political issues.

In 2002, Pat Robertson retired from the leadership of the Christian Coalition and from active politics, announcing that he intended to spend his remaining years concentrating on the leadership of CBN and Regent University, which he founded in 1978, and which has provided many of his best broadcasting executives. His younger son Gordon is now the principal host of The 700 Club and is expected to continue if and when his father retires.