During the first Gulf War, he withdrew to a private retreat to await his personal “Rapture”. To his followers, he regularly prophesied an imminent Apocalypse, before which true believers would be “raptured” out of their clothes to sit at God’s right hand with a ringside seat at the battle of Armageddon (a precondition, which explained his fervent support for Zionism, if not for Jews, was that Israel should expand to occupy its “Biblical lands”). In The New World Order (1991), Robertson wrote of a “tightly knit cabal” of Marxists and European bankers whose “goal is nothing less than a new order for the human race under the domination of Lucifer”.

When George W Bush, a born-again Christian, was elected president in 2000, he showed his gratitude by choosing as his Attorney General John Ashcroft, a conservative former Missouri senator with close ties to the Christian Right.īut to many Americans, Robertson’s outlook on the world was alarming.

The Republican capture of Congress in 1994 after 40 years owed much to grassroots work by the Coalition. The list became the basis for a new political movement, the Christian Coalition, which Robertson used as a vehicle for campaigning and grassroots infiltration to bodies ranging from school boards to Congress.īy mastering the arts of entryism, the Christian Coalition became, in the 1990s, one of the most potent electoral forces on the American political landscape.

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