WASHINGTON - Mr Pat Robertson, the television evangelist with a passion for politics who marshalled Christian conservatives into a powerful constituency that helped Republicans capture both houses of Congress in 1994, has died. He was 93.

He died on Thursday at his home in Virginia Beach, Virginia, according to the website of the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN).

Mr Robertson’s television ministry gained a national platform in 1977, when he began using a satellite to deliver his religious programming to local cable operators. The move put him in the pantheon of cable TV pioneers and showcased his talent in raising contributions from viewers.

His long-running 700 Club television programme served as a vehicle to raise money and attempt to influence US social and political thought.

The show, which debuted in 1966, brought Mr Robertson to the fore of Christianity’s charismatic movement. He crafted a long-term contract to keep the programme airing through several subsequent sales of CBN’s Family Channel.

The sale of the channel to Fox Kids Worldwide in 1997 created sizable nest eggs for CBN, Mr Robertson and Regent University, the religious school he founded in 1978 in Virginia Beach.

Mr Robertson became a leader of the growing Christian conservative movement, denouncing abortion and homosexuality and deploring efforts to remove references to God in schools and other public places.

In 1989, he founded the Christian Coalition, a lobbying group for religious and conservative issues. He stepped down as its leader in 2001.

Presidential bid

Mr Robertson announced in 1986 that he would seek the Republican nomination for the presidency two years later if 3 million registered voters signed petitions to support him.

A year later, with 3.3 million signatures, he resigned as a Southern Baptist minister to launch his campaign.

He stunned the Republican establishment with his second-place showing in the kickoff Iowa caucuses, coming in ahead of Mr George H.W. Bush, the sitting vice-president, and behind only Senator Robert Dole.

Party regulars were uncomfortable with his religious claims of faith healing and his political platform, which called for the abolition of social security as a government programme.

A string of primary defeats after his Iowa showing quickly ended the Robertson boomlet, and Mr Bush won the nomination and the presidency.

Provocative comments

Whether in the pulpit, on the stump or in front of a television camera, Mr Robertson could exhibit the mild manner of a friendly local minister, chuckling softly and displaying an almost perpetual twinkle in his eye.

But he was also given to statements that his detractors saw as outlandishly wrongheaded and dangerously incendiary.

A few days after the 9/11 terror attacks, Mr Robertson invited televangelist Jerry Falwell on the 700 Club and agreed with Mr Falwell’s comment that “the pagans, the abortionists, the feminists, the gays and lesbians helped make this happen”. Mr Falwell died in 2007.

In 2005, Mr Robertson linked the “wholesale slaughter of unborn children” to Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans and killed more than 1,800 people.

The Haiti earthquake that local officials said killed an estimated 300,000 people in 2010 occurred because the nation had been “cursed” after it “swore a pact with the devil”, Mr Robertson said.

From law student to born-again Christian

Mr Marion Gordon Robertson was born on March 22, 1930, in Lexington, Virginia, to Mr Absalom Robertson and the former Gladys Churchill, who were cousins, according to historian David Edwin Harrell Jr, who wrote a biography of Mr Robertson.

When Mr Robertson was two, his father, a one-time state senator, was elected to the US House, serving 14 years before being appointed to a vacant Senate seat.

He received a bachelor’s degree from Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, in 1950. After a brief stint in the Marine Corps during the Korean War, he entered Yale Law School.

Mr Robertson was a mediocre law student who preferred the distractions of women, whiskey and poker, according to his biographers.

At the start of his final year, he married Ms Adelia “Dede” Elmer, a Yale nursing student, when she was pregnant with their first child, Timothy.

After earning a law degree in 1955, Mr Robertson failed the New York bar examination and soon afterward became a born-again Christian. He enrolled in the Biblical Seminary of New York, later renamed New York Theological Seminary.

During a visit to Lexington, his mother put him in touch with a hometown friend who had preached on a weak-signalled television station in Portsmouth, Virginia, which Mr Robertson bought for US$37,000 (S$50,000).

He found a job at a church in nearby Norfolk and became an ordained Southern Baptist minister to support his family while he sought donations for his fledgling TV station.

Mr Robertson formed the Christian Broadcasting Network in 1960 and went on the air the next year. The 700 Club was born when Mr Robertson hosted a telethon to ask 700 viewers to pledge US$10 a month to cover the station’s US$7,000 monthly budget.

The show gained viewers as Mr Robertson bought time on television stations in other cities and made the programme available to cable TV operators.

Family entertainment

To gain a wider audience, Mr Robertson decided in 1981 to eliminate all religious programmes except for the 700 Club from the cable network.

He substituted family entertainment with a mix of reruns and original programming and changed the name from CBN Satellite Network to CBN Cable Network – The Family Entertainer.

By 1987, the format’s success enabled him to charge cable operators for the programming.

Mr Robertson returned to CBN as chief executive officer in May 1988 after his presidential bid. Donations had dropped precipitously in his absence, and about 600 employees lost their jobs.

CBN’s nonprofit status was imperilled by the growing profitability of its cable channel, which adopted the “The Family Channel” name in 1989.

To resolve the problem, the channel was sold in early 1990 to a Robertson-led group and Mr John Malone’s Tele-Communications.

The company went public as International Family Entertainment in 1992, with Mr Robertson’s son, Timothy, as chief executive.

Five years later, it was sold for US$1.9 billion to Fox Kids Worldwide, a unit of Mr Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.

The contract required Fox Family to continue running The 700 Club, an obligation that passed to the Walt Disney Company in 2001, when it purchased Fox Family Worldwide for US$5.2 billion.

Mr Robertson and his wife had four children: Timothy, Elizabeth, Ann and Gordon, who succeeded his father as chief executive at CBN. BLOOMBERG