Pat Robertson and the End of Fake Compassion

To me, the passing of Pat Roberson heralds the end of a certain kind of religious-conservative public figure: the kindly, elder moralist, passing out butterscotch candies to the grandkids on the sly, whose smile stops just below the eyes where the facial muscles start to clench in a menacing scan that could almost pass as a sign of beneficent concern, if you didn’t know better. Coat upon coat of old-fashioned folksiness pancaked over the fissures of a face cracked by decades spent delighting in cruelty.

Falwell wore this mask as well, and you could see it in their feigned performances of regret for those ravaged by diseases, violence, or natural disasters, victims of tragedy that, alas, brought their suffering upon themselves through sin. But no one did it as easily as Robertson in his later years, as he soaked his loathing in regretful condescension (he wasn’t mad, he was disappointed). Falwell, by contrast, was always smirking through his pomposity, signaling he would totally sic his goons on a guy who looked a little too smart or a little too girly. Pat and his ilk really were doing their dad-gum best to help us see the light of Jesus, goodness, and rightness, and it just broke their poor old hearts to see all the gays and abortionists and pornographers and adulterers and women with jobs always kicking the Cosmic Hornet’s Nest and unleashing God’s buzzing, swarming wrath.

We’re in a new era, the door to it kicked open by Donald Trump, in which those who relish the sorrows and torments of their cultural enemies do so without pretense. They are openly gleeful, dancing on graves and pouring salt into wounds. It’s more honest, but it’s also far more frightening, because at least when Robertson pretended to feel compassion for the suffering of sinners, he was tacitly upholding a societal norm holding that other people’s pain is not a victory to be celebrated, but a tragedy for all of us, even if their suffering was brought on as a result of their own misguided deeds.

The patronizing grandfatherly veneer is gone. (Sorry, Mike Pence.)