ABSTRACT
Opinion polls taken during Pat Robertson’s campaign for the Republican party nomination for the presidency showed clearly that Americans are radically divided in their attitudes to television evangelists. The ability of even the most obviously fraudulent evangelists to raise money shows that many Americans have a strong tendency to trust those who claim to be servants of God. The very low ratings which Robertson scored on the question of trustworthiness show that a sizeable part of the American people is intensely suspicious of ‘holy rollers’. Reasonable assessments of the impact of Falwell’s Moral Majority and other new Christian right organizations suggest that, although they have failed to win any major victories on their agenda, they have helped to make fundamentalism and its associated socio-moral positions (and hence the people who promoted them) legitimate. Robertson’s election campaign can be seen in this light: evidence of the increasing respectability of conservative Protestantism. This chapter discusses two scandals which together were a major setback to that improvement of televangelism’s image.
