Marion “Pat” Robertson, one of the fathers of the modern religious right, has died at age 93. The televangelist was linked to the Republican Party for so long that many people are surprised to hear that the first presidential candidate he went out of his way to boost was Jimmy Carter.* But Robertson voted for Carter in the 1976 Democratic primary—the man was, after all, the born-again Christian in the race—and shortly before Election Day he traveled to Georgia to interview the candidate for his TV show, The 700 Club.

Yet the marriage showed signs of trouble from the start. Like a lot of Christian conservatives, Robertson was put off by Carter’s decision to give an interview to Playboy (and by Carter’s comment in that conversation that he had “committed adultery in my heart many times”). Some of Carter’s foreign policy views were too dovish for Robertson too, though it took a while for that to become fully clear. And then there was the letter the evangelist sent the incoming president once the voting was over. After the ballots were counted, historian Rick Perlstein writes in his 2020 book Reaganland, Robertson

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