orig. Marion Gordon Robertson
born March 23, 1930, Lexington, Va., U.S.
U.S. evangelist.
He attended Washington and Lee University, served in the Marine Corps, and earned a law degree from Yale University. After undergoing a religious conversion, he studied at New York Theological Seminary and was ordained a Southern Baptist minister in 1959. In 1960 he started the nation's first Christian television station, at Portsmouth, Va., and he built it into the Christian Broadcasting Network. Its mainstay was his talk show, The 700 Club . In 1988 he campaigned for the Republican presidential nomination. In 1989 he founded the Christian Coalition, a conservative political organization that went on to exercise wide influence.