A lot of people were taken aback when Pat Robertson, the founder of the 700 Club and former presidential candidate, enthusiastically endorsed Rudy Giuliani for the republican presidential nomination.Most people were surprised, some mortified, that a conservative evangelical like Robertson would support a liberal, pro-choice Republican such as Giuliani instead of a true conservative and former pastor like Mike Huckabee, or a supposedly conservative pro-life candidate like John McCain.
As a former pastor and one who has had close contact with dozens of pastors and ministers, I am not surprised at all, which is unfortunate.
As ministers like Robertson get older, especially in their last years, they tend to become a lot more liberal in their thinking and more willing to abandon their strict ideology and theology. What causes this is open to a lot of debate, but the trend for older pastors and ministers to adopt a more lenient view of important matters in their latter years is undeniable.
Robertson's endorsement of Giuliani so early is a huge disappointment to the conservative religious right, who feel that Robertson sold himself and the evangelical movement out. I agree with Robertson that in national security issues, Giuliani is a strong candidate, but can he really count on a pro-choice candidate to pick Supreme Court nominees like Scalia, Thomas, and Roberts?
The likelihood of Giuliani being able to nominate constitutional originalists to the Supreme Court is unlikely if he feels he has to bargain with a Democrat controlled Congress over other issues like the "war on terror", NSA matters, torture, and expansion of government entitlements. The Supreme Court will shift radically to the left during a Giuliani presidency, guaranteed.
I would prefer Giuliani as president over any of the Democrat candidates, but at this early stage, conservatives have few opportunities to keep the Republican party steering to the right, and Robertson just threw up a huge roadblock to that effort.
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