New world order, old world anti-Semitism - Pat Robertson of the Christian Coalition - includes related articles on the Illuminati - Cover Story

BENEATH THESE extremist views lies an even more basic anxiety about declining economic fortunes. This is the missing link between Robertson's jeremiad against a "new world order" and his employment of anti-Semitic rhetoric. In his attack on a central banking system that can control the money supply by manipulating interest rates, Robertson identifies two main problems: the practice of "fractionl reserve banking," by which large sums of money are loaned out on the basis of small reserves, and the imposition of "compound interest," which he explicitly identifies as "Baron Rothschild's eighth wonder of the world."

"If it is possible to create money out of nothing," Robertson portrays Rothschild as reasoning, "then loan it at interest. Think how much more wealth can be created if the money is not repaid but allowed to compound year after year." Robertson then outlines how the Rothschilds and other (Jewish) bankers such as Paul Warburg and Jacob Schiff managed to bring "the power of the New World into their orbit." To what end? To saddle individuals, companies and finally the American government with so much debt as to render them tools of an evil power.

Debt, then, is the primary horror in Robertson's scenario of the disaster overtaking America. And it is the very vivid personal add undeniably crushing experience of debt and its consequences that makes the Illuminati conspiracy, charged with dark tales of Jewish usurers, so compelling to millions of Americans. The appeal of Robertson's Illuminati theory has been boosted considerably by the work of Christian financial counselor Larry Burkett, who is a fervent opponent of deficit spending and, not incidentally, the author of a popular novel titled The Illuminati. This overt work of fiction appeared on bookshelves at about the same time its Robertson's New World Order. Burkett himself is a frequent guest on Robertson's television program The 700 Club.

BURKETT'S BOOK is about a secret society's plan to start a world war and take control of national governments. The plan is foiled by a computer-literate pastor who heads an activist Christian "coalition." The novel is notable mostly for its grotesque caricatures, including a cocaine-snorting, drug-legalizing, Christian-bashing homosexual governor of California and a cocaine-snorting, power-hungry, ineffectual female president of the United States who is also a member of the Illuminati. (Burkett's use of the conspiracy they actually lies closer to Hal Lindsey's ambivalent philo-Israeli apocalypticism than it does to Robertson's sources.

Burkett's novel sells largely because many Christians hold him in high esteem as a financial sage. For almost two decades Burkett has been proclaiming that debt is bad, that indebtedness is ruining the American family and the American government. In the early 1980s, after forecasting (as he still does) an impending financial collapse in the U.S., Burkett wrote quasi-suryivalist handbooks on how to withdraw from the normal economy and live off barter and exchange practices.