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The business pages of the Edinburgh Scotsman quietly reported on March 3 that the venerable Bank of Scotland, the oldest surviving clearing bank in the United Kingdom, had entered into a multi-million-pound agreement with Robertson Financial Services, a key component of American televangelist and media mogul Marion "Pat" Robertson's money-generating apparatus.

This surreal partnership was to have set up a central bank in Stamford, Connecticut, conducting monetary business by telephone and Internet with customers across America.

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Online direct banking had been introduced in the United Kingdom two years ago through the teamwork of the Bank of Scotland and the Sainsbury supermarket chain. The American version would have been controlled by the Bank of Scotland, with Robertson holding a 25 percent minority interest. Bank of Scotland (BoS) officials found the prospect of tapping into the 55 million viewers of Robertson's Christian Broadcast Network (CBN) an irresistible incentive, noting that Robertson commands an audience approximately equal to the population of Great Britain.

The deal was crafted in February during a New York meeting between Robertson and BoS Chief Executive Peter Burt, who was reportedly charmed by Robertson's assertion that his ancestors had left Scotland in 1695, the same year the Bank of Scotland was founded. (While detailed records kept in Scotland during the 17th century show no trace of Robertson's purported Scottish forbears, the Christian Coalition's publications place the date of their emigration some 50 years earlier. Robertson has long been known to alter personal statistics to suit his convenience; for many years he fudged the date of his wedding in order to hide the fact that his wife was seven months pregnant when it took place.)

Gay activists across the UK voiced their disapproval of the venture swiftly and loudly, citing Robertson's well-documented history of bigotry toward racial, religious, and sexual minorities. BoS officials fielded these objections with dismissal and disdain, insisting that Robertson's credentials were sound and citing as proof his recent appointment to the board of a high-profile, eminently respectable (though failing) British retail chain, the 400-store Laura Ashley clothing and home furnishings empire. Peter Burt described Robertson as a "very kindly man."

Burt may or may not have been aware that in joining forces with Robertson, he was entering a select club of Robertson business associates that includes the late Zairean dictator Mobutu Sese Seko and some of the more unsavory right-wing elements in Central America. Shoring up his personal net worth of about $140 million, Robertson's business practices have included flagrant abuse of nonprofit tax status by such personal projects as the Christian Coalition; diversion of funds from CBN and the relief organization Operation Blessing to the Nicaraguan Contras in the 1980s; use of Operation Blessing aircraft and personnel to serve Robertson's profitable diamond-mining schemes in Africa; and efforts to circumvent environmental regulations in reopening an offshore drilling site that in 1990 produced a 416,000-gallon oil spill off Huntington, California. Until recently, when he sold the enterprise to Rupert Murdoch for $1.9 billion, Robertson's holdings included International Family Entertainment (IFE), a conglomerate encompassing the Family Channel and the Ice Capades.

Vox scotia

On March 12, demonstrators converged on The Mound, the hill in the center of Edinburgh where the Bank of Scotland's main branch is located. Participants included members of the gay-rights group Equality Network, the ad hoc Bank of Scotland Pressure Group, trade unionists, feminists, and church officials. Among the speakers was Rev. Iaian Whyte, chaplain of the University of Edinburgh, who said he was "embarrassed and disgusted" by Robertson's association with Christianity. Although police lines kept the crowd of about 100 away from the bank, six protesters managed to enter the lobby, handcuff themselves together, and lie down on the floor.

In the weeks that followed, BoS stock dropped in value. Some 500 individuals and organizations closed their accounts. Two major AIDS charities withdrew £600,000 and took their business elsewhere. The Scottish Trades Union Congress threatened to cancel a credit-card deal. Action of Churches Together in Scotland (ACTS), representing 1.5 million Scottish Christians, expressed its "abhorrence" of Robertson and threatened to advise its member churches to join a growing Bank of Scotland boycott. Scottish MPs denounced the Robertson venture before Parliament. The Edinburgh City Council and other local governments passed motions of censure. In April, OutRage, the British cousin of ACT UP, picketed the Bank of Scotland booth at London's Ideal Home Exhibition.

The Bank of Scotland refused to back down. In late March, it hired PR consultant Jack Irvine to defend the transaction to the public. Noting that this was the same Jack Irvine who in a 1998 letter to the Scottish Daily Mirror had characterized gay men as "slobbering queers who want to get their hands on 16-year-old boys' bottoms," the British gay community interpreted the Irvine appointment as an open provocation. As the public relations disaster intensified, the BoS threatened OutRage with a lawsuit.

Then Robertson himself inadvertently dropped the last straw. On the May 18 broadcast of CBN's 700 Club, the daily religious talk show Robertson hosts, the irrepressible televangelist blathered at length about the BoS deal, describing Scotland as a "dark land" that has abandoned traditional morality and the legacy of Scots Reformation leader John Knox. He warned that Scotland's moral decline could bring it "back to the darkness very easily."

"In Europe," Robertson told his TV audience, "the big word is tolerance. You tolerate everything. Homosexuals are riding high in the media... and in Scotland you just can't believe how strong the homosexuals are. It's just simply unbelievable." He added that it's "frightening to look at [Scotland's] great Christian history... and to see the lack of depth there today."

Shareholder 'values'

Once the content of the 700 Club broadcast had been reported in the British press, the banking deal was over. As a report in the June 6 London Times observed, "The bank was prepared to take Robertson's denigration of women, gays, Jews, and Islam: besmirching Scotland was a step too far."

On June 5, the BoS agreed to pay Robertson up to £10 million in bailout money. Robertson and the bank issued a joint statement saying that "changed external circumstances" had made the arrangement "unfeasible." A few days later, skirting the edges of contrition, the Bank of Scotland reaffirmed its "long-standing commitments to ethical values, tolerance, equal opportunity and nondiscrimination." An apology issued on June 15 by BoS Governor Sir John Shaw was strictly intended for the bank's shareholders.

Robertson, meanwhile, was also forced to resign from the board of Laura Ashley. And on June 9, in the US, the IRS ruled that the Christian Coalition's blatantly political activities made the organization ineligible for tax-exempt nonprofit status. While this will simply mean privatizing what has always been a profit-making political entity, it also means that the Christian Coalition may owe millions of dollars in back taxes, and must loosen its church ties. The Christian Coalition's tax-free "educational" activities will continue nationally through its securely nonprofit Texas chapter.

Robertson can be trusted to make the most of these travails. He has long known the value of alleged religious persecution as a fund-raising tool. In a 1993 interview he fulminated, "Just like what Nazi Germany did to the Jews, so liberal America is now doing to evangelical Christians," asserting that Democrats, "the liberal-based media, and the homosexuals" have inflicted upon American evangelical Christians a martyrdom "more terrible than anything suffered by any minority in history." Whether or not Robertson himself is sufficiently delusional to believe such a statement, he has made an impressive career of stampeding his culturally illiterate flock.

As Scottish poet Don Paterson recently wrote in the London Times, Robertson is "a whole walking dark land in himself, and he trawls an entire night behind him like a shadow." **