The New World Order — Pat Robertson: Religion, Politics, and a Vision of the Global Establishment

Robertson as Religious and Political Author

When The New World Order appeared, Robertson was not simply a television preacher. He had founded the Christian Broadcasting Network, had run for the Republican presidential nomination in 1988, and later founded the Christian Coalition after his campaign. His own biography also records that he had served as president of the Council on National Policy, an organization of conservative political and social leaders.

This context matters because the book did not circulate only within apocalyptic or devotional literature. It was written by a figure with direct political ambitions, a mass-media platform, and access to Republican political networks. Robertson endorsed George H. W. Bush at the 1988 Republican convention; a few years later, Bush’s language about a “new world order” became one of the book’s central reference points.

Robertson’s political role helps explain the book’s historical significance: a religious interpretation of global politics was being presented by a politically active media figure to a large American audience.

The first part of the book discusses old and new forms of world order and the transition after the Cold War. The second turns to the establishment, money, education, and New Age themes. The third becomes more explicitly eschatological and addresses the prospect of a future global system.[8][8][1]

Bush, the “New World Order,” and the UN

On 11 September 1990, George H. W. Bush explicitly spoke before Congress about the possibility of a “new world order.” His public definition was not secret. He described an international environment in which law, cooperation, and collective action would restrain aggression by stronger states against weaker ones.

The immediate context was Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. Bush emphasized cooperation among the United States, the Soviet Union, and other states and presented the United Nations as a framework for collective political and legal action. His speech described a post–Cold War international order, not a detailed constitutional blueprint for a single world state.

Robertson places Bush’s language within a longer history of projects and ideas about world order and links it with the institutions and traditions that structure the rest of the book.

Robertson gives considerable attention to national sovereignty and to the possibility that state powers could gradually move toward supranational institutions. The United Nations therefore occupies an important place in his political model.

The UN Charter formally begins from the principle of the sovereign equality of its members. Article 2 also protects political independence and territorial integrity and includes a principle of non-intervention in matters essentially within domestic jurisdiction, subject to the Charter’s other provisions, including Security Council powers under Chapter VII.

That does not mean membership creates no international obligations or that the organization lacks mechanisms for collective enforcement. It means the UN’s formal legal starting point is an organization of sovereign member states rather than a constitution for one sovereign world state.

Robertson’s claim is therefore primarily directional: whether international institutions may accumulate greater practical authority over time. That question can be examined treaty by treaty and institution by institution rather than inferred from the UN’s existence alone.[3][9]

The Establishment and the Trilateral Commission

The Establishment is one of the central chapters in the book. Robertson uses the term for overlapping political, financial, academic, and foreign-policy elites, and places institutions such as CFR and the Trilateral Commission within that framework.

the previous article on Bilderberg, CFR, and the Trilateral Commission showed that this type of overlap is not imaginary. CFR itself reports more than 5,000 members, including senior government officials, business leaders, academics, journalists, and legal professionals. Members have access to senior officials, statesmen, and policy forums, while CFR organizes close to a thousand events annually and describes its mission partly in terms of informing and shaping the U.S. role in the world through research, membership, and convening power.

David Rockefeller founded the Trilateral Commission in 1973. The organization itself states that it brings together senior policymakers, business leaders, media figures, and academics from North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific and seeks to develop ideas and relationships across sectors and regions.

Robertson presents these structures as parts of a unified system moving through multiple institutions toward one global authority.

CFR, Political Access, and Money. CFR’s relationship with U.S. policy is not based only on membership lists. During the Second World War, its War and Peace Studies project prepared memoranda for the State Department on wartime and postwar planning, establishing a direct historical channel between a private policy institution and official foreign-policy planning.

Modern CFR likewise makes no attempt to conceal its ambition to matter in the policy environment. Its research programs, briefings, Task Forces, and member access are presented as part of the institution’s purpose.

Robertson’s Follow the Money rests on the idea that political power cannot be understood without monetary institutions. He pays particular attention to central banks, private financial capital, and the possibility that credit systems allow financial actors to influence states.

This is an area where the historical record provides unusually concrete material. The most important example is Jekyll Island.

In November 1910, six influential figures — Senator Nelson Aldrich, A. Piatt Andrew, Henry Davison, Arthur Shelton, Frank Vanderlip, and Paul Warburg — met secretly on Jekyll Island. Federal Reserve History states directly that the purpose of the meeting was concealed and that the plan developed there laid an important foundation for the later Federal Reserve System.[1][6][7][6][5]

Jekyll Island and the Federal Reserve

The Jekyll Island plan did not become the final law without change. The original Aldrich plan drew political resistance, especially over fears that it would give large banks excessive influence. After Woodrow Wilson’s election, Democrats developed a different political structure while continuing to consult financial specialists, including Paul Warburg, on technical questions.

Federal Reserve History notes that the final Federal Reserve Act shared many technical features with the Aldrich plan, while the largest differences concerned political and governance arrangements.

Robertson treats central banking as a major center of power. In the book, central banking becomes one of the key categories of political and financial power.

The Federal Reserve Board of Governors is a federal public institution. The regional Reserve Banks, however, have corporate features, and member commercial banks hold statutory shares in them. Those shares are not ordinary freely tradable corporate equity and do not carry the same ownership rights as shares in a conventional private company.

The system is therefore genuinely hybrid. It is incomplete to describe it either as an entirely ordinary government agency with no private banking component or as a conventional private corporation owned by bankers.

Questions of practical influence are better addressed through the actual mechanisms: appointments, regional directors, statutory mandate, monetary-policy authority, financial-sector access, revolving doors, and crisis decisions.[5][5]

The Illuminati and Freemasonry

Like Epperson, Robertson connects the history of his “old world order” with the Bavarian Illuminati. Here the historical core is substantial.

Adam Weishaupt founded the group in Ingolstadt in 1776. LMU Munich describes it as a secret society of radical Enlightenment whose program sought to educate and monitor an elite cadre that could eventually occupy key positions in the state and undermine the political dominance of existing territorial rulers.

Robertson treats organizational continuity, personal networks, and ideological continuity as parts of the same historical sequence.

Robertson builds part of his historical continuity through links between the Illuminati and Masonic structures. Historical scholarship does document overlap between the Illuminati and Masonic environments in the eighteenth century, including individuals involved in multiple secret societies.

That does not automatically establish that world Freemasonry became the institutional continuation of Weishaupt’s order. Freemasonry consists of different jurisdictions, grand lodges, and rites and does not operate through one single global executive authority.

The Great Seal as a Symbolic Bridge. Robertson also uses the reverse of the Great Seal of the United States, with its unfinished pyramid, Eye of Providence, and Novus Ordo Seclorum motto.

The National Archives preserves Charles Thomson’s 1782 explanation. He associated the pyramid with strength and duration, the eye with providential favor toward the American cause, the date 1776 with the Declaration of Independence, and Novus Ordo Seclorum with the beginning of a new American era.

Robertson’s esoteric or Masonic reading of the symbol is therefore one layer of interpretation, while Thomson’s explanation is a direct document concerning the seal’s official adoption. Later symbolic use does not erase that original record, but the original record by itself cannot settle every later interpretation.[4][10]

New Age and the Religious Layer of the New Order

In New Order for a New Age, Robertson shifts from political institutions to religion. His thesis is that political globalism is accompanied by a cultural or spiritual transformation in which traditional Christianity is displaced by universalist spirituality.

Robertson places New Age movements, the CFR, the Trilateral Commission, Freemasonry, and central-banking systems inside the same wider story of a coordinated transformation of world order.

Robertson’s Christian Alternative. Robertson does not end the book only with a warning. He contrasts the “New World Order” with his own concept of a Christian order in which political institutions should recognize divine law, personal liberty, and limited government.

His critique of the global establishment is therefore not a value-neutral institutional theory. It is a form of political theology. Robertson’s proposed alternative is not simply more transparency but a morally Christian social order.

This theological level also explains why political structures in the book are at times linked to Lucifer and the Antichrist. Those terms belong to Robertson’s religious interpretive framework rather than to legal or archival institutional categories.

National Sovereignty and “One-World Government”

Robertson’s central political concern is the possibility of “one-world government,” in which states gradually surrender essential parts of sovereignty while financial and supranational institutions gain decision-making authority.

Post-1945 history does show dramatic growth in international institutions, treaties, economic integration, and shared decision-making systems. European integration is the clearest example of states voluntarily pooling or transferring certain competences.

But “global governance” is not automatically the same thing as a sovereign world government. An international institution may be powerful without being a state above states. Each case therefore requires analysis of actual competences, their legal source, amendment procedures, vetoes, and exit mechanisms.

“European Bankers” in the Book. Robertson uses phrases such as “international bankers” and “European bankers” while discussing historical financial families and individuals, including the Rothschilds, Paul Warburg, and Jacob Schiff.

A public controversy followed in 1995. Critics Michael Lind and Jacob Heilbrunn argued that portions of Robertson’s historical construction drew on older writers such as Nesta Webster and Eustace Mullins and that those sources carried antisemitic themes.

Robertson responded that antisemitism was not his intention, that “European bankers” was not a code for Jews as a group, and that his account of high finance and the foreign-policy establishment also relied heavily on Carroll Quigley.[11][12][12][13]

How Robertson Selects His Sources

Robertson’s bibliography includes very different kinds of sources. The later controversy highlighted Webster and Mullins, while Robertson emphasized Quigley and other historical material.

Carroll Quigley as an Important Reference. In his response to criticism, Robertson specifically highlighted historian Carroll Quigley, author of Tragedy and Hope. Quigley described elite financial and foreign-policy networks in the Anglo-American world and relationships among private capital, educational institutions, think tanks, and government policy.

The book then identifies these financial and policy networks with older themes involving the Illuminati, Lucifer, and a centuries-long command structure.

Networks of Influence and a Coordinated Establishment. Robertson’s central argument brings the preceding institutions and networks together into one model of establishment power.

Conclusion: Faith, Geopolitics, and Elite Networks. Robertson’s distinctive move is to combine institutional history, financial networks, political language, Christian eschatology, and the idea of a coordinated establishment into one interpretive system.[11][12]