Marion Gordon Robertson was born March 22, 1930, in Lexington, Virginia, into a political family; his father served in both houses of Congress. Robertson graduated from Washington and Lee University, served in the Marine Corps Reserve, earned a law degree from Yale in 1955, and after a religious conversion studied at New York Theological Seminary, becoming an ordained Southern Baptist minister in 1961.
In January 1960, Robertson founded the Christian Broadcasting Network with a small budget and a single struggling UHF station, WYAH-TV, which began broadcasting from Portsmouth, Virginia, on October 1, 1961. He refused paid commercial advertising on principle, and when the network needed 7,000 dollars a month to cover its budget, a 1963 telethon appealed for 700 viewers willing to give 10 dollars a month. The format and the number stuck, becoming The 700 Club, the daily program that carried CBN's identity for the rest of the twentieth century and into the twenty first.
CBN grew from that single station into a national and eventually international satellite network, becoming, by most accounts, the first Christian television network established in the United States and a direct model for the ministries, including Jim and Tammy Bakker's early careers, that trained under Robertson before building networks of their own.