Founder of the Moral Majority Rev. Jerry Falwell Dies at 73
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May 15, 2007 8:46 PM
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Virginia News
Founder of the Moral Majority Rev. Jerry Falwell Dies at 73 LYNCHBURG, Va. --
On the day before he died, the Rev. Jerry
Falwell called his son and asked him take a drive up the mountain
that overlooks Liberty University.
From there, Falwell could see the school he built with the same
tenacity he used in crafting a potent political movement.
It was a gentle scene in a life marked by accomplishment and
controversy. The older Falwell got a close look at a new, massive
"LU" logo and took pictures with students who had hiked and biked
to the spot.
"He said he was feeling better than he'd felt in awhile,"
Jerry Falwell Jr. said. "He'd been feeling kind of tired in the
past two weeks."
On Tuesday morning, the 73-year-old Falwell was discovered
without a pulse in his office at Liberty and pronounced dead at a
hospital about an hour later. Dr. Carl Moore, Falwell's physician,
said he had a heart condition and presumably died of a heart rhythm
abnormality.
After a prayer service that afternoon, university students
remembered their school founder and spiritual leader fondly.
"He's kind of like our grandpa," said junior Brittany Martin.
Falwell retained the style of a folksy, small-town preacher as
he used the power of television to found the Moral Majority and
turn the Christian right into a mighty force in American politics
during the Reagan years.
Driven into politics by the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that
established the right to an abortion, Falwell founded the Moral
Majority in 1979. One of the conservative lobbying group's greatest
triumphs came just a year later, when Ronald Reagan was elected
president.
Falwell credited the Moral Majority with getting millions of
conservative voters registered, aiding in Reagan's victory and
giving Republicans control of the Senate.
"I shudder to think where the country would be right now if the
religious right had not evolved," he said when he stepped down as
Moral Majority president in 1987.
Fellow TV evangelist Pat Robertson, himself a one-time GOP
candidate for president, declared Falwell "a tower of strength on
many of the moral issues which have confronted our nation."
The rise of Christian conservatism--and the Moral Majority's
full-throated condemnation of homosexuality, abortion and
pornography--made Falwell perhaps the most recognizable figure on
the evangelical right, and one of the most controversial ones, too.
Over the years, Falwell waged a landmark libel case against
Hustler magazine founder Larry Flynt over a raunchy parody ad, and
created a furor in 1999 when one of his publications suggested that
the purse-carrying "Teletubbies" character Tinky Winky was gay.
Matt Foreman, executive director of National Gay and Lesbian
Task Force, extended condolences to those close to Falwell, but
added: "Unfortunately, we will always remember him as a founder
and leader of America's anti-gay industry, someone who exacerbated
the nation's appalling response to the onslaught of the AIDS
epidemic, someone who demonized and vilified us for political gain
and someone who used religion to divide rather than unite our
nation."
The 1980s marked the religious conservative movement's
high-water mark. In more recent years, Falwell had become a
problematic figure for the GOP. His remarks a few days after Sept.
11, 2001, essentially blaming feminists, gays and liberals for
bringing on the terrorist attacks drew a rebuke from the White
House, and he apologized.
Falwell's declining political star seemed apparent when he was
quietly led in and out of the Republican Party's 2004 national
convention. Just four years earlier, he was invited to pray from
the rostrum.
The big, blue-eyed preacher with a booming voice started a
fundamentalist church in an abandoned bottling plant in Lynchburg
in 1956 with 35 members. He built it into a religious empire that
included the 24,000-member Thomas Road Baptist Church, the "Old
Time Gospel Hour" carried on TV stations around the country and
9,600-student Liberty University, which Falwell founded in 1971 as
Lynchburg Baptist College.
From his living room, he broadcast his message of salvation and
raised the donations that helped his ministry grow.
Falwell had once opposed mixing preaching with politics, but
changed his views. The Moral Majority grew to 6.5 million members
and raised $69 million as it supported conservative politicians and
railed against abortion, homosexuality, pornography and bans on
school prayer.
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