May 16, 2007
Jerry Falwell, Moral Majority Founder, Dies at 73
By PETER APPLEBOME
The Rev. Jerry Falwell, the fundamentalist preacher who founded the Moral Majority and brought the language and passions of religious conservatives into the hurly-burly of American politics, died yesterday in Lynchburg, Va. He was 73.

His death was announced by Liberty University, in Lynchburg, where Mr. Falwell, its founder, was chancellor. The university said the cause had not been determined, adding that he died in a hospital after being found unconscious yesterday morning in his university office.

Mr. Falwell went from a Baptist preacher in Lynchburg to a powerful force in electoral politics, at home in both the millennial world of fundamentalist Christianity and the earthly blood sport of the political arena. As much as anyone, he helped create the religious right as a political force, defined the issues that would energize it for decades and cemented its ties to the Republican Party.

He came to prominence first as a religious broadcaster through his “Old-Time Gospel Hour” and then, in 1979, as the leader of the Moral Majority, an organization whose very name drew a vivid line in the sand of American politics. After the organization disbanded a decade later, he remained a familiar and powerful figure, supporting Republicans like George W. Bush, mobilizing conservatives and finding his way into a thicket of controversies. And he built institutions and groomed leaders — including his two sons, who will succeed him in two important positions.

Mr. Falwell grew up in a household that he described as a battleground between the forces of God and the powers of Satan. In his public life he often had to walk a line between the certitudes of fundamentalist religion, in which the word of God was absolute and inviolate, and the ambiguities of mainstream politics, in which a message warmly received at his Thomas Road Baptist Church might not play as well on “NBC Nightly News.”

As a result, he was a lightning rod for controversy and caricature. After the Sept. 11 attacks, for example, he apologized for calling Muhammad a terrorist and for suggesting that the attacks had reflected God’s judgment on a nation spiritually weakened by the American Civil Liberties Union, providers of abortion and supporters of gay rights. He was ridiculed for an article in his National Liberty Journal suggesting that Tinky Winky, a character in the “Teletubbies” children’s show, could be a hidden homosexual signal because the character was purple, had a triangle on his head and carried a handbag.

Behind the controversies was a shrewd, savvy operator with an original vision for effecting political and moral change. He rallied religious conservatives to the political arena at a time when most fundamentalists and other conservative religious leaders were inclined to stay away. And he helped pulled off what had once seemed an impossible task: uniting religious conservatives from many faiths and doctrines by emphasizing what they had in common.

He had many failures as well as successes and always remained a divisive figure, demonized on the left in much the way Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, or Jane Fonda were on the right. Even so, political experts agree he was enormously influential.

“Behind the idea of the Moral Majority was this notion that there could be a coalition of these different religious groups that all agree on abortion and homosexuality and other issues even if they never agreed on how to read the Bible or the nature of God,” said John Green, director of the Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron and an expert on religious conservatives.

“That was a real innovation,” Mr. Green continued, “And even if that’s an idea that did not completely originate with Falwell, it’s certainly an idea he developed and championed independently of others. It was a very important insight, and it’s had a huge influence on American politics.”

Seeds of Faith

Jerry Falwell was born Aug. 11, 1933, in Lynchburg. His ancestors there dated back to 1669, and his more immediate ones lived as if characters in the pageant of sin and redemption that formed his world view.

His paternal grandfather, Charles W. Falwell, embittered by the death of his wife and a favorite nephew, was a vocal and decisive atheist who refused to go to church and ridiculed those who did.

His father, Carey H. Falwell, was a flamboyant entrepreneur who opened his first grocery store when he was 22. He was soon operating 17 service stations, many with little restaurants and stores attached. He built oil storage tanks and owned an oil company and in 1927 began American Bus Lines, supplying old battery-operated movie projectors to show Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy movies to riders.

Later, he turned to bootlegging liquor, among other enterprises. His best-known business was the Merry Garden Dance Hall and Dining Room, high on a Virginia hilltop, which became the center of Virginia’s swing society. Carey Falwell, too, had no use for religion. He was left shaken forever by an episode in which he shot his brother to death. He became a heavy drinker and died of liver disease at the age of 55.

On the other hand, Mr. Falwell’s mother, the former Helen Beasley, was deeply religious. Every Sunday when he awoke, Mr. Falwell recalled, Charles Fuller’s “Old-Fashioned Revival Hour” was ringing out from the radio.

“It was my mother who planted the seeds of faith in me from the moment I was born,” Mr. Falwell said in his autobiography, “Strength for the Journey.”

What he saw in his own family, he said, was the battle between God and the Enemy, the malignant force just as real and just as determined to produce evil as God is to create good. It was the Enemy who destroyed his father and grandfather, he said, and God whose grace ennobled his mother.

In his telling, Mr. Falwell chose God on Jan. 20, 1952, when he was 18. It was an experience, he said, not of blinding lights and heavenly voices. “God came quietly into Mom’s kitchen” and answered her prayers, he said.

He declared his acceptance of Christ that night at the Park Avenue Baptist Church in Lynchburg, on an evening in which he also first saw the woman who would become his wife, the church pianist, Macel Pate. The next day he bought a Bible, a Bible dictionary and James Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible. Two months later, he decided he wanted to become a minister and spread the word.

He transferred from Lynchburg College, where he had hoped to study mechanical engineering, to Baptist Bible College in Springfield, Mo. Returning home, he decided to start his own church, an experience that melded his mother’s faith with his father’s entrepreneurial instincts. He started the Thomas Road Baptist Church with $1,000 and an initial congregation of 35 adults and their families in an abandoned building that had housed the Donald Duck Bottling Company.

Mr. Falwell began building his church in 1956 much as he would build a political movement. Carrying a yellow legal pad and a Bible, he set out to visit 100 homes a day, knocking on doors to seek members. Soon after the church opened, he began a half-hour daily radio broadcast. Six months later, he broadcast his first televised version of the “Old-Time Gospel Hour.” He was struck by how effective the radio and television broadcasts were in drawing new members.

“Television made me a kind of instant celebrity,” he wrote. “People were fascinated that they could see and hear me preach that same night in person.” On the church’s first anniversary, in 1957, 864 people showed up to worship, and he felt he was on his way. The church grew. Anticipating the megachurches to come, it morphed into a social service dynamo, with a home for alcoholics, a burgeoning Christian Academy, summer camps and worldwide missions.

In 1971, Mr. Falwell established Liberty University, originally Liberty Baptist College, with the intent of making it a national university for fundamentalist Christians. The same year, when the “Old-Time Gospel Hour” began broadcasting nationally from his church’s sanctuary, he gained a national audience at a time when televised evangelism was exploding.

Political Action

There were reversals as well. A lawsuit in July 1973 by the federal Securities and Exchange Commission accused the church of “fraud and deceit” and “gross insolvency” in the selling of $6.6 million worth of bonds for church expansion and services. The charges were dropped a month later after a United States District Court found that there had been no intentional wrongdoing.

As the cultural passions and transformations of the 1960s and ‘70s swept the nation, Mr. Falwell, like many religious leaders, struggled with what role to play. He saw ministers joining the civil rights movement and was unimpressed.

“Preachers are not called to be politicians, but soul winners,” he said in a sermon titled “Ministers and Marchers” in March 1964. “If as much effort could be put into winning people to Jesus across the land as is being exerted in the present civil rights movement, America would be turned upside down for God.”

His position reflected his opposition at the time to the civil rights movement and his loyalty to a long fundamentalist tradition in which the faithful believed their role was to cater to the soul, not to the transitory tides of politics.

But Mr. Falwell said the 1973 Supreme Court ruling legalizing abortion, Roe v. Wade, produced an enormous change in him. Soon he began preaching against the ruling and calling for Christians to become involved in political action.

In 1977, he supported the singer Anita Bryant’s efforts to repeal an ordinance granting equal rights to gay men and lesbians in Dade County, Fla. The next year, he played a similar role in California. He urged churches to register voters and for religious conservatives to campaign for candidates who supported their positions. He organized “I Love America” rallies, blending patriotism and conservative values; students at Liberty University produced their own upbeat presentations around the country.

As he told it, at a meeting of conservatives in his office in 1979, Paul M. Weyrich, the commentator and activist, said to him: “Jerry, there is in America a moral majority that agrees about the basic issues. But they aren’t organized.”

To Mr. Falwell, that suggested a movement encompassing more than just evangelical or fundamentalist Christians. He envisioned one that would also include other Protestants, Catholics, Jews, even atheists, all with a similar agenda on abortion, gay rights, patriotism and moral values.

“I was convinced,” he wrote, “that there was a ‘moral majority’ out there among these more than 200 million Americans sufficient in number to turn back the flood tide of moral permissiveness, family breakdown and general capitulation to evil and to foreign policies such as Marxism-Leninism.”

The movement, he said, would be pro-life, pro-traditional family, pro-moral and pro-American — precisely the kind of broad agenda that could unite conservatives of different faiths and backgrounds. His agenda also included fervent support for Israel, even if his relations with Jews were often rocky; in 1999, for example, he apologized for saying that the Antichrist was probably alive and if so would be in the form of a male Jew.

The Moral Majority, he said, had a basic goal in building its membership: “Get them saved, baptized and registered.” He held up a Bible at political rallies, telling followers: “If a man stands by this book, vote for him. If he doesn’t, don’t.” Within three years of the Moral Majority’s founding, he boasted of a $10 million budget, 100,000 trained clergymen and several million volunteers.

In 1980, the Moral Majority was credited with playing a role in the election of Ronald Reagan and in dozens of Congressional races. The election gave resounding evidence of the potential of religious conservatives in politics. They themselves were electrified by their influence, but many others were alarmed, fearing an intolerant movement of lockstep zealots voting en masse for the preachers’ designated candidates.

A. Bartlett Giamatti, president of Yale University in 1981, accused the Moral Majority and other conservative groups of a “radical assault” on the nation’s political values.

“A self-proclaimed Moral Majority and its satellite of client groups, cunning in the use of a native blend of old intimidation and new technology, threaten the values” of the nation, Mr. Giamatti told Yale’s entering freshman class of 1985. He called the organization “angry at change, rigid in the application of chauvinistic slogans, absolutistic in morality.”

But many of those who defend mixing religion and politics, not all of them conservatives, say it is a form of bigotry to seek to deny religious conservatives their voice in the political process.

Mr. Falwell disbanded the Moral Majority in 1989, saying “our mission is accomplished.” But he remained a lightning rod. While running for the Republican presidential nomination against George W. Bush in 2000, Senator John McCain of Arizona characterized Mr. Falwell and the evangelist Pat Robertson as “forces of evil” and called them “agents of intolerance.” He soon apologized, but the remarks, believed to have alienated the party’s base, were seen as enormously damaging to his candidacy. The two men later reconciled. Last year, Mr. McCain delivered the commencement address at Liberty University.

For all the controversy, Mr. Falwell was often an unconvincing villain. His manner was patient and affable. His sermons had little of the white-hot menace of those of his contemporaries like Jimmy Swaggart. He shared podiums with Senator Kennedy, appeared at hostile college campuses and in 1984 spent an evening before a crowd full of hecklers at Town Hall in New York, probably not changing many minds but nevertheless expressing good will. He seemed “about as menacing as the corner grocer,” the conservative writer Joseph Sobran wrote in National Review in 1980.

Many experts say his role as a direct participant in politics may have peaked with the Moral Majority. Others, like Ralph Reed and Karl Rove, were even more successful in taking Mr. Falwell’s ideas and translating them into lasting political power and influence. But he never left the public eye, whether trying to rescue the foundering PTL ministry in the late 1980s, seeing his libel suit against Larry Flynt go to the Supreme Court or describing President Bill Clinton as an “ungodly liar.”

Culture vs. Politics

It could be argued that he affected electoral politics more than mainstream culture. The Moral Majority, for instance, began a campaign to “clean up” television programs in the 1980s, but no one viewed the initiative as a great success. After President Clinton was acquitted by the Senate in his impeachment trial, Mr. Weyrich wrote his supporters to say that maybe there was not a “moral majority” after all.

For all Mr. Falwell’s influence on the world stage, home always remained Lynchburg and his church. Last year the church moved to grand and vast new quarters in Lynchburg, with a membership of about 22,000.

Besides his wife, Macel, whom he married in 1958, Mr. Falwell is survived by two sons, Jerry Jr., of Goode, Va., who will succeed his father as Liberty University’s chancellor, and the Rev. Jonathan Falwell, of Lynchburg, who will become senior pastor of Thomas Road Baptist Church; a daughter, Jeannie Savas, a surgeon, of Richmond; a fraternal twin brother, Gene, of Rustburg, Va.; and eight grandchildren.

To the end of his life, Mr. Falwell remained active at Liberty University, expanding the campus by buying surrounding land and erecting buildings. And he continued to participate in the political discourse, meeting with prospective Republican candidates for president in the 2008 campaign and inviting them to speak at Liberty.

He preached every Sunday and remained openly political in his sermons, declaring, for example, that the election of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton to the presidency would represent a grave threat to the country.

He surprised some critics, who felt his views on some social issues, like gay rights, had moderated over time.

But, at his core, he remained through his career what he was at the beginning: a preacher and moralist, a believer in the Bible’s literal truth, with convictions about religious and social issues rooted in his reading of Scripture.

So there was no distinction at all between his view of the political and the spiritual. “We are born into a war zone where the forces of God do battle with the forces of evil,” he wrote in his autobiography. “Sometimes we get trapped, pinned down in the crossfire. And in the heat of that noisy, distracting battle, two voices call out for us to follow. Satan wants to lead us into death. God wants to lead us into life eternal.”

Margalit Fox contributed reporting.