The Rev. Jerry Falwell, the fundamentalist preacher who transformed American politics by rallying the religious right into an electoral force, died Tuesday of apparent heart failure shortly after collapsing in his office at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va. He was 73.
Falwell had suffered several cardiac and respiratory problems in recent years. He was found unconscious in his office Tuesday morning and was pronounced dead about an hour later at Lynchburg General Hospital.
A genial man in person, with a heart for the quiet, humbling work of a small-town pastor, Falwell made his public name with blistering attacks against what he saw as the moral decay gnawing at American society: legalized abortion, homosexuality, pornography, godless liberalism.
He poured that outrage into creating a new model for Christian engagement with the world. The result was the Moral Majority, which Falwell founded in 1979 after consultations with theologians and political strategists.
The group was credited with helping to elect Ronald Reagan president and a slate of Republicans to Congress in 1980. In the next two years, Falwell claimed to build a mailing list of about 7 million religious conservatives determined to express their faith at the ballot box.
Today, in an era when the religious right is an acknowledged force in American politics, the Moral Majority seems unremarkable.
In 1979, it was a startling vision.
First, Falwell asked fundamentalists and evangelicals to engage directly with the political world. For decades, they had been taught that politics was a dirty, unseemly business and they were better off standing apart from it all.
Even more audacious, Falwell called for cooperation across theological lines. He wanted Baptists to work with Catholics and Mormons and Jews. That was a heretical proposition among fundamentalists; indeed, one leading preacher suggested that Falwell's thinking had been corrupted by Satan.
"It was no small accomplishment for a fundamentalist preacher to come along and say, 'We're going to work with people whom we've always thought were wrong about everything,' " said Michael Cromartie, who directs the Evangelical Studies Project at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank in Washington.
Even Falwell's commitment to the Republican Party was suspect in some circles. To the extent that they had been involved in politics in the past, many evangelicals and fundamentalists had tended to vote Democratic, because the party in those days appealed to their demographic -- blue-collar, rural Southerners.
