The Rev Jerry Falwell

Jerry Lamon Falwell, minister of the church: born Lynchburg, Virginia 11 August 1933; ordained a Baptist minister 1956; Founder, Liberty University, Lynchburg 1971, Chancellor 1979-89; President, Moral Majority 1979-89; married 1958 Macel Pate (two sons, one daughter); died Lynchburg 15 May 2007.

Gregarious and outspoken, Jerry Falwell may have been a figure of controversy, rather than influence, in recent years. But during his heyday in the late 1970s and the Reagan era, no-one did more to turn America's conservative Christian community into the driving force of Republican politics that it remains today.

Falwell, for better or worse, was an American original. He was among the first to yoke the power of the Church to the power of television. The name of Billy Graham may have resonated more loudly abroad. But in the United States, Falwell spearheaded the generation of celebrity evangelists that also included Pat Robertson and Jimmy Swaggart, not to mention Jim Bakker, swept away by a soap-opera of a sex and financial scandal in which Falwell played a minor (and, it must be said, entirely innocent) part.

By his own account, Falwell turned his life over to Jesus Christ on 20 January 1952 at Park Avenue Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia, during a service in which his future wife Macel was playing the piano. Four years later, after graduating from the Baptist Bible College in Springfield Missouri, he founded and became pastor of the Thomas Road Baptist Church in his home town. Today, TRBC is one of America's most famous mega-churches, with 24,000 members and an auditorium that holds 6,000.

In those days Falwell was a fundamentalist - and also a segregationist who criticised Dr Martin Luther King and mocked the latter's "Civil Wrongs Movement". The likes of George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama, would feature on The Old Time Gospel Hour, a syndicated programme broadcast on radio and television (and now the internet) from the Thomas Road church.

Soon, the Falwell franchise expanded with Liberty University, a Christian evangelist college which he set up in 1971. Eight years later came the Moral Majority, the initiative for which Falwell is best remembered, a coalition of religious groups whose emergence both hastened and epitomised the rightward shift in US politics sealed by Ronald Reagan's victory in 1980. By then, Liberty had become an obligatory stop for any Republican politician with national aspirations.

Falwell's prestige was at its zenith. In 1983, US News & World Report magazine named him among the 25 most powerful people in America. Three times in the decade, Good Housekeeping magazine named him its Second Most Admired Man (after Reagan, of course). In 1987 Falwell's reach extended further as he took over Jim Bakker's Praise The Lord religious network - having described the disgraced evangelist, with typical verve, as "the greatest scab and cancer on the face of Christianity in 2,000 years of church history".

All the while, he was on the very front line of America's endless culture wars. Throughout his career, he was as famous for what he opposed as for what he supported. Blacks, of course - apart from his early advocacy of segregation, he was a supporter of the apartheid regime in South Africa - but also gays and the pro-abortion lobby. Falwell also had a thing about Bill Clinton, bankrolling a scurrilous 1994 video called The Clinton Chronicles, a slickly produced fantasy about the then President, allegedly at the centre of a veritable criminal network of drugs, corruption and murder.

There were several brushes with the courts as well. In 1983 Falwell sued Larry Flint's pornographic Hustler magazine for running a fake ad in which the evangelist recounted his "first time" - an incestuous, drunken union with his mother in an outhouse. Falwell sued and ultimately lost (proof again that it is virtually impossible in the US for a public figure to win a libel case).

A constant theme was how a Godless, sinful country was sliding into ruin. In one jeremiad, delivered on The 700 Club, the news programme of his fellow evangelist Pat Robertson, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, he declared that "I really believe that the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians . . . the ACLU, People for the American Way, who have tried to secularise America. I point the finger in their face and say 'You helped this happen.' "

As his religious convictions veered into bigoted partisanship, Falwell's opponents gave as good as they got. "In a very Christian way, as far as I'm concerned, he can go to hell," the former Democratic President Jimmy Carter, a Christian southerner of rather different political views, famously observed. In 2000, John McCain, about to lose the Republican nomination to the born-again Christian George W. Bush, labelled Falwell an "agent of intolerance".

But the latter had the last laugh. As he prepared a new campaign for the White House, McCain made his own "journey to Canossa" in 2006, addressing the Liberty University graduation ceremony, in a bid to convince a sceptical religious right of his credentials. His line on Falwell changed too. The "agent of intolerance" became a "man of distinguished accomplishment who devoted his life to serving his faith and country".

As the years passed, other organisations on the social conservative right would become more influential, among them the Christian Coalition, and James Dobson's Focus on the Family. But Falwell, the preacher who once exuberantly proclaimed that "God is a Republican", had paved the way.

Rupert Cornwell

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