Rev. Jerry Falwell, the founder of the Moral Majority, died Tuesday at 73. His personal physician, Dr. Carl Moore, told reporters at a news conference that the Reverend had no heartbeat when he was found unconscious in his office at Liberty University at about 10:45 a.m. He was taken to Lynchburg General Hospital where resuscitation efforts failed.
Moore said Rev. Falwell had a heart condition and most likely died of a heart rhythm abnormality.
Falwell was an icon in the religious right. In a 1980 speech, Falwell said of himself, “I am not a Republican. I am not a Democrat! I am a noisy Baptist!” And his broadcasting empire gave him plenty of opportunities to be noisy. His mix of religion and politics appealed and angered millions and made him famous. He appeared on national magazine covers, talk shows, and even made the U.S. News and World Report’s 25 most influential people in 1983.
His beginnings were modest. He started a fundamentalist church in 1956 in an old abandoned bottling plant in Lynchburg, VA.
Falwell’s legacy lives on through his wife, Macel, his daughter, Jeannie Savas, and his sons. Jerry Falwell, Jr. is the vice chancellor of Liberty University, and Jonathan Falwell is the executive pastor of Thomas Road Baptist Church.
Information from the Boston Globe, the Associate Press, and Reuters was used in this report.
The "moral majority" is neither in my view. While I am saddened by his death, I cannot say I will miss his narrow-minded view of the world. His mix of politics and religion left me with a sickened stomach. It one thing to preach religion, but I feel he went beyond this in his mixing of the two, which are often at dichotomous ends of the spectrum.
RIP. While I can't claim any joy at his death, I'm not sorry to see him go. I wish he could take all the poisonous rightousness he's spawned with him, but sadly his legacy lives on in the ignorant and morally impared.
I do not consider myself ignorant or morally inpaired. I think the man had many issues which he spoke out on. He may not have always said the PC thing, but he was not afraid to say what he believed. He helped many people in their faith. While I did not always agree with all of the things he said, I would not put them in a class with blind followers that were unable to think for themselves.
How so? What did he do that was good? Followers of the Talliban could make this same claim for one of their leaders and find me just as skeptical. There is ample evidence to support the claim that he was skilled at commericalizing his religion and delivering it at greater profit than ever seen before, but I question how much he helped anyone. His so called Liberty University has turned out graduates that seem to be able to land cushie jobs within the Bush administration and do a dreadful job of them. His idiotic post 9/11 comments call his sanity into question. Pretending he was a great man of God strikes me as a joke.
Take his attitude on homosexuals. Highly ignorant and morally impared. Supposedly he honored the teachings of Christ. I find it remarkable that anyone could honestly believe that his sort of hateful spewing of misguided nonsense would be pleasing to God. While you might be happy to wave those sort of pronouncements aside as merely something you disagree with, I find a self-professed man of God who urges followers away from loving tolerance to be a moral disgrace. I strongly dispute the notion that homosexuality is a sin or moral failing or even a choice. To claim that it is, is a slap in the face to God.
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