WASHINGTON - Firebrand evangelist Jerry Falwell, who died Tuesday aged 73, was one of the first preachers to plug into the power of television, wielding huge influence over US politics through his group, Moral Majority.
Unabashedly political and provocative, Falwell started an evangelist Baptist congregation from scratch in Lynchburg, Virginia in 1956 and spun it into a national movement dedicated to restoring a conservative Christian world view in US daily life.
Moral Majority was twice credited with helping to elect Ronald Reagan as president of the United States in the 1980s.
Falwell`s long career was marked by inflammatory attacks on liberals, Jews, Muslims, blacks, homosexuals, women`s activists and civil rights organizations.
Two days after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, he blamed "the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians ... who have tried to secularize America."
A year later he called Muslim prophet Mohammad "a terrorist", to which Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khameini responded with a fatwa command for Falwell`s death.
Falwell was one of twin boys born to a well-off businessman in Lynchburg in 1933. He joined the Baptist church in 1952 and then attended the Baptist Bible College in Missouri.
"God literally turned my life around. I sat at the feet of great Bible teachers who taught me the Word, soul-winning and local church building," he said in an interview published before his death on his church website.
Ordained in 1956, he started Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg in a former soft drink bottling plant.
He popularized the church through his "The Old Time Gospel Hour" television show, establishing the model for the modern "televangelism" and building it to a congregation of 22,000 members today.
Falwell was already known as a conservative firebrand in the 1960s.
Writing in the Catholic New Times in 2004, retired Catholic Bishop John Shelby Spong, who led Lynchburg-area churches in the 1960s, recalled Falwell as a "race-baiting segregationist" who praised South Africa`s apartheid regime as the "bulwark for Christian civilization" and branded black rights activist Nelson Mandela a "communist".
Falwell pushed into national politics in 1979 with Moral Majority, a Christian political coalition aiming to elect conservatives, ban abortion and reinstate Christian prayer in schools.
After helping to elect Reagan, the group faded after a decade in the wake of scandals of Falwell`s fellow televangelists Jim and Tammy Bakker.
Falwell then turned his energy to the financial problems of his Lynchburg-based, fundamentalist Christian Liberty University, where he was found dead in his office on Tuesday.
"Dr Falwell was a giant of faith, a visionary leader ... he has left instructions for those of us who have to carry on, and we will be faithful to that charge," said Ronald Godwin, the university`s vice president on Tuesday.
But Falwell came under fire from fellow Christian leaders when he accepted several million dollars from South Korean evangelist Sun Myung Moon, who calls himself God`s modern prophet.
Never far from controversy, Falwell lost a Supreme Court case in 1988 over the pornographic Hustler magazine`s 1983 parody of him which became a landmark ruling for press freedom.
In 1999, he shot back to international headlines when he warned that Tinky Winky, a character in the popular BBC children`s television show Teletubbies, might be gay.
But his opponents consider his most outrageous words to have been his comments after the September 11 attacks.
"The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad."
Naming feminists, civil rights activists, and Democratic party groups, he said, "I point the finger in their face and say: you helped this happen."
05/15/2007 19:22 GMT