One Pastor Reflects upon Falwell's Legacy
Ray Pritchard
Keep Believing Ministries

Jerry Falwell died Tuesday at the age of 73. He will be chiefly remembered for two enormous accomplishments:

First, he led the fundamentalist movement out of the wilderness and won for it a seat at the table of public discourse. Looking back, it is hard to remember what things were like 35 years ago. Mainstream evangelicals had their leaders, most notably Billy Graham who traveled the world filling enormous stadiums for his crusades. But fundamentalists had no one comparable to Dr. Graham. Then Jerry Falwell stepped onto the scene, and he did it from the pulpit of a Baptist church in Lynchburg, Virginia. Using his televised sermons as a base, he rallied conservative Christians in a way that no leader had done before. Seizing the moment, he created the Moral Majority, a broad-based coalition of fundamentalists, evangelicals, conservative Catholics, conservative Jews, and he even included the Mormons, which was, to put it mildly, shocking. I recall attending one rally in the late 70s where he offered this simple defense for including the Mormons. The Moral Majority was not a religious organization, the nation is in trouble, and if people who agree on traditional values rally together, we can elect people who reflect those values. And, he said, after we get the ship of state turned around, we can have a debate with the Mormons if we want to, but for the moment, we’ve all got to work together. That sort of pragmatic populism worked for a while, certainly long enough to elect Ronald Reagan. the rest