Jerry Falwell Sr.

Jerry Falwell Sr. was recruited by Paul Weyrich as the public face of what would become the Moral Majority — a political organization framed as a moral revival. Falwell had previously preached that pastors should stay out of politics (he opposed the Civil Rights movement's church-based organizing in 1965). By 1979 he had reversed this entirely, at Weyrich's urging. His Thomas Road Baptist Church became a model for megachurch political organizing. Through Liberty University (founded 1971) he built an institution to train the next generation of conservative evangelical leaders. Falwell's gift was presenting Weyrich's electoral strategy in the language of spiritual revival.

Themes this entry appears in

• Christian Nationalism
• Anti-LGBTQ
• Political Strategy
• Abortion Politics
• Race & Civil Rights

Connections from Jerry Falwell Sr.

• exploited → September 11, 2001 (2001) — Falwell stated on Robertson's 700 Club that the 9/11 attacks were God's punishment for pagans, abortionists, feminists, gays and lesbians, the ACLU, and People for the American Way. This framing cast domestic political opponents as responsible for the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans.
• exploited → AIDS Crisis (1983) — Falwell used the AIDS crisis as theological confirmation that homosexuality was uniquely sinful, saying in 1983 that he considered it a holy punishment of homosexuals. This framing justified legislative discrimination and opposition to public health responses.
• founded → Moral Majority (1979) — Falwell was the public founder and president of the Moral Majority, providing its evangelical credibility.
• promoted → Oliver North (1987) — Du Mez and Diamond describe how Falwell and other Religious Right leaders embraced Oliver North during the Iran-Contra scandal, helping make him a movement celebrity whose conduct was recast as patriotic faith.
• founded → Liberty University (1971) — Jerry Falwell Sr. founded Lynchburg Baptist College in 1971 with Elmer L. Towns as an extension of his Thomas Road Baptist Church — a fundamentalist counter to secular higher education. It became Liberty Baptist College in 1976 and Liberty University in 1984.

Connections to Jerry Falwell Sr.

• Anita Bryant influenced (1979) — Falwell traveled to Miami in 1977 to support Anita Bryant's Save Our Children campaign, two years before he founded the Moral Majority. Bryant had proven that religiously grounded, grassroots-organized anti-gay politics — framed around children's safety rather than religious opposition — could win at the ballot box. Du Mez argues Falwell carried that framing — children's safety, church-based organizing, parental fear — into the Moral Majority's anti-gay politics.
• Segregation Academies influenced (1967) — Jerry Falwell Sr.'s founding of Lynchburg Christian Academy in 1967 was a direct product of the segregation academy movement that swept the South in response to federal desegregation orders. The local paper described it at its founding as 'a private school for white students.' Balmer and others place it within the pattern of segregation academy founding documented across the South, in which evangelical churches and pastors established private schools as white parents withdrew their children from newly integrated public schools. Falwell's own prior statements made his views on integration explicit. In a 1958 sermon titled 'Segregation or Integration: Which?' Falwell had preached: 'If Chief Justice Warren and his associates had known God's word and had desired to do the Lord's will, I am quite confident that the 1954 decision would never have been made.' He argued that racial integration was contrary to God's design. This history — Falwell's segregationist preaching and his academy's founding — sits beneath the Moral Majority's public presentation of itself as a movement motivated by abortion and school prayer. The segregation academy movement was the structural origin of Falwell's political organizing. It shaped his relationships with donors, pastors, and political operatives, and it created the institutional grievances that Weyrich would later harness into a national movement.
• Jerry Falwell Jr. influenced (2007) — Upon Jerry Falwell Sr.'s death on May 15, 2007, Falwell Jr. assumed the presidency of Liberty University and custodianship of his father's Religious Right brand. He leveraged both to build a financial empire and, crucially, to deploy the Falwell name's evangelical credibility in service of Trumpist nationalism.
• Paul Weyrich influenced (1979) — Weyrich recruited Falwell to lead the Moral Majority, convincing him that political engagement was a religious duty.

Sources

• Jesus and John Wayne — Kristin Kobes Du Mez (2020), pp. 91-108
• Thy Kingdom Come — Randall Balmer (2006)