Jerry Falwell

From dKosopedia

Categories: Right wing religious whack-jobs | Media figures | Religious figures

Rev. Jerry Falwell was a conservative televangelist, and he was a leader of protestant fundamentalists in the United States. He founded the Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia in 1956. Falwell was an avowed segregationist in his early career, saying that African-Americans had been created to serve whites. Prominent racists such as Lester Maddox and George Wallace appeared on his TV show, the "Old Time Gospel Hour", and he called Archbishop Desmond Tutu "a phony".

He founded Liberty University in 1971.

He was one of the founders of the Moral Majority in 1979, and he used this ostensibly religious organization to support right-wing Republicans like President Ronald Reagan.

He encouraged millennialist protestant Christians to believe in an apocalypse was just around the corner and that they would be "saved" by "the Rapture". He said that the Anti-Christ was already alive among us, and that he was a Jewish male.

Falwell died on May 15, 2007.

Quotes

• Regarding the September 11, 2001 attacks he said, "I really believe that the pagans, the abortionists and the lesbians ... and all those who have tried to secularise America helped this happen."
• On Friday, September 22, 2006 the Reverend Falwell gave Democrats a peek at the ugliness he masks with cheap pieties. "I certainly hope that Hillary is the candidate," Falwell said at a breakfast session Friday in Washington. "I hope she's the candidate, because nothing will energize my (constituency) like Hillary Clinton. If Lucifer ran, he wouldn't."