Jerry Falwell-Gap Rating 4/10

He is an American fundamentalist and evangelist who was born in Lynchburg, Virginia, where he continues to lead the Thomas Road Baptist Church, a church he founded in 1956.

Soon after starting that church, he also began to broadcast the popular "Old Time Gospel Hour" on radio and television. From a congregation of just 35, things quickly grew and within 20 years, it numbered about 16,000. In 1971 he founded the Lynchburg Baptist College, later renamed Liberty University.

n 1979 he began what would become perhaps his most famous venture, the Moral Majority. Although it is traditionally believed that he was the driving force behind it, many believe that he was more of a figurehead. Much of the ideological and political muscle seems to have come from the financial backers Bob Billings, Paul Weyrich, Ed McAteer and Howard Phillips.

The Moral Majority group took a religious and political stance against abortion, pornography, feminism, homosexuality, and a variety of other things, thus helping in the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. This represented a tremendous break from his own previous beliefs - during the Civil Rights era, he sharply criticized black ministers who participated in the movement on the basis that Christian ministers should not be politically active.

When Jim Bakker was forced to resign from the PTL television ministry in 1988, Jerry Falwell took it over. In 1989 the Moral Majority was officially closed, but Falwell continues to publish and appear in the media to promote his evangelical agenda. During the Clinton presidency Falwell exhibited an incredible obsession with Bill and Hillary Clinton - every single issue of his monthly National Liberty Journal included denouncements of the Clintons for various improprieties. Falwell even promoted a video, the Clinton Chronicles, dramatizing the accusation that Clinton was involved in the death of his friend Vincent Foster.

In the end, it is uncertain just how much either Falwell or the Moral Majority has accomplished in real terms - but it is certain that he paved the way for other, more successful groups like the Christian Coalition.

Jerry Falwell has long been an opponent of public education. For Falwell, public schools are a place where children learn secularism, humanism, and atheism - all in contradiction to the fundamentalist Christian morals he believes that children should be learning instead. He doesn't believe that public schools can be changed, so he seems to have concluded that they should simply be scraped and replaced with private, church-run schools.

Unfortunately, Falwell's opposition to public education seems to have led him to spread false information about it. For example, in December, 2002, he sent out an e-mail alert alleging that public schools in Sacramento, California, had ordered teachers not to use the word "Christmas" in front of their students:

Imagine that, Christmas banned in a public school classroom. This interdiction is actually quite predictable because the word Christmas and the concept of a holiday bearing the name of Christ contradicts the situation ethics that pervades many public school classrooms. If there is no true right and wrong, there must not be a notion of a Savior or the need of a Savior.

Clearly, this claim by Falwell was designed to boost his position that there is something fundamentally anti-Christian about American public schools and that this, in turn, is a part of declining morality in the United States. This allegation will probably appear regularly in the future - even though it is completely false. There is absolutely no evidence of it happening and the Sacramento City Unified School District and specifically denied it.