The Rev. Jerry Falwell speaks at a rally on the steps of the Alabama Capitol in Montgomery, Ala., in this Aug. 16, 2003, file photo. Falwell, who founded the Moral Majority and built the religious right into a political force, died Tuesday, shortly after being found unconscious in his office at Liberty University, a school executive said. He was 73.

The Rev. Jerry Falwell, the conservative televangelist and founder of the Moral Majority, died Tuesday afternoon at a Lynchburg, Va., hospital after being found unconscious and without a pulse in his office at Liberty University.

Falwell, who gained national stature for galvanizing conservative Christians into political action during the 1980s, was 73 and had suffered from a heart condition.

The Chicago Tribune interviewed him May 1 at his office in a little stone cottage on the campus of Liberty University, which he founded in 1971 and which has 9,600 students on campus. He spoke proudly of the massive education complex – now providing programs from preschool to doctoral studies – that he has built in Lynchburg, all created around the Thomas Road Baptist Church where he preached since 1956.

“Everything we’re doing here is to produce multiple young champions for Christ,” he said, referring to the sprawling campus in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Falwell’s 1979 founding of the Moral Majority, an organization he characterized as “pro-life, pro-family, pro-moral and pro-American,” changed the political conversation in the country, encouraged Christian conservatives to become politically active and was instrumental in the 1980 election of President Ronald Reagan, whose candidacy the organization championed.

Despite efforts at resuscitation at his office, en route to the hospital and in the emergency room of Lynchburg General Hospital, Falwell never regained a pulse and apparently died of cardiac arrhythmia, Dr. Carl Moore, his personal cardiologist, said at a news conference Tuesday afternoon. Moore said the heart rhythm abnormality occurs without warning and cannot be predicted.

‘Giant of faith’

Ron Godwin, the university’s executive vice president, said he had met Falwell for breakfast at 8:30 a.m. EDT and they left each other for their respective offices about 9:50 a.m. After Falwell failed to appear at a meeting, colleagues found him unconscious and unresponsive in his campus office, Godwin said.

At breakfast, Godwin said, “Dr. Falwell was talking about the future, plans for the future and about some encounters he had had with Liberty students yesterday that were very encouraging to him.”

Godwin also said that Falwell had made “timely and prescient preparations for an event such as this.” He said Falwell’s two sons, Jerry Jr., a vice chancellor at the university, and Jonathan, executive pastor of the Thomas Road Baptist Church, would fill the void in leadership left by their father’s death.

“Dr. Falwell was a giant of faith and a visionary leader and has always been a man of great optimism and faith. He has left instructions to those of us who have to carry on and we will be faithful to that charge,” said Godwin, noting that commencement events at Liberty would take place this weekend as planned.

Falwell died just days before the university’s commencement ceremony Saturday. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich will deliver the address, and Liberty will graduate the first class of its new law school.

Liberty Mountain

Falwell clearly had been looking forward to that event.

“The reason we have a law school – I’m not sure another law school is needed unless there is a unique purpose, and ours is to train up men and women who can provide the salt of ministry to a hurting nation and world,” he said.

The law school was just the latest item to be ticked off Falwell’s ambitious list of educational institutions he planned to found, he said.

“More than 40 years ago, I had already been pastor of Thomas Road Baptist Church here in Lynchburg for 10 or 11 years, and I began building a dream,” he said, sitting at a dining room table at one end of his wood-paneled office.

“The dream was a Christian institution of education providing preschool, kindergarten, elementary, high school, liberal arts university, graduate schools, seminary, law school, engineering school, medical school. Well, the engineering starts this fall and the medical is five years down the road,” he said proudly.

“So we bought 5,000 acres of land over the years. It’s called Liberty Mountain. And our church actually established all of this. The law school, three years ago, was our most recent invention.”

The law school will graduate 50 students Saturday.

Moral Majority

In his book “With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America,” Rice University professor William Martin points out that with the founding of the Moral Majority, Falwell became one of the first evangelicals to use his pastoral influence for political purpose. Citing a report that 8 million evangelicals were not registered to vote at the time, Falwell declared that dereliction “one of the major sins of the church today” and urged pastors to help eradicate it.

At the time, Falwell was breaking new ground by inserting Christian values into the political arena. The priority for evangelical Christians at the time was to love God and neighbor and forget about politics. But Martin writes that the miracle of the Moral Majority was that in just a matter of months that whole concept was shattered.

Controversy

Falwell often was outspoken but rarely caused as much controversy as he did in remarks he made after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Speaking on the “700 Club” television program of fellow televangelist Pat Robertson, Falwell said, “I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America – I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen.”‘

Falwell is survived by his wife of nearly 50 years, Macel, and in addition to his two sons, a daughter, Jeannie Falwell Savas, who is a surgeon in Richmond, Va.