Jerry Falwell - RIP

LYNCHBURG, Va. (AP) - The Rev. Jerry Falwell was stricken at his campus office and died Tuesday after a career in which the evangelist used the power of television to transform the religious right into a mighty force in American politics. He was 73.

The founder of the Moral Majority was discovered without a pulse at Liberty University and pronounced dead at a hospital an hour later. Dr. Carl Moore, Falwell's physician, said he had a heart condition and presumably died of a heart rhythm abnormality.

Driven into politics by the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that established the right to an abortion, Falwell founded the Moral Majority in 1979. One of the conservative lobbying group's greatest triumphs came just a year later, when Ronald Reagan was elected president.

Falwell credited the Moral Majority with getting millions of conservative voters registered, aiding in Reagan's victory and giving Republicans control of the Senate.

The world owes Jerry Falwell a debt of gratitude for the part he played in getting Ronald Reagan elected president. However the real story of his life will only be told at the judgment seat of Christ when the souls he led to salvation are numbered and when the countless acts of kindness which characterized his life are revealed. The teenage unwed mothers which he aided and their children who would otherwise have been killed in the nation's abortion mills. The students who received educations at Liberty University only because he gave them scholarships and sometimes subsidized them out of his own pocket.

They and all the others who he aided and comforted and counseled will one day testify if his character. Until then know that heaven is richer and the earth poorer for his death.