Jerry Falwell

Jerry married Macel Pate on April 12, 1958. The couple had three children, two sons (Jerry Jr and Jonathan) and a daughter (Jeannie).

He was strongly against homosexuality a and reprimanded the addition of LGBT-friendly Metropolitan Community Church into the World Council of Churches.

He believed that Islam was a satanic religion and that their prophet Muhammad was a terrorist. Although, he apologised to the Muslims community, he didn't remove these comments from his website.

Jerry Falwell was born on August 11, 1933 in the Fairview Heights region of Lynchburg, Virginia along with his twin brother, Gene, to Helen Virginia and Carey Hezekiah Falwell.

His father was an entrepreneur and an agnostic, his grandfather a staunch atheist and his mother was a devout Christian.

He was good in studies and also excelled at sports. After passing his high school, he joined the Lynchburg College in 1950 and underwent a religious conversion in 1952.

He later transferred to Baptist Bible College in Springfield, Mo., and graduated in 1956.

Shortly after graduation, in 1956, Jerry founded the Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, in an abandoned building, with an initial congregation of 35 adults and their families. Their first project was scrubbing cola off the brick walls.

In 1956, he also began a half-hour radio broadcast called 'The Old-Time Gospel Hour'. In 1971, the broadcast became a TV show and with a target audience in millions.

He opposed the US public education system owing to the view that it inculcated the views of secularism, atheism and humanism in the students, which were very much against the Christian moral teachings and called for a school voucher system.

In 1967, he expressed his desire to create a Christian educational system for the evangelical youth and soon established the Lynchburg Christian Academy. The academy was a segregation academy and a ministry of the Thomas Road Baptist Church.

He founded the Liberty University in Virginia in 1971. Gradually, it became the largest university in Virginia, the largest private, non-profit university in the nation and the largest Christian university in the world.

Jerry founded the Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg in 1956 and now it is a mega church with 22000 members and also includes a day school, a live-in rehabilitation centre for alcoholics, a summer camp for children, a transportation service.

Jerry founded the Moral Majority—a political action committee—in 1979 to promote religious segregation and it grew to several million members in a short time. The committee was disbanded after having accomplished its mission.