Jerry Falwell was a “pioneer in organizing conservative Christian activism,” said a longtime Colorado friend.
H.B. London, a vice president at Focus on the Family in Colorado Springs, said Falwell “cast a wide shadow.”
London said Falwell, who died Tuesday, “made it clear you can’t ignore the conservative Christians anymore,” especially in the voting booth.
Falwell’s formation of Moral Majority in 1979 gave life to evangelical Christian political activity and spurred Christians to vote, London said.
“It was Jerry who led an entire wing of Christianity, the fundamentalist wing, away from isolation and into a direct confrontation with the culture,” Focus on the Family chairman James Dobson said in a statement. “In the late 1970s, he began making it respectable for Christian pastors to talk from the pulpit about the evil of abortion, simply because he did so on his television program and in his printed communications.”
Former Colorado Gov. Roy Romer, who was in office when Falwell visited Denver, said Falwell “had a large impact on politics, especially in the region where he lived (Virginia), and for a while he had a large impact nationally.”
Falwell made at least five trips to Colorado between 1981 and 1992, and his outspokenness was evident.
During a 1986 visit, he told a Denver Post reporter that Libyan leader Moammar Khadafy “is an absolute animal – as much an animal as Hitler.”
In the same interview, he lashed out at abortion and birth control, saying, “dispensing birth control pills in junior high schools is like throwing cookbooks at people at a fat farm.”
In a speech in Denver, he was asked about his marriage and views on divorce. “Divorce wasn’t an option. Murder maybe, but not divorce.”
In 1991, he spoke at a Trinity United Methodist Church event with feminist Betty Friedan, defense attorney William Kunstler and former Colorado Gov. Dick Lamm.
Staff writer Virginia Culver can be reached at 303-954-1223 or vculver@denverpost.com.
This article has been corrected in this online archive. Originally, due to a reporting error, it had an incorrect initial in the name of a vice president of Focus on the Family. His name is H.B. London.
