Jerry Falwell, who collapsed and died at his Lynchburg, Va., office yesterday at 73, was a fundamentalist preacher who made evangelical Christianity a political force as never before in American history.

He was given to statements that other segments of the citizenry regarded as outrageous, such as “God Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew” (he later took it back) and blaming the attacks of September 11, 2001, on God’s wrath at the American Civil Liberties Union and gays (he later took that back, too). He even accused Tinky Winky of the children’s television show “Teletubbies” of being gay; in that indictment he persevered.

Yet for all his bluster, Falwell was a potent politico-religious organizer, and no matter how offensive or absurd his rhetoric, politicians feared to cross him.

He was pastor at the Thomas Road Baptist Church he founded in 1956 in his hometown of Lynchburg with a claimed membership of 24,000. He was chancellor of Liberty University, also in Lynchburg, where a student body of nearly 10,000 is educated along evangelical lines. At the height of his popularity in the mid-1980s, he claimed a television audience of millions for his “Old-Time Gospel Hour” and counted millions more as members of the Moral Majority, the non-denominational organization he cofounded in 1979 to oppose the Equal Rights Amendment, homosexuality, and abortion, and to support school prayer, a military buildup, and balanced budgets.

Despite the misgivings of more traditional evangelicals such as the Reverend Billy Graham, who had a suspicion of involving their flocks directly in partisan politics, Falwell did not hesitate to endorse politicians. Nearly all of them turned out to be Republicans, and although Falwell once insisted, “I am not a Republican, I am not a Democrat! I am a noisy Baptist!” he nevertheless offered the benediction at the 1996 Republican National Convention.

The Moral Majority disbanded in 1989 with a flourish that was the press equivalent of a “mission accomplished” banner, but Falwell stayed visible as what he liked to call a “minister to the media,” appearing as the token right-winger on news opinion shows. His political activities during the Clinton presidency were somewhat diminished, although he did offer a videotape accusing President Clinton of crimes from cocaine trafficking to assassination — and another positing the possibility that dinosaurs and humans trod the earth together. But with the election of President Bush in 2000, he refounded his lobbying group, now known as the Moral Majority Coalition.

Falwell slowed in recent years and suffered a couple of heart attacks, but he did not lose his edge. In a sermon he gave May 6, he told his flock about a “story from Washington last week reporting that Chelsea Clinton had interviewed some Marines just returning from Iraq. She asked one Marine, ‘What do you fear most?’ He quickly answered, ‘Osama, Obama, and your mama.'”

Jerry Lamon Falwell was born August 11, 1933, in Lynchburg, where his family had lived since colonial times. His father owned a string of gas stations and reputedly used his tanker trucks to smuggle liquor during Prohibition; he died an alcoholic, and among Falwell’s first projects as a minister was to open a clinic for alcoholics.

Falwell did not absorb his mother’s piety and liked to portray his schoolboy years as a bit run amok, although his high school average was in the high As and his worst pranks involved locking the teacher’s supply closet and counterfeiting lunch tickets.

While still a teenager, Falwell experienced his own Road to Damascus as a result of listening to radio evangelist Charles Fuller’s “Old Fashioned Revival Hour”; he subsequently transferred from Lynchburg College to Baptist Bible College in Springfield, Mo., where he was ordained a minister. After graduating in 1956, he returned to Lynchburg and with $1,000 and 35 dissident congregants of another local church founded the Thomas Road Baptist Church in an abandoned building that had once been home to the Donald Duck Bottling Co. The congregation’s first act was to scrub the cola off the bricks, but Falwell was ambitious, and within two weeks he had begun a halfhour daily Christian broadcast. Within a year, he had founded the “Old-Time Gospel Hour” on television; the church had expanded quickly, too, to nearly 1,000 worshippers.

Despite utilizing Space Age press outlets, Falwell did not encourage his flock to politics. The church was originally segregated, but after Congress of Racial Equality workers were arrested at services there in 1964, he began baptizing blacks as well. In 1966, he was quoted by the Associated Press attacking War on Poverty programs for being overly political.

By the 1970s, things had changed, as he hosted a conference at which one of his associates talked about selling Jesus “as effectively as Coca-Cola,” while Falwell began embracing a series of overtly political causes. He said he was impassioned by the Roe v. Wade decision of 1973, and by 1977 he was an active supporter of singer Anita Bryant’s crusade to repeal a Florida ordinance guaranteeing equal rights for gays.

In 1979, Time magazine quoted him as saying, “The liberal churches are not only the enemy of God but the enemy of the nation.” Noting that evangelicals were less involved in politics than most citizens, he urged ministers to “Get them saved, baptized, and registered.”

A political juggernaut was born, and one suspects it is to the potential voters rather than the risen God that politicians make obeisance when they cross the threshold of the Thomas Road Baptist Church or stand at the podium of Liberty University, where no less a sinner than Newt Gingrich is slated to deliver the commencement.