Macel appreciated her husband's non-combative, affable nature, writing in her book that he "hated confrontation and didn't want strife in our home ... he did everything in his power to make me happy."

[16][17] During the 1950s and 1960s, Falwell spoke and campaigned against the civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. and the racial desegregation of public school systems by the federal government.

[26] According to Jimmy Carter, "that autumn [1980] a group headed by Jerry Falwell purchased $10 million in commercials on southern radio and TV to brand me as a traitor to the South and no longer a Christian.

"[24] In March 1987, Pentecostal televangelist Jim Bakker came under media scrutiny when it was revealed that he had a sexual encounter with, and allegedly raped, Jessica Hahn, and had paid for her silence.

[28] Bakker believed that fellow Pentecostal pastor Jimmy Swaggart was attempting to take over his ministry because he had initiated a church investigation into allegations of his sexual misconduct.

[30] Later that summer, as donations to the ministry declined in the wake of Bakker's scandal and resignation, Falwell raised $20 million to keep PTL solvent and delivered on a promise to ride the water slide at Heritage USA.

"[38] On his evangelist program The Old-Time Gospel Hour in the mid-1960s, Falwell regularly featured segregationist politicians like governors Lester Maddox and George Wallace.

[41]In 1977, Falwell supported Anita Bryant's campaign, which its proponents called "Save Our Children", to overturn an ordinance in Dade County, Florida, prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

[5] Twenty-eight years later, during a 2005 MSNBC television appearance, Falwell said he was not troubled by reports that the nominee for Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, John G. Roberts, had done volunteer legal work for gay rights activists in the case Romer v. Evans.

"Civil rights for all Americans, black, white, red, yellow, the rich, poor, young, old, gay, straight, et cetera, is not a liberal or conservative value.

Falwell supported President George W. Bush's Faith Based Initiative, but had strong reservations about where the funding would go and the restrictions placed on churches: My problem is where it might go under his successors. ...

[51] In 1985 he drew the ire of many when he called Nobel Peace Prize winner and Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu a phony "as far as representing the black people of South Africa".

The video purported to connect Bill Clinton to a murder conspiracy involving Vince Foster, James McDougall, Ron Brown, and a cocaine-smuggling operation.

[56] In 1995 Citizens for Honest Government interviewed Arkansas state troopers Roger Perry and Larry Patterson about the Foster murder conspiracy theory.

Homosexual rights groups called Falwell an "agent of intolerance" and "the founder of the anti-gay industry" for statements he had made and for campaigning against LGBT social movements.

[5][41] Falwell supported Anita Bryant's 1977 "Save Our Children" campaign to overturn a Florida ordinance prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and a similar movement in California.

"[64] He later told New York Times columnist Frank Rich that "admittedly, evangelicals have not exhibited an ability to build a bond of friendship to the gay and lesbian community.

"[65] In February 1999, a National Liberty Journal article (the media attributed it to Falwell)[66] claimed that Tinky Winky, a Teletubby, was intended as a homosexual role model.

[67][68] In response, Steve Rice, spokesperson for Itsy Bitsy Entertainment, which licenses Teletubbies, a U.K. show for preschool children, in the U.S., said, "I really find it absurd and kind of offensive.

After the September 11 attacks in 2001, Falwell said on Pat Robertson's The 700 Club, "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.

"[77] In her extensive ethnographic study of Falwell, cultural anthropologist Susan Friend Harding noted that he adapted his preaching to win a broader, less extremist audience as he grew famous.

For example, though he was a teetotaler,[78] Falwell no longer condemned "worldly" lifestyle choices such as dancing, drinking wine, and attending movie theaters; he softened his rhetoric predicting an apocalypse and God's vengeful wrath; and he shifted from a belief in outright biblical patriarchy to a complementarian view of appropriate gender roles.

He also began to aim his strongest criticism at "secular humanists", pagans, and liberals rather than engaging in the racist, antisemitic, and anti-Catholic rhetoric common among Southern fundamentalist preachers but increasingly condemned as hate speech by the consensus of American society.

[85][86][87] In 1983, Larry Flynt's pornographic magazine Hustler ran a parody of a Campari ad featuring a mock "interview" with Falwell in which he admits that his "first time" was incest with his mother in an outhouse while drunk.

Flynt then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which unanimously held that the First Amendment prevents public figures from recovering damages for emotional distress caused by parodies.

[89]In 1984, Falwell was ordered to pay gay rights activist and former Baptist Bible College classmate Jerry Sloan $5,000 after losing a court battle.

In July 1984 during a televised debate in Sacramento, California, Falwell denied calling the gay-friendly Metropolitan Community Churches "brute beasts" and "a vile and Satanic system" that will "one day be utterly annihilated and there will be a celebration in heaven".

Hitchens took special umbrage at Falwell's alignment with "the most thuggish and demented Israeli settlers"[105] and his declaration that 9/11 represented God's judgment of America's sinful behavior, deeming it "extraordinary that not even such a scandalous career is enough to shake our dumb addiction to the 'faith-based.

[105] Appearing on CNN the day after Falwell's death, Hitchens said, "The empty life of this ugly little charlatan proves only one thing: that you can get away with the most extraordinary offenses to morality and to truth in this country if you will just get yourself called 'reverend'.

[108] Jerry Falwell Jr. is a lawyer; he became president of Liberty University after his father's death and was put on indefinite leave from that position on August 7, 2020, after posting an inappropriate photo with a young woman on social media.