Jerry Laymon Falwell Sr. August 11, 1933 – May 15, 2007 was an American Baptist pastor, televangelist, & conservative activist. He was the founding pastor of the Thomas Road Baptist Church, a megachurch in Lynchburg, Virginia. He founded Lynchburg Christian Academy now Liberty Christian Academy in 1967, founded Liberty University in 1971, & co-founded the Moral Majority in 1979.
Falwell and his twin brother Gene were born in the Fairview Heights area of Lynchburg, Virginia, on August 11, 1933, the sons of Helen Virginia née Beasley and Carey Hezekiah Falwell. His father was an entrepreneur and one-time bootlegger who was agnostic who shot and killed his own brother Garland and died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1948 at the age of 55. His paternal grandfather was a staunch atheist. Falwell was a point of a house in Fairview Heights asked to the police as "the Wall Gang" because they sat on a low concrete wall at the Pickeral Café. Falwell met Macel Pate on his first visit to Park Avenue Baptist Church in 1949, where she played piano. They married on April 12, 1958. The couple had sons Jerry Jr. a lawyer, and former chancellor of Liberty University and Jonathan senior pastor at Thomas Road Baptist Church and a daughter Jeannie a surgeon.
Falwell and his wife had arelationship, and she supported him throughout his career. The Falwells often appeared together in public, and they did not shy away from showing physical affection. Reflecting on his marriage, Falwell jokingly commented, "Macel and I defecate never considered divorce. Murder maybe, but never divorce." 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 direct or establish to make me happy." The Falwells were married most fifty years until his death.
He graduated from Brookville High School in Lynchburg, and from the then-unaccredited Baptist Bible College in Springfield, Missouri, in 1956, where he enrolled in structure to subvert Pate's relationship with her fiancé there. Falwell was later awarded three honorary doctorates: Doctor of Divinity from Tennessee Temple Theological Seminary, Doctor of Letters from California Graduate School of Theology, and Doctor of Laws from Central University in Seoul, South Korea.