I never really thought about the impact Jerry Falwell had upon my life until he passed away recently. He was the kind of man you either loved or hated. His plain spoken manner and in-your-face style made him a lightening rod for controversy. I always suspected he liked it that way.

I came to faith in Christ in April 1979. Though I had been raised in church, it was not until my sophomore year in college that I truly encountered God and began to serve Him. One of my earliest memories of those days was listening to Jerry Falwell on The Old Time Gospel Hour.

His message resonated within me. He talked of patriotism and Christianity almost interchangeably. It was not until many years later that I realized how unusual it was for a member of the fundamentalist wing of our faith to be leading the charge into politics.

Everything Jerry Falwell said made sense to me in those early days. I watched as the Moral Majority was formed and saw it influence the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. That led directly to the presidential bid of Pat Robertson in 1988.

As it happened, that was the same year I moved to Virginia Beach to attend graduate school at Regent University , founded by Pat Robertson. At Regent, there was a bit of a love-hate relationship with Jerry Falwell and Liberty University .

We agreed politically on most issues and I recall at least one classmate who graduated from Liberty and came to Regent for post-graduate work. But Regent University was part of the charismatic arm of Christianity, thus Dr. Falwell and Dr. Robertson had to agree to disagree on some areas of theology. Jerry Falwell wasn’t very good at disagreeing agreeably, but it seemed things had improved in recent years.

The Moral Majority was officially disbanded in 1989 and replaced by Pat Robertson’s organization the Christian Coalition. As it happened, the state leaders of the Christian Coalition were the subject of my master’s thesis in 1992. During the course of the thesis research, I talked personally with several dozen of the leaders of that group. One of my discoveries from those interviews was that many of them had been involved with conservative Christian causes in the 1980s. By inference, they too had been influenced and led by Jerry Falwell.

Though I admire Dr. Falwell and agreed with most of his public stands on the issues, I found his rhetoric and some of his statements difficult to swallow. His very public battle with Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler magazine was never a good thing. And when he accused the Teletubbies cartoon characters of promoting a gay agenda I wished he had just stayed in bed that day.

As I watched the cable news interviews the day of Dr. Falwell’s death, one theme emerged. Those who admired him and those who opposed him all saw him as a man of integrity. They said he fought for what he believed and was always honest.

That’s a great eulogy for all of us to strive toward.