WASHINGTON, May 15 (Xinhua) -- The Rev. Jerry Falwell, the television evangelist who founded the Moral Majority and Liberty University, died on Tuesday in Lynchburg, Virginia, at the age of 73, U.S. media reported.

    Falwell, born in August 1933, founded the Moral Majority in 1979 and used it to mold the religious right into a political force, according to the Associated Press.

    The Moral Majority organization was reportedly a major vehicle for getting out the vote for the Republican Party.

    Falwell disbanded the Moral Majority in 1989 but it was resurrected as the Moral Majority Coalition, after the presidential elections in 2004.

    Falwell attended Baptist Bible College in Springfield, Missouri, and in 1956, he became the founding pastor of the Thomas Road Baptist Church of Lynchburg, which has grown to a membership in excess of 24,000.

    In 1971, he founded Liberty University in Lynchburg, an evangelical Christian liberal arts university. ¡¡