The Rev. Jerry Falwell will forever be considered the Founding Father of the modern-day Religious Right in America. Falwell died yesterday at his Liberty University office in Lynchburg, Va. He was 73.

Regardless of your opinion of the often-acerbic televangelist, he should be recognized as the man who helped forge one of today's most powerful blocs of voters. Ronald Reagan's election in 1980, the Republican congressional take-over in 1994 and President George W. Bush's reelection in 2004 all took place with important help from a Religious Right movement Falwell helped jump-start.

"Reagan owed his victory to the Moral Majority and they were going to make sure he delivered," says former Bush administration aide and conservative Christian David Kuo.

Falwell's attitude hasn't been lost on the Religious Right's current power players. Suggesting that Bush was beholden only to those who returned him to office, the Southern Baptist Convention's Richard Land said in late 2004 that Bush would have to "dance with the one who brung him. We haven't come to this place to go home and not push our values and our beliefs."

For better or worse, Falwell's influence on American politics cannot be ignored.

"Yet for the movement he led to prominence, Falwell's legacy will remain a mixed blessing," W. James Antle III writes in today's American Spectator. The minister's shrill public remarks made him an embarrassing spokesman for religious and political conservatives throughout much of his career.

Falwell's cruelest comments came on Sept. 13, 2001.

"I really believe," Falwell said on Pat Robertson's "700 Club," "that the Pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians...the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America" are responsible for the terrorist attacks. "I point the finger in their face and say, 'You helped this happen.'"

Many of his fellow religious leaders tried to distance themselves from the man who stigmatized conservative Christians as intolerant sheep. Kuo laments "the worst of Jerry Falwell," that used "Jesus' pulpit for his own angry 'Christian' conservatism."

"It is ironic and sad," continues Kuo, "that the man who stood on the sidelines during the civil rights movement – saying pastors needed to preach Jesus, not politics – became the leading person marketing Jesus for political ends in the 70s, 80s and 90s, and that he will be remembered not as a great spiritual leader but a powerful political one."

Let Jerry Falwell's life be a testament to why religion and government do not mix. Entangling the two harms both. Near the end of his column, Kuo says, "Changing politics, Jerry Falwell discovered, didn't change the soul. Only God can change souls."