So he already possessed a certain status, enough to lend his words credence to journalists in a cycle that only built on itself. For years, it was as if, when one wanted to quote politically active religious conservatives, one needed only to call Lynchburg.

One of his legacies (hardly his alone, although I think he was the most influential in achieving this) lies in the way that many journalists began using the word "Christian" as Falwell himself might use it--that is, as a synonym for "politically and theologically conservative evangelical Protestant." Thus, the word Christian often appeared (and still does) in news stories without any sort of modifier when the context of those stories actually demand a greater precision.

Conservative evangelical Protestants are perfectly free to call themselves Christians without any adjective, holding as they do that the experience of being born again--making a conscious decision to accept Jesus as savior and undergo a believer's baptism--is what makes one a Christian, plain and simple. But the news media needs to be considerably more careful in its usage, acknowledging that there are a great many people in the United States who call themselves Christians (and not just casually) who have very different understandings of how to interpret the Bible and relate to the larger culture--not to mention their having very different understandings of baptism, liturgy, church governance and more. Christianity's a big tent.

Finally, it's worth remembering that Falwell pioneered a paradox: the fundamentalist Protestant who builds coalitions that are fundamentally about secular politics and so are open to people on social and ideological (rather than purely religious) grounds. That's what Moral Majority was. And that's why he didn't call it the Christian Coalition.