Person of the Year 2007

If Martin Luther King Jr. was the preacher who did the most for civil rights in the U.S., this Baptist pastor from Lynchburg, Va., was the most effective galvanizer of the religious right. Falwell's lobby group, the Moral Majority, was crucial in delivering Evangelicals to the Republicans in the 1980s. Avuncular, not fire-breathing, he still denounced gays as "brute beasts," predicted that the Antichrist would be Jewish, and said it was feminists, abortionists and secularists who had made God allow the Sept. 11 attacks. Yet he was not one-note; Hustler publisher Larry Flynt called him a friend.