FACTBOX: Jerry Falwell, a leader of U.S. religious right

(Reuters) - U.S. evangelist Jerry Falwell, who built a conservative religious movement that was associated with the Republican Party and campaigned against abortion and homosexuality, died on Tuesday.

Here are some facts about Falwell:

- Born on August 11, 1933, Falwell said he was "born again" on January 20, 1952, the day he converted to Christ while a sophomore at Lynchburg College in his home town in Virginia.

- He founded the Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg in 1956 and as a fire-and-brimstone Baptist preacher and a pioneering televangelist became one of the most prominent figures in the Religious Right.

- He founded Liberty University in 1971 and in 1979 started the Moral Majority organization which helped the conservative Ronald Reagan get elected U.S. president in 1980. The movement sought to redraw U.S. public policy along biblical lines and has long been associated with the Republican Party.

- He was part of a backlash against the "permissive culture" that took off in the 1960s when, he said, "Bible reading and prayer were expelled from the public square." He was a staunch anti-communist and fiercely anti-Islam and pro-Israel.

- He said gays, lesbians and abortionists were partly to blame for the September 11 attacks. "I really believe that the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians ... all of them who have tried to secularize America, I point the finger in their face and say: you helped this happen," he said.

- His influence waned in recent years, but he declared his aim was to work for a Supreme Court -- whose members are appointed by the president -- which would overturn the Court's 1973 ruling that women had a constitutional right to abortion.