By RAY WADDLE As a Tennessean reporter I met Jerry Falwell twice. The first time was a disaster. He sat moodily in the parlor of a local church, flanked by two frowning bodyguards. To my questions he gave banal answers, contemptuously. This was 1986, the Reagan era, when Falwell enjoyed the height of his glory and notoriety. Power, I concluded, gives these men of God a deep mean streak. A decade later we talked again. Though the hated Bill Clinton in power, Falwell was relaxed and genial, a good sport. He talked of completing another strong voter registration drive. He divulged plans of beefing up his Liberty University football squad and someday beating Notre Dame. There was a twinkle in his eye. Falwell was a 73-year-old man with heart problems, but his death this week was still startling. I assumed he was indestructible. The word Falwell itself is lodged in the public psyche in ways that (Pat) Robertson and (James) Dobson are not. His many critics grant him permanence every time they use the adjective "Falwellian," a term of abuse that vaguely stands for any theocratic scheme to take over the country. Everyone this week is reciting his legacy. He transformed American elections by persuading conservative Christians to overlook their distaste for politics, lay aside centuries of theological dispute and unite around a newly urgent culture war against liberals, gay rights, abortion, pornography, feminism and Hollywood. He started the Moral Majority in 1979 at the end of a dreary, unfocused national decade. New prosperity and techno-revolution were poised to erupt, and the swelling ranks of suburbanites were looking to religion to dignify their dreams -- and their anger. His timing was perfect. He was often recklessly, cheerfully speculative. He announced the Antichrist was probably a Jewish man now living in Europe. He complained that a TV Teletubbies character was excessively gay for wearing purple and sporting a handbag. After 9/11, he blurted that the attack happened because of divine anger at the moral decline of America. He apologized. By 1989, he disbanded Moral Majority, saying "mission accomplished." The announcement surprised us. True, Moral Majority had galvanized millions of believers to vote (Republican), care about social policy and protest the coarsening of pop culture. But his movement had accomplished no real reversals in American life. Abortion is still legal. Gay America still exists. Porn is bigger than ever. His legacy is Liberty University, and his 22,000-member Virginia church, and the fixed assumption that a surging Christian activism will remain part of the national political alchemy. And this legacy too: Conservative religious people now vote mostly Republican, but the GOP politicians who win the elections with religious voter help never deliver on conservative religious hopes of a moral revolution. America made Jerry Falwell possible, and America stopped him from going further than he did.