Advancing the stories and ideas of the kingdom of God.
John G. Turner
Why Colorado Springs no longer shapes evangelicalism as it once did.
Colorado Springs, Colorado, was the center of American evangelicalism in the second half of the 20th century. Ministries relocated to a place whose government and chamber of commerce welcomed them. Megachurches built huge worship centers. Parachurch workers evangelized Air Force Academy cadets with the support of their officers. The confluence of economic, military, and spiritual power turned a small city just east of the Rockies from the “little Wheaton of the West” into an “evangelical Vatican.”
Or into Jesus Springs, as William J. Schultz puts it in his new book, subtitled “Evangelical Capitalism and the Fate of an American City.” Schultz, a historian at the University of Chicago Divinity School, has written a nuanced portrait of evangelical ministries and political aspirations after World War II. In the book, he argues that the “early Cold War was the pivotal moment in the emergence of modern American evangelicalism,” using the trajectory of Colorado Springs as a case study.
Any scholar who writes about evangelicalism faces a definitional challenge. How does one describe a diffuse group of people who don’t always call themselves evangelical? Is theology at the heart of this movement? Or is it some blend, in Schultz’s words, of “white supremacy, conservative politics, and consumer capitalism”?
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Schultz smartly cuts through these debates. “Neo-evangelicals” such as Billy Graham, he writes, “sought to Christianize the United States by converting as many people as possible and by securing recognition of Christianity as the dominant force in American culture.” Evangelicals who headquartered their ministries in Colorado Springs—figures like Young Life’s Jim Rayburn, Dawson Trotman of the Navigators, and perhaps most prominently, James Dobson of Focus on the Family—didn’t perceive any conflict between the work of saving souls and efforts at “Christianizing” the nation.
To Schultz’s credit, though, he underscores the centrality of evangelism rather than the nationalistic ends. Trotman and Rayburn, like Billy Graham, were first and foremost evangelists who sought to share Jesus Christ with as many people as possible. Young Life’s goal, as Schultz frames it, was presenting the gospel in “the most attractive and winsome way possible.” It and other parachurch ministries cultivated star athletes, sorority leaders, and soldiers, hopingsuch high-profile figures would in turn bring others to Christ. Trotman, clad in a leather jacket, rode motorcycles through the streets of 1950s Colorado Springs.
Stodgier Protestants pointed out that Jesus didn’t recruit the cool kids; nevertheless, conservative Protestants still bankrolled these and similar ministries with their promises to save the next generation of Americans. And so Colorado Springs became their base of operations. Young Life acquired Star Ranch, just south of the city, and the Navigators purchased Glen Eyrie, a Tudor-style mansion built by a railroad magnate.
Scores of other ministries followed, in part because the city’s business leaders rolled out a welcome mat. As Schultz notes, the chamber of commerce “plied evangelical organizations with promises of cheap land and cheap labor.” He profiles Alice Worrell, hired by city boosters in 1984 to recruit businesses. Worrell was the devout daughter of missionaries, and she knew what evangelical ministries wanted. “Most people I talk to are trying to escape liberalism,” she explained. By this, Schultz elaborates, she meant not just a political bent but also “a whole host of social ills, most of them associated with big cities.”
Worrell enlisted leaders of Young Life and the Navigators in a successful campaign to bring the Christian and Missionary Alliance denominational headquarters to Colorado Springs. But the city’s biggest evangelical triumph was convincing Focus on the Family to relocate from Southern California. The arrival of Focus and the rising profile of Ted Haggard, pastor of New Life Church, cemented the city’s evangelical reputation.
Not all the evangelical newcomers took the same gospel-centered, largely apolitical approach as Rayburn and Trotman. Robert LeFevre, a staunch libertarian and believer in the prosperity gospel, founded the Freedom School, which had a close association with the right-wing John Birch Society and at least tolerated segregation. One local pastor, David Skipworth, criticized a public school course on mythology as satanic paganism. The city’s leading evangelical lights didn’t want to disrupt warm relations with civic and business leaders and accordingly kept extremists like LeFevre and Skipworth at arm’s length.
By the early 1990s, an era of relative moral consensus was fraying, both locally and nationally. Campaigns for gay rights had stoked evangelical anxiety across the country, and several Colorado municipalities passed ordinances banning discrimination against individuals based on sexual orientation. Colorado Springs evangelicals were prominent among the conservative activists who mobilized a successful campaign to overturn such laws through a state constitutional amendment. Its 1992 passage emboldened evangelicals across the country who hoped to replicate the effort.
Success, however, came at a steep cost. “Many people,” Schultz observes, “blamed Colorado Springs and its evangelical population for imposing its morality on the rest of the state.” Some progressive denunciations were unfair, but evangelicals did themselves no favors by occasionally portraying their opponents as evil and satanic. The city’s business leaders fretted about the negative publicity. The consensus that had brought together evangelicals, civic leaders, and the US military shattered. In 1999, the aptly named incumbent mayor, Mary Lou Makepeace, a moderate on gay rights, defeated a challenger backed by conservatives.
The close relationship between the Air Force Academy and evangelical Christianity also came under fire. The chapel had incorporated separate spaces for Catholic and Jewish cadets, but Protestant Christianity, and evangelicalism in particular, achieved something akin to an unofficial establishment at the academy.
The city’s megachurches and parachurch ministries took every opportunity to evangelize and disciple cadets. The academy’s leadership did its part as well. General Johnny Weida, commandant of cadets, encouraged cadets to participate in the National Day of Prayer and in evangelism. Football coach Fisher DeBerry hung a banner in the team’s locker room that declared, “I am a member of Team Jesus Christ.”
By the early 2000s, the cozy relationship between evangelical Christianity and the Air Force Academy generated complaints and congressional investigations. There was plenty of evidence that nonevangelical cadets chafed at institutional support for evangelical religiosity. Evangelicals countered that their opponents sought to limit their free exercise of religion. The conflict symbolized the crumbling of a once durable consensus.
Another symbol of Colorado Springs’ evangelicalism collapsed in 2006. New Life Church’s Haggard had distinguished himself as one of the country’s most prominent and winsome young evangelical leaders. He was far more reticent about political activism than many of his Colorado Springs counterparts, but he lent strong support to a 2006 state constitutional amendment defining marriage as between one man and one woman. At the same time, however, he had been having sex with a male escort, who also helped him acquire crystal meth. Two days after Colorado voters overwhelmingly approved the proposed amendment, Haggard resigned his position at New Life.
In closing, Schultz uses the historical trajectory of Colorado Springs to illuminate how evangelicalism has changed from the 1950s to today. Men like Jim Rayburn, Dawson Trotman, and Billy Graham, he writes, “worked in an era when they could feel, with some justification, that they were speaking to a Christian population who simply needed to be recalled to their evangelical heritage.” They were confident that they could achieve this goal through “persuasion rather than force.”
But that consensus, says Schultz, is long gone. As he describes it, “We now live in an era of democratic backsliding, cultural progressivism, and widespread secularization.” In response, he finds, newer generations of evangelicals have become more strident, more authoritarian, and more wedded to the Republican Party. There are still many evangelical ministries in Colorado Springs, but some have moved elsewhere in search of cheaper land and new beginnings.
As Schultz comments, “The parachurch ministries that made Colorado Springs into ‘Jesus Springs’ are certainly not irrelevant to American evangelicalism,” and they “retain the loyalty of many Christians.” But the cultural ground has shifted underneath their feet. According to the Pew Research Center, Americans now hold negative views of evangelical Christians in higher percentages than of any other religious group.
Over time, Schultz concludes, this new era will “produce its own version of evangelicalism,” although the outcome “remains to be seen.” Hopefully, however, we won’t be too eager to discard the legacy of Rayburn, Trotman, and Graham. Like many of today’s evangelical leaders, they faced criticism for alleged theological shallowness, unabashed patriotism, and forays into politics. But they undoubtedly succeeded at making evangelical Christianity attractive to large numbers of Americans. Stridency might win attention and notoriety, but winsomeness isn’t the worst starting point for winning people to Christ.
John G. Turner is professor of religious studies and history at George Mason University. His latest book is Joseph Smith: The Rise and Fall of an American Prophet.
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