In the introduction to his new book, Jesus Springs: Evangelical Capitalism and the Fate of an American City, William J. Schultz writes: “On April 12, 1943, the sun rose on an impressive sight in the Garden of the Gods. This park, located a few miles west of Colorado Springs, was always picturesque; its pinkish-red sandstone formations drew tens of thousands of visitors every year. But that April morning witnessed something unique: 25,000 people gathered at the park’s Gateway Rocks to take part in an Easter sunrise service.”
A worship service this large—and in Colorado? It is gatherings like this one—and various developments that led to them—that have earned Colorado Springs such nicknames as “Jesus Springs” or “Evangelical Vatican.” In this book, Schultz tells the story of how it all came about and explains the broader implications of this story for American evangelicalism.
William J. Schultz is assistant professor of American religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School.
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Daniel K. Williams: Today Colorado is a socially liberal, reliably blue state that is neither in the Bible belt nor the South. Yet your new book Jesus Springs argues that if we want to understand conservative evangelical politics, we need to look at Colorado Springs. Why? What can a study of the history of religion in Colorado Springs tell us about American evangelicalism and the Christian Right?
William J. Schultz: It's true we wouldn’t usually associate a place like Colorado—left-leaning, socially liberal—with the Christian Right. But Colorado Springs merits our attention because of its anomalous position. Within a fairly secular state, Colorado Springs became (at least in the 1990s and 2000s) the capital city of American evangelicalism. It was home to dozens of evangelical ministries and churches, including some of the most influential evangelical organizations in the world—James Dobson’s Focus on the Family and Ted Haggard’s New Life megachurch, for instance. How did this happen? Explaining why Colorado Springs became “Jesus Springs” illuminates how evangelical Christianity has influenced and has been influenced by major trends in US history, including the onset of the Cold War and the spread of suburbia. The city’s history demonstrates that the influence of American evangelicalism has always gone far beyond the “Bible Belt.”
Daniel K. Williams: How (and when) did Colorado Springs become a magnet for evangelical enterprises? What were some of the most significant evangelical enterprises that located in Colorado Springs—and what drew them to the Springs?
William J. Schultz: Though Colorado Springs gained its “Jesus Springs” reputation in the 1990s, its transformation began decades early, when the youth ministry Young Life relocated to the city in the late 1940s. Soon after came the Navigators, which focused on person-to-person evangelization, and Summit Ministries, a conservative summer school. These ministries were drawn to the city by economic factors. Colorado Springs offered them cheap, scenic property that they could use as part of their mission to evangelize the world. But those economic factors were interwoven with cultural ones: As the evangelical community in Colorado Springs grew, that community itself became an attraction for other evangelical organizations. Then, too, the enthusiastic support that the Colorado Springs business community gave to evangelicals proved enticing. Who doesn’t want to go someplace they’re wanted? Finally, the western location and physical beauty of Colorado’s Front Range gave evangelicals a sense that they were on the cutting edge of something—that in moving to Colorado Springs, they were building the future of Christianity.
Daniel K. Williams: Evangelicalism’s influence in Colorado Springs over the past half century has come almost entirely from parachurch ministries, nondenominational megachurches, and other organizations that are outside of official denominations. What do you think has given parachurch enterprises and nondenominational church plants such extraordinary influence in American evangelicalism and in Colorado Springs?
William J. Schultz: Parachurch enterprises and nondenominational churches are market-driven institutions. This isn’t to deny their religious nature, but their piety is always intermingled with pragmatism. They are exquisitely attuned to the needs of their audience; they are always asking themselves what people want. Think, for example, of Bill Hybels going door-to-door in suburban Chicago, asking people what they want in a church and using their responses as the foundation for the Willow Creek megachurch. Hybels once remarked: “If I ever preach an irrelevant sermon, drag me out of the ministry!”
I think that attitude captures the appeal of the parachurch institutions which clustered in Colorado Springs. They recognized that people wanted advice on how to put their religion into practice—they wanted a relevant religion. Focus on the Family’s James Dobson was a master of this. He gave people a Christian (albeit a specific kind of Christian) map to navigate the maze of modern life. Similarly, groups like Young Life offered Christian analogs to the youth culture of their era, allowing one to be of the world while also being distinctively Christian (again, a particular kind of Christian). The result was a subculture at once in touch and in tension with modern culture, the sort of productive tension that Christian Smith and others have cited as a key source of evangelical vitality.
Daniel K. Williams: In the last two or three decades, the political or cultural influence of Colorado Springs’s conservative evangelicals has diminished. What caused this decline?
William J. Schultz: The organizations that turned Colorado Springs into “Jesus Springs” belonged to the first generation of the “neo-evangelicals,” the religious leaders who came of age in the 1930s and 1940s and who sought to transform hard-edged “fundamentalism” into something more palatable. Billy Graham was the most famous figure in this movement, but it also included James Rayburn of Young Life and Dawson Trotman of the Navigators. These men wanted to attune evangelicalism to American culture.
By the turn of the twenty-first century, however, the cutting edge of evangelicalism was less interested in adapting to American culture than in reconquering that culture for Christ. They were more explicitly political than the neo-evangelicals; their faith was more open to the supernatural; their style was much more aggressive. Certainly, some figures in this movement (like C. Peter Wagner, Cindy Jacobs, and Dutch Sheets) had connections to Colorado Springs. But the city is no longer a destination for evangelical groups. The marketplace forces which made Colorado Springs a center of evangelicalism ultimately unmade it as well.
Daniel K. Williams: Do you think that the trajectory of the rise and fall of evangelical enterprises in Colorado Springs has parallels with the trajectory of evangelicalism in other parts of the United States? In what ways is the story of evangelicalism in Colorado Springs similar to the story of American evangelicalism elsewhere? In what ways is it different?
William J. Schultz: Yes, you could absolutely point to other examples. Philadelphia, for instance, was long seen as a bastion of American evangelicalism (it’s worth remembering that the evangelical movement was once associated primarily with the urban Northeast and Midwest). Another evangelical capital: Wheaton, the Chicago suburb that was home to Billy Graham’s alma mater, Wheaton College. Its reputation was leveraged by Colorado Springs boosters, who touted their city as the “Little Wheaton of the West.” Nowadays, one could point to Nashville as the home to many key evangelical institutions.
The takeaway from all this is that religion always needs a place, even in our decentralized and digital world. There will always be a “there there” for religions, and so there will always be a story to be told about how religious history intersects with the history of particular places.
Daniel K. Williams: How did your research for this book change your own understanding of American evangelicalism? Is there anything that you discovered in your research that surprised you?
William J. Schultz: I was surprised at how porous the boundary between “evangelical” and “Pentecostal” was. Scholars tend to treat these faith traditions separately from each another. But, as the late, great Donald Dayton long argued, Pentecostal ideas about the power of the Holy Spirit have always played an important role in the tradition we call “evangelicalism.”
Many of the evangelical leaders who called Colorado Springs home were shaped by the Holiness and Pentecostal streams of Protestantism, particularly those who, like Jim Rayburn or James Dobson, came out of the American south. Ted Haggard, one-time pastor of New Life and president of the National Association of Evangelicals, was as thoroughly Pentecostal as he was evangelical, having studied at Oral Roberts University and pastored at a charismatic megachurch in Louisiana before arriving in Colorado Springs.
Daniel K. Williams: What is your next book project?
William J. Schultz: My next project is about the relationship between religion and financial fraud in the modern United States. There are, needless to say, lots of stories to tell, so the real challenge is to figure out to overarching story which connects these eye-catching scandals.
I’ve been particularly fascinated by the continuing appeal of what we might call alternative forms of currency to religious institutions. Think of crypto or gold, for instance. I think the appeal of these alternative currencies arises from the desire of many religious institutions to insulate their relationship with donors from outside intervention. Not surprisingly, this creates an environment in which fraud can run rampant.
One thing I want to emphasize is that this is not simply an evangelical problem, despite the widely held stereotypes about phony televangelists. All religions face the problem of financial fraud, and they all deal with it in their own way, drawing on their own traditions.
