I was in college in New York City in 2010 when I first heard the title, “Evangelical Vatican” to refer to my hometown, Colorado Springs. Born and raised in the city, I am the product of its religious and political reputation: homeschooled for 13 years, attending George Bush rallies in 2004, trained in a Christian liberal arts college, and now back home as an evangelical Presbyterian minister. When a fellow pastor commended Jesus Springs: Evangelical Capitalism and the Fate of an American City (2025) to me, I knew I had to read it carefully–and even let it “read” me.
The book is one of several (here and here) attempts to consider how Colorado Springs shaped contemporary political and religious landscapes in a post-Trump America. I was refreshed in some ways, expecting another lambasting from left-pulling Academia. Schultz is fair, if still biased, in his analysis and reporting of what I remember growing up in Colorado Springs in the late 90s and 2000s. “I argue that many ideas that seem distinctive to post-World War II evangelicalism…are best understood as inheritances of the Cold War. The case of Colorado Springs, a center of both military and evangelical power, demonstrates this point.” Overall, he’s successful, and more importantly, charitable. But in final analysis he succumbs to the same vices he accuses of the city.
Schultz’s project is significant: to describe and analyze how Colorado Springs became the strategic center for the larger conservative and evangelical agendas in the US from the 1950s to 2026. He describes the city’s founding as an intentional anti-mining town, a moral City on a Hill contrasted with the vice-dens of the Western Gold Rush boom towns. Post World World II, evangelical organizations trickled and then flooded into Colorado Springs, beginning with the Navigators and Young Life, climaxing with Focus on the Family, and totaling over 135 ministries. Attracted to plentiful land, tax incentives, the swirl of evangelical momentum, and the mountain air for revivals, these organizations created a nuclear critical mass of evangelistic and missionary fervor for first Colorado Springs, and then the world.
Key to his thesis is that a unifying theme for Colorado Springs is an equivocation between the Christian faith with a Cold War-era battles of ideas. “[The culture war effort] was a strategy that–like modern evangelicalism–had its roots in the Cold War. Declarations that the United States was hopelessly divided between forces of religion and secularism, tradition and modernity, Christianity and humanism, drew upon older claims about the cultural threat posed by communism." Schultz is right here. I often heard growing up, “Ideas have consequences,” along with virulent critiques of Darwinism, communism, and secularism mashed together. Schultz shows how in the Colorado Springs milieu, this political and economic conflict received a spiritual flavor in the hands of Summit Ministries (whose key tome, “Understanding the Times” I devoured in middle school and high school), Focus on the Family (whose “Adventures in Odyssey” I devoured in elementary school), and New Life Church (whose mega-campus I drove past almost daily).
Amendment 2, a 1992 Colorado Constitutional Amendment that barred gay and lesbian couples from claiming minority rights or protected status, served as a crisis for the city, state, and even nation. Schultz notes that the leadership for the Amendment’s organization (Colorado for Family Values) attended Village Seven Presbyterian church, the church I too grew up attending since infancy. The public debate, lawsuit, and ultimate reversal of the Amendment, by Schultz’s telling, is a prophetic story, writ-small, of the culture war that would soon engulf the entire nation in the George Bush years and now the Donald Trump era: the battle of values, the role of religion in public life, the definition of marriage, along with the playbook for cultural engagement still used by conservative and Republicans today.
The Air Force Academy, which I drove past starry-eyed, watching cadets parachuting to the airfield, also plays a role in Schultz’s tale. The Academy was a foil of the culture war as legislators, chaplains, professors, and civil liberties organizations debated the role of religion, specifically protestant Christianity, in the formation of American warriors. The academy added a “War-fighter” ring to cultural battles, and gave Christian, according to Schultz, a concrete place to fight for their beliefs. War fighting metaphors crept into Christianity, and Christianity crept into war fighting. “Like Colorado Springs, the Air Force Academy was a symbol to which evangelicals turned their eyes.”
Finally, Schultz describes New Life Church and the ministry of Ted Haggard as the climax of spiritual warfare in militaristic terms, with a Spiritual NORAD at the World Prayer Center. “Haggard thus redrew the lines of the Cold War for a post-Cold War era. Conflating evangelicalism, democracy, and capitalism, he believed the New Life’s growth betokened the triumph of these forces at home and abroad.” New Life, for Schultz, is the final form of the coalescing of conservatism, spiritual warfare, cultural battles, and political action. I too felt the weight of the church as we drove past its enormous campus on my way to town, or when I attended the local community college next door, or was invited to Desperation, their weekly youth group numbering in the thousands.
Schultz’s final analysis? If you want to understand conservative Christianity in America, study Colorado Springs, a mish-mash of military conflict distorted to spiritual warfare in a battle of good vs. evil, where the good is the conservative, capitalistic Christians fighting forces of Darkness personified by communism, demon possession, LGBT rights, and secularism. “In Colorado Springs, we see how evangelicals came to understand themselves as stewards and defenders of a Christian heritage against a rising tide of secularism.”
Overall, Schultz is not wrong in his analysis. Colorado Springs punches above its weight in influence, both in politics and religion. Interestingly, the term “culture war” was coined by notable Christian intellectual James Davison Hunter to describe the fight over Amendment 2. There is no doubt that evangelical ministries flocked to Colorado Springs. I remember many of my parent’s friends in the military equating their professional careers in the service branches with their Christian faith. I remember families who attended New Life Church inviting me to prayer services full of language of spiritual warfare. And particularly in the last chapter, Schultz persuasively argues that the modern political landscape owes its lineage to confluences of Colorado Springs: “Evangelical institutions promote Republican politicians, and the Republican Party advances the political agenda of evangelical Protestantism. This alliance was confirmed by the overwhelming evangelical support for Mitt Romeny in 2012 and for Donald Trump in 2016, 2020, and 2024.”
Beyond the correlations, I agree with Schultz’s subtle critique that evangelicals have been far too bellicose in their interpretation of cultural conflict and strategy. Particularly on the charismatic side, but even out of ministries like Summit, Focus, and YWAM, the rhetoric of “battle of ideas,” “culture war,” and spiritual warfare has not been helpful to civil debate or persuasive missions nationally. We all know too well that this rhetoric has only increased in the national sphere, particularly with President Donald Trump’s invective against the left, Democrats, and frankly anyone he disagrees with, to the almost universal praise of conservative Christians. Christian’s have overly relied on militaristic images, language, themes to interpret and explain their presence in the world. My family, and especially my friends, were participants in what he describes, no doubt. I am thankful that my parents and church did not participate full-throatedly in the culture battle he describes.
Praise aside, two issues perplex me and one concerns me. First, for a book whose subtitle contains “capitalism,” Schultz spends precious little time describing how capitalism (an economic theory of distribution of resources through free exchange of private property governed by supply and demand captured by prices) shaped the city or evangelicalism. At best, Schultz describes how evangelicals contrasted capitalism with Marxism. At worst, “capitalism” is a dog whistle to alert Marxist allies to his critical cause. But it’s not a clear connection through his story. Economic theory plays little role in his analysis. (In a later conversation with Schultz, he clarified that by capitalism, he meant the competition for funding among Christian groups in Colorado Springs, where each had to compete with stories of conversions, ideological victories, and numerical growth.)
Second, Schultz, while more fair than most academics when writing about evangelicalism, still shows his bias beyond mere. In his chapter on the Air Force Academy, he suggests that any kind of Christian involvement in the Academy’s sphere is an organized cabal to form a Christian nation with Christian warriors, instead of constitutionally protected free expression. In his chapter on Amendment 2, he portrays the LGBT side as civil, fair-minded citizens, which was not the case. My father recalls public worship at our church being disrupted by LGBT activists in the 2000s. Lastly, in his chapter on spiritual warfare and Ted Haggard, he ignores any nuance on the diversity of views among Christians around spiritual warfare, assuming that all Christians believe the extremes of the Charismatic, pentecostal, and holiness churches. Later in the conclusion, he admits that he is aware of diverse and more nuanced positions among evangelicals, but fails to account for these when they might weaken his argument. The overall feel of the book, while more charitable than some, is still condescending and suspicious toward Christians of good faith.
These criticisms are cosmetic quibbles. My bigger concern is, ironically, ideological and rhetorical. Schultz accuses evangelicals of creating a “culture war” to win back America: “Evangelicals had not abandoned their desire to Christianize the United States.” This struggle is one we are all familiar with: two ideological “sides” are entrenched with their own histories, values, narratives, institutions, and cities. They are engaged in protracted conflict for the hearts and minds of the future generation, playing out in court rooms, classrooms, bedrooms, and chat rooms. Each views the other as an evil, an existential threat to their liberty, expression, and even life. Each has pet issues they champion online and in public debate. Each vilifies the others. At his worst, Schultz only perpetuates this same narrative. “They” (the evangelicals and fundamentalist conservatives) are a threat to “us” (the left-leaning progressives, academics, and historic minorities). “They” are an organized force using a whole array of political, economic, and social forces to fight and oppress “us.” “They” have a strategic headquarters from which “they” have practiced and perfected their art of cultural war. “We” must study their history and tactics (Jesus Springs as Art of War, anyone?) to best understand how to respond (defeat?) them.
In the last chapter, Schultz shows how New Life Church, Ted Haggard, and Peter Wagner assembled a massive army of spiritual prayer warriors for a global campaign of spiritual battle. To my ears, it’s as laughable or serious to me as it is to Schultz. But I can’t help but feel that Schultz is trying to marshal the same kind of movement on the other side by pointing out the worst types of evangelical identity politics.
As a counter part, I would humbly offer my family, and by extension, the best of the reformed tradition, in which I grew up and now serve. At the risk of cliche, I was “in but not of” the Colorado Springs that Schultz describes. My family, and my best influences, never embraced this bellicose rhetoric. Yes, Christians globally and historically have understood themselves as in a spiritual battle. But reformed Christians (and my family) at their best never framed the discussion as “us vs them.” Rather, it was “us for them.”
Richard Niebuhr's categories of Christ and culture apply. Schultz only sees Christians as against culture. But a long history of Christ transforming culture protests. The Church imitates its founder, Jesus, in understanding itself as a servant to culture, a friend to sinners, and a midwife to cultural reform rather than revolutionary. Cultural issues don’t need warlike rhetoric from anyone. It only foments violence upon violence upon violence. At times the evangelical church has absolutely been complicit and even inciting of violence and oppression. But not at its best, theologically or historically. Even in Colorado Springs, there were and are, pockets of protest to both the political and ideological status quo. Schultz rightly reveals the hypocrisy, duplicity, oppressions–what the Bible calls sins–of my hometown. For that, I am grateful and will rely on his scholarship and analysis. But also, he is just another voice in the fray of identity politics turned culture war turned actual war.