Episode 8: William Schultz

Jeffrey Stackert: Hello and welcome to the Biggest Questions podcast. I'm Jeffrey Stackert.

Kevin Hector: And I'm Kevin Hector.

Jeffrey Stackert: And it's a pleasure to welcome our guest today. He is William Schultz, who is a historian of American religion. He's currently a fellow in the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University, and it's a special privilege for us to welcome him to the podcast because he's also our new colleague at the Divinity School at the University of Chicago where Will will be starting this fall, Assistant Professor of Religions in the Americas. So Will, welcome to the Biggest Questions Podcast.

William Schultz: Pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for having me on.

Jeffrey Stackert: Well, the pleasure's really all ours. We want to talk with you today about your research and specifically about the research that you've been doing. I know that you have a forthcoming book that deals with the topic of evangelical Christianity and its intersections with economics and law and politics. Correct me if I'm wrong, but as I understand it, the working title of the forthcoming book is Jesus Springs: How Colorado Springs Became the Capital of the Culture Wars. Is that correct?

William Schultz: That's right. It's gone through a lot of changes as it started life as a dissertation, but that is the current title that has held pretty stable and God willing, that's going to be the final title.

Jeffrey Stackert: Very nice, very nice. Well, give us an entree into this topic of Jesus Springs.

William Schultz: Absolutely. So Colorado Springs is a medium-sized city located, as you won't be surprised to learn, in Colorado, that in the 1990s and 2000s gained a reputation as the capital city of American evangelicalism. My book tries to explain how Colorado Springs became, as some people nicknamed it, Jesus Springs. It got this reputation because it was home to dozens of evangelical Christian ministries, radio stations, publishing houses, missionary enterprises, denominational headquarters, all kinds of these ministries gathered together in this city at the foot of Pikes Peak. It's a story that starts well before the 1990s. Trace it back to the 1940s and 1950s when local boosters in the city of Colorado Springs start to look for outside industries to diversify the economy and they realize that in evangelical Christian ministries, there is an industry that's going to be non-polluting. So they begin recruiting these ministries to their city.

At the same time, these evangelical Christian institutions are attracted by the economic factors in Colorado Springs. It's a very cheap place to be and many of these ministries are doing their best to cut costs, but they also like the culture. They see it as a city that's patriotic, it's home to lots of military organizations. They see it as separate from the urban sprawl of the New York area, of the Los Angeles area. At first, there's very little intentional about it. In the 1940s and 1950s, it's when the first Christian ministries moved there. Groups like the Navigators, which ministered to college students and people in the military or Young Life, which evangelizes high school students. It's a very ad hoc seat of the pants sort of thing. They happen to know a real estate agent in Colorado Springs or they happen to know a pastor in Colorado Springs and so it's very much by chance.

In the 1990s, once you have a solid foundation there, then people do become more intentional about offering the city as a model for what a Christian community can look like. Its New Life Church, which is a charismatic, non-denominational, megachurch led by Ted Haggard who, before his downfall due to sex and drugs scandal in 2006, was one of the most influential pastors in the United States. And so over the decades, they flocked there by the dozens, and as each one arrives, it helps draw in more of those Christian ministries. So by the 1990s, you get a bit of a critical mass there and some evangelicals in that city start to use it as a platform for political organizing. They want to transform the United States the way that they transformed Colorado Springs. So in the 1990s then the city becomes a touchstone for your political identity depending on whether you see it as a Christian utopia or as a right wing dystopia.

It naturally receives a lot of media attention. There is an NPR, this American life story about New Life and the evangelical movement there. By the 1990s, it's not just evangelical Christians themselves who are offering the city as a model. The media, religious media, but also more secular media, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, they're also looking to Colorado Springs as "This is what evangelicalism looks like." So the creation of Colorado Springs as Jesus Springs is not just an evangelical phenomenon. It's also about non-evangelicals thinking about what this kind of Christianity is and what it means. So that is the story I'm telling in this book.

Kevin Hector: I have what I take to be a follow-up question. To frame this, here's a story that I think is a standard story and if it's wrong, you can correct me. You're the historian. But what strikes me about Colorado Springs and the movement you're talking about is this is very self-consciously a group of evangelicals who want to be influencing culture. And I'd be interested to hear you say more about the arc of that. You talk about the earliest period of this. It sounds like this wasn't at least intentionally a culturally influencing group. It grows an influence as evangelicalism does through the late 1980s, early 1990s, the heyday of evangelical influence, and then I suspect that that arc goes somewhere as evangelicalism's broader influence wanes. So I would just be interested to hear you trace this arc by the lights of that kind of story.

William Schultz: I would say that arc which has been laid out and explored by many great historians of religion in America is very much correct. A story about self-conscious effort to create an identity called evangelical; something which will bring together previously disparate and very fractious religious communities. And no one quite epitomizes that like Billy Graham in the 1940s and 1950s. So I think it's very worth noting that Graham considers moving to Colorado Springs in the 1940s and 1950s. He looks at buying a mansion in the city and using it as a conference center and headquarters. The notion is that by removing yourself from other centers of culture, the secular culture of, say, New York City, and withdrawing to this mountain hideaway in Colorado Springs and the landscape here is very important. It is beautiful, mountainous area, Pikes Peak towers right over the city, the Garden of the Gods, which is a magnificent sandstone park, is right nearby.

It provides a sense of "Here's a place where you can get away. Here's a place where you can immerse yourself in a fully Christian atmosphere." And it's telling that so many of the first Christian ministries to move there are educational ventures of one kind or another. Another significant one is an organization called Summit Ministries, which is associated with Billy James Hargis, who is a very devout anti-communist preacher. Summit Ministries, its goal is to educate the Christian leaders of tomorrow to get out the "Marxist brainwashing" that they're receiving in colleges and giving them a new and Christian education and then sending them out into the world to transform it.

You mentioned the waning of evangelical influence and you can see that as well in Colorado Springs. One of the striking things is that in the 1990s, the same business leaders, the boosters and chamber of commerce types who recruited these Christian ministries to the city in the first place begin to turn against them because they believe that if their city gains a reputation for social conservatism, it's going to hurt their ability to attract outside capital. The city is trying to diversify, it's trying to bring in high-tech companies and they figure engineers and scientists won't want to move to a place called Jesus Springs. So one of the ironies of this story is the limits you find on evangelical power, even in a city that is nicknamed the Evangelical Vatican.

Kevin Hector: And if I could just follow up. By and large, how have evangelicals there responded to no longer being the insiders in Colorado Springs?

William Schultz: Well, the culture wars of the 1990s in the city, which were fought in particular over gay rights, left a lot of scars and many of the evangelical institutions in that city began to take a more conciliatory tone. They tamped down the aggressive culture war language. When James Dobson left the leadership of Focus on the Family, he was replaced by Jim Daly, who, again, made a very concerted effort to work with non-evangelicals in the city. In the 1990s, there is this series launched called Dialogue Dinners, which is supposed to get evangelicals to sit down with gay people, to have a chance to talk with one another and see each other as human beings and not as enemies. So there is a concerted effort to turn the temperature down, so to speak. None of that means, though, that the city has become a liberal bastion in any sense. Donald Trump still won the county in 2020, in 2016, so while the outright conflict may have faded, it still remains a very conservative city.

Jeffrey Stackert: Can I ask about the economic side of this a little bit more? Because on the one hand, the story you tell makes a lot of sense; attracting people to the city with these ministries. On the other hand, if these are nonprofits, if the kinds of jobs that they're offering are relatively low paying, especially in comparison to something like high-tech companies, but in terms of an economic plan for growth, how did this work? Did it work well?

William Schultz: Yes. Here's where the element of chance comes into play, always an important element in history. In the 1980s, the city of Colorado Springs is the recipient of a huge amount of military spending. This is related to Ronald Reagan's strategic defense initiative, the Star Wars idea. A lot of the infrastructure for that is supposed to have been built in Colorado Springs. So the boosters start selling the city, the boosters' very good at coming up with nicknames for it as the Aerospace Capital of the Free World, but that proves less of a sure thing than they thought. The defense spending later in the 1980s causes a massive real estate crash leaving tens of thousands of square feet of vacant office space and leaves the city with a much less enviable nickname, which is the foreclosure capital of America. The New York Times runs a front page story about how Colorado Springs is the center of all these foreclosures.

So by the late 1980s, the Chamber of Commerce of Colorado Springs are quite desperate. And even if these nonprofit jobs are perhaps not quite as well paying as, say, a job with Apple or IBM, they still jump at the opportunity to recruit them. It's made easier by the fact that one of the key figures in the Chamber of Commerce, a woman named Alice Worrell, is, herself, an evangelical Christian. There's lots of foreclosed property throughout Colorado Springs that evangelical institutions move into. So there's an interesting story about the relationship between real estate and religion going on here.

Kevin Hector: One of the things that you talked about is that this is a pretty intentional act on the side of Colorado Springs boosters and there's not a lot of competition, but I wonder if there are other communities, other cities that see this and think, "Oh, we could do something like that." And partly, I'm just wondering more broadly about this kind of pattern, a pattern of a community trying to woo a particular group. I'm wondering what kind of patterns you as a historian see that look like this, and in the light of those patterns, what you can see about the difference that it makes, that this is an evangelical version of it, as opposed to if you had tried to attract Orthodox Jews or immigrant Muslim community or whatever it is, right?

William Schultz: Yeah. So in terms of recruiting these religious institutions, there's no place that does it quite as thoroughly or as successfully as the Springs does, but there are plenty of cities and communities that make some effort to it. A notable example is with the organization, Campus Crusade for Christ, which the 1980s is looking to move out of its original home in Southern California. Campus Crusade originally thinks about moving to Colorado Springs, but they ultimately decide on Orlando instead because a group of local businessmen there in Orlando offer them financial incentives, offer them free property, a couple 100 acres, and that seals the deal for Campus Crusade. They tear up their plans to move to Colorado and wind up moving to Florida instead. There are similar clusters of evangelical institutions that you can find in Cary, North Carolina, attracts a lot of them. Phoenix, Arizona, brings in a lot.

And then there is the classic evangelical cluster in Wheaton, Illinois. I think one of the noteworthy things about evangelical Christianity is very fractured nature of a lot of these activities. The fact that there are so many of these small ministries because most of these ministries, the ones that move to Colorado Springs are quite small. One or two or three or four people often embodying the vision of a founder. And so that creates a religious space with lots of small, almost shoestring operations. It's not surprising that they're going to seek out a much cheaper place. And whatever one can say about Colorado Springs, one of its greatest strengths is the low cost of living.

Jeffrey Stackert: Well, can I follow up on this? I'm interested to explore a little bit more what you described as this fractured quality or this decentralized quality of evangelical Christianity in America because I think if you would ask a lot of people right now about evangelicalism, they would see it as much more unified, especially politically. The number that keeps getting thrown around is 80% of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump. There's a kind of unification. How do you make sense of that?

William Schultz: It's a difficult circle to square, but the way I would understand it is that many of these ministries are not political in nature. So it's important to make a distinction there between evangelical Christianity as a broad phenomenon and the Christian right as a political phenomenon. Lots of the ministries in Colorado Springs are ones that are not explicitly political in nature. Publishing companies, associations of Christian summer camps, radio stations, they are religious, but they don't have a specific political agenda. So they are trying to serve an evangelical community. They're trying to, in many cases, provide alternatives to secular services, but they don't break the evangelical community apart in political terms. They aren't expressing a variety of political viewpoints. Part of the story of Colorado Springs, part of the larger story that Kevin alluded to near the beginning of our conversation is the formation of this distinct and unified evangelical identity.

That is what some of the more influential actors in Colorado Springs are trying to bring about. James Dobson and Focus on the Family, for instance. Dobson's goal is very clearly to make religion, make evangelical Christianity synonymous with social conservatism. And so throughout the 1990s and 2000s, it becomes a rite of passage for Republican presidential candidates to make a pilgrimage to Colorado Springs to meet with Dobson and to try to win, if not his endorsement, at least his favor. You have this universe of smaller ministries, but you also have a couple very large and very influential organizations who are trying to bring about the kind of unity, this political unity.

Kevin Hector: Just to follow up on that, the story you're telling just now makes it sound like there's a little bit of a two-way street, at least at the level of a powerful figure like James Dobson influencing the very politicians who are then going to try to court the evangelical vote. Can you disentangle some of this? What dance is going on between evangelicals and Republican Party or just conservative politics more generally?

William Schultz: So much of it is about how much priority the Republican Party should give to what are broadly referred to as social issues, LGBTQ rights, abortion rights. Part of the dance between the Republican Party and evangelical Christians, especially power brokers like James Dobson and Ted Haggard, the pastor of New Life Church, is in the 1990s over the question of how will the Republican Party prioritize these questions? The Republican Party had always been socially conservative, but does it want to make these the most important issues? And so the 1992 election is very important. On this front is George HW Bush who is not in any sense seen as a culture warrior. He's a very old line country club Republican. Nonetheless, as he is facing these economic headwinds in 1992, part of his response and part of the response of many Republicans is to reach out to this potentially untapped reservoir of votes of social conservatives.

The 1992 Republican National Convention is where Pat Buchanan gives his speech about the culture war, the war going on for the Soul of America. It's also in 1992 that the culture war really comes to Colorado Springs, which is when a group of Christian activists located there put forward a amendment to the Colorado Constitution called Amendment Two, which would overturn all gay rights laws in the state. And much of the surprise of pollsters and observers, it passes. Colorado voters approve it even as they're voting for Bill Clinton. And so conservative Christian activists hold this up as a sign of "Look, fighting against LGBTQ rights is a winning issue. He can deliver this to you if you work with us on us." So that is seen as proof that embracing social conservatism is what the Republican Party is, what the next step ought to be, and that enhances the prestige of people like Dobson.

Jeffrey Stackert: Well, this is one of the things that I really wanted to ask you about in thinking about having this conversation. In talking about this mix of evangelicalism and the culture wars and Republican politics, there's a way in which we're also experiencing a new version of culture wars, which is similar to, but also somewhat different from those earlier cultural wars of 30 years ago now that there's just been this experience of a loss of the presidency, a loss of Congress, but what do you see for American evangelicalism going forward?

William Schultz: I don't see any remarkable shifts in the near future. Throughout recent American history, there's always the hope by many on the left that there will be some kind of evangelical cracker and that some evangelicals, or at least white evangelicals will abandon the Republican Party and will come over to the Democratic Party. We'll move leftward. That's never really happened and I don't see that happening in the future. It's remarkable that even now with Trump out of office, with his popularity lower than ever before, still not a lot of prominent evangelical leaders have jumped ship or broken with him. There are obviously exceptions, but if there isn't a transformation now, I'm not sure what would make it happen. For me, I think the key thing is what will the response to this evangelical unity look like?

Kevin Hector: So I'm curious about two things in this connection. One, you talk about a bunch of important figures, none of whom are still in power, so to speak. There is no Billy Graham, there's no Dobson. The figureheads you mentioned, Ted Haggard had a significant fall from power, and it's not clear who the next generation of leaders would be or even if there is such a thing. So that's one just follow up question. The other is I'd love to hear you talk a little bit about disaffected evangelicals. There's a fair number of people within the evangelicalism who've left evangelicalism or who are evangelical, but they would never accept that name because that name has become so associated with a certain kind of politics.

William Schultz: To answer the first one, well, you can never rule out the possibility of some unknown or obscure charismatic figure playing a role similar to Billy Graham. I think the leaders are just as likely to be politicians as they are to be ministers. I think it's telling that Graham and Falwell and Robertson were all ministers, but then a later generation, Dobson, for instance, Dobson was not a minister. Dobson was a trained pediatrician. I think future people who can unite an evangelical constituency are going to be politicians rather than ministers. So a figure like Ted Cruz or maybe Josh Holly, again, they will not ascend to the level of Billy Graham most likely, but they, I think, have a skill in using the rhetoric that people like Falwell and Robertson used to weld together this constituency. And as to disaffected evangelicals, I think one of the other things, to go back to Jeff's question is we will probably see a general fading away. Maybe not total fading away, but I'd say a reduction of the very use of the term evangelical in part because it's now become so inescapably political and even relatively conservative people now are issuing the term. People disaffected from that community, while their theology might not change, the language that they use I think likely will.

Jeffrey Stackert: This has been a fantastic conversation and I want to ask you, in closing the question that we ask all of our guests, and that is in your work, what is your biggest question?

William Schultz: My biggest question is what makes the United States distinctive? Why, for so long, has the US been, by most measures, much more religious than so many other industrialized and wealthy nations like France or Germany or Japan? Why is the US also often more conservative in political terms, more opposed to welfare spending, more open to laissez faire capitalism, and what's the relationship between those? I think figuring that out has a lot to do with understanding communities like Colorado Springs. This very unusual, at least outside the United States, fusion of devout Christianity, of military power... The city is the home to an army base, two Air Force bases, the Air Force Academy, and to free market capitalism. So asking that question doesn't mean embracing American exceptionalism. I know the US is not some magical world removed from forces that affect other countries, but answering that question does help you think about broader global questions. So what I'm getting at in this project is why did the United States remain much of the 20th century and into the 21st remain such a religious nation in comparison with other countries?

Jeffrey Stackert: That's great.

Kevin Hector: It seems evident that you certainly are getting us closer to an answer to that, and it's a really compelling question, and your work is interesting and important, so we will let you go on this. We give all of our guests a chance to make a public service announcement, and it consists in this: what do you wish people outside of your field understood either about the kind of work that you do or understood about your subject matter.

William Schultz: This is what I would say, and I hope in saying this, I'm not undoing everything that I've said previously. It's to avoid theological determinism. That there's a tendency when people see an evangelical Christian do something, do anything, whether it's voting or the kind of movies they watch, it's easy to say, "Oh, they're doing that because they are an evangelical Christian." But people are complicated and they do things for a lot of reasons. So an evangelical Christian may vote for Trump for reasons that have nothing to do with their religious beliefs. They might watch movies, they might read books, they might send their kids to school in a way that is not about their religious position, but about their class position, about whether they're white or Black or native-born or an immigrant. So recognizing that complexity, avoiding theological determinism.

Jeffrey Stackert: That's great. Thanks, Will. This has been The Biggest Questions Podcast and our guest has been William Schultz. Thank you so much for being with us, and we hope you'll come back and talk with us again.

William Schultz: It's been great. Thanks so much.