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Pike's Peak smiles down on the town from under its snow cap. At the south end of the city there's the hollowed-out Cheyenne Mountain, inside which NORAD has its command centre. The U.S. Air Force Academy is located here, as are headquarters of the military branch of the Department of Homeland Security, a brace of air-force bases, several army plantations, at least two colleges and the headquarters of the U.S. Olympic Committee (Colorado Springs is where U.S. Olympic athletes train). But I needed to get a book at Focus on the Family, the single most important unifying force in Christian America and a powerful engine of its revival.

The bookstore was full of merchandise you'd find in any commercial establishment, provided it catered entirely to Christians and people obsessed with family life. There were Bibles and religious CDs, books in Spanish such as Donde Esta Papa? and others in English, such as Really Bad Girls of the Bible. There was a book called Fabulous and Funny: Clean Jokes for Kids (Q: What do you get when you squeeze a curtain? A: Drape juice) and tapes of the Focus on the Family radio show. You could buy a painting of heaven, Focus on the Family's favourite place, or a carved wooden plaque that read, "As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord."

And, of course, the store carried all of the more than one dozen books written by Dr. James Dobson, the 68-year-old founder of Focus on the Family. I picked up one of his latest, Marriage Under Fire: Why We Must Win This Battle, and took it over to the cashier.

"Are a you a pastor?" She was a pleasant women in her 60s, from what I could tell.

"No," I said.

"Are you 55-plus?"

"I look it, but I'm not."

"Well, then," she said.

"How much discount does a pastor get?" I said.

"Are you a pastor?" she repeated.

"No. Just curious."

"I can't tell you that," she said.

That was the first time my paranoia popped up at Focus on the Family, the first time I felt -- not that I was being watched, but that I stood out, that somehow I smelled, spiritually. I was travelling around America to find out why more and more Americans were turning to God, and now I was at ground zero of the Christian right -- a place where everyone I met was friendly and committed and knew with apparent certainty what was true and what was good. I, on the other hand, was a gushing fountain of doubt.

I left the bookstore and climbed into my rental car and drove back to my hotel. All the way to the horizon, I could see new suburbs going up in the dry hills to the east. Fifteen years ago, before Focus on the Family moved here, before 9/11 attracted a new military presence and a bushel of new high-tech companies to the high desert, Colorado Springs was a snoresville of 50,000, little more than what it had started out as -- a vacation town for the miners who worked the Cripple Creek gold rush in the 1890s. Today, 250,000 people live here: Between the athletes and the generals and the soldiers for Christ, there are a lot of fervent types around.

This makes Colorado Springs a testing ground not just for new artillery but for ideas, as if the mental frontier of America is still up for grabs. In the late 1980s, Colorado-based Silverado Savings and Loan -- one of whose directors was Neil Bush, George W.'s kid brother -- went eyes-up, leaving taxpayers with a bill of more than $1-billion, and Colorado Springs the nickname "the forfeiture capital of America."

Desperate for new blood, the city council and a local foundation offered Focus on the Family (then based in Pomona, Calif.) a sweetheart grant and land deal. There were 35 non-profit, para-religious organizations in town then; today, there are more than 130.

This is where Dr. James Dobson, "America's trusted family psychologist," chose to make his stand against the eroding forces of secular commercialism, as the leader of the religious right -- out here in a high, bright desert, next to one of the earth's deadliest collections of military hardware. I wondered if Dr. Dobson had sensed the apocalyptic possibilities.

The new houses on the edge of town looked like brown burrows mounding in the safety of the earth. "They're still building the world out here," I said, just before I realized I was talking to myself in the car.

I went to Focus on the Family because I had a theory. My theory was that Dr. James Dobson is the Pope of evangelical America. Granted, it's a stretch: There are more than a billion Catholics worldwide, compared to perhaps 500 million evangelical Christians, and the Pope doesn't have a portrait of Winston Church on the wall of his office, the way Dr. Dobson does.

But James Dobson is the most prominent Christian in America, and -- with the exception of the president -- possibly the most prominent American Christian in the world. His folksy Focus on the Family radio programs are heard by 200 million people in 171 countries. A recent survey of Protestant pastors voted him one of the four most influential Christians in the world, well ahead of John Paul. His books have sold 12 million copies, and he's widely credited with mobilizing the eight million evangelical voters who swung the election for the Republicans last November.

Having helped convince 11 states to veto gay marriage, he hopes to convince 15 more in the next year-and-a-half. His latest and most controversial plan, announced in letters to 1.2-million Focus on the Family supporters, is to make life miserable for six Democratic senators if they oppose the president's nominees for the U.S. Supreme Court, spaces on which are about to open up like spring bulbs.

James Dobson is the official voice of the Christian right. He's everywhere. His name has appeared 9,307 times in The New York Times in the past year alone. It was James Dobson, for instance, who made headlines during inauguration week last January when he scolded a lobby group for using SpongeBob, the beloved cartoon . . . sponge, in a film that promoted (depending who you talk to) either sexual inclusivity or multiculturalism.

This is the man to whom I said, "Are you the Pope of the evangelical Christian community?"

Dr. Dobson smiled a lopsided smile -- he's enormously friendly and engaging -- and shook the large blond head that tops off his six-foot-two body. "I am not the Pope, because I have no authority that goes beyond the power of my persuasion," he said. He had an Oklahoma accent, and a voice like Ronald Reagan's. "That's certainly not like some edict that comes from the head of the Catholic Church."

"But the power of your persuasion is very much informed by your sense of mission from God," I said.

"That's true," he said, which surprised me. "I've been a Christian since I was a child. And what I call righteousness in the culture is very, very important to me. And I do what I can to preserve it. And why not? . . . The liberal media, which apparently you're part of" -- here I demurred, because Focus is famous for checking the political biases of journalists who visit -- "seems to imply that somehow if you are a person of faith that you violate the principle of church and state by advocating things. That's never been true.

"I mean, Abraham Lincoln said at the Gettysburg Address that this is the government 'of the people, by the people and for the people.' He didn't say all the people, except Christians or people of faith. I have a right in a democracy or a representative form of government to advocate what we believe in."

This is the thing about Dr. Dobson: He is always on message, because he is always believing, always tuned to the thought of heaven.

"I don't think evangelicals can have a Pope," Luis Lugo, the director of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, told me one morning not long after that. "But I think there are certain powerful people -- I will call them gatekeepers -- who speak for them. Richard Land, of the Southern Baptist Convention, is one. Charles Colson" --the former Watergate felon and founder of Prison Ministries, and one of Dobson's best friends -- "is another. But if I had to pick one who came above, it would be Dobson."

The meaning and purpose of life have been clear to James Dobson for a long time.

"I gave my heart to Jesus Christ when I was three years old," he tells me one afternoon. There are knickknacks all over his office; Shirley, his faithful wife of 44 years, a former homecoming queen of Pasadena College who now runs the U.S. National Day of Prayer, is in her office next door.

"I remember it as though it were yesterday. I'm not kidding you. I was sitting with my mother at the back of the church, back row, on the right side. And my father was the minister. And he invited those who wanted to give their hearts to Jesus to come to an altar. And I didn't ask my mother: I just stepped up and walked down there. And I remember being highly emotional about it. I remember crying. And afterward I remember we went someplace in the car. And they left me in the car."

I was amazed at his recall, though I later found out that he had told this story many times. "I remember sitting in the front seat, talking, thinking about what I'd done, wondering about its meaning. So that's been my whole life. I haven't lived the perfect life, but I've lived by that standard, or tried to, since I was a little boy."

By the age of 40, he had worked his way up through various teaching jobs to become a professor of pediatric psychology at the University of Southern California medical school, and a veteran at the Los Angeles Hospital for Children. There he might have stayed, had he not written Dare to Discipline in 1977. The book claimed that children needed a reliable authority in their lives, even if it meant spanking.

"I just felt that I ought to try to do what I could to preserve the family, because I saw it falling apart," he says now.

The book sold three million copies and produced an avalanche of mail that convinced him he had a calling to help families. His father suggested that he reach them via radio rather than on the road, so he could spend more time with his own family. The first show, broadcast out of Arcadia, Calif., was half an hour long, on 27 stations, with a staff of nine.

Within six years, Focus had 400 employees. Today, its reach is breathtaking. Some 1,400 employees, with a budget last year of $146-million, field 10,000 phone calls, e-mails and letters a day, and fire out four million books, pamphlets and letters a year in return. The international Focus mission has penetrated to China and Indonesia.

"It's obvious there is just a great need for support for the family, particularly marriage and parenthood and things related to family life," Dr. Dobson says, and means it: He doesn't take a salary, and lives off his book royalties. (At an estimated $20-million so far, it can't have been such a bad living.)

While Focus takes pains to insist its main concern is "the vanilla issues . . .of raising families" -- which extend to the sanctity of marriage and the value of human life -- Dr. Dobson stepped into the limelight a year ago as never before. He created Focus on the Family Action, a second tax-exempt entity that can spend 60 per cent of its contributions on lobbying. (The original organization is limited, under U.S. tax law, to spending only 10 per cent of its budget that way.)

The new entity "lets him talk about the federal marriage amendment act," Gary Booker, a Focus staffer, explains. Of course, when he endorses political candidates -- as he did George W. Bush last November -- he does it as a private citizen, lest Focus lose its tax-exempt status. "It's a sensitive issue," Mr. Booker adds. "How do you separate Dr. James Dobson, as an individual, from Focus on the Family? Our lawyers watch that constantly." The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was threatened with an IRS audit last year, allegedly for tipping its political hand during the election campaign. But Focus has escaped the tax department's notice.

Dr. Dobson admits he feels called to speak out more today than ever. Abortion is an issue close to his heart -- he refers to the killing of 47 million fetuses as "the baby holocaust" -- but these days gay marriage really has him popping.

"It's a culture war in this country," he says. "And it is heating up. Nobody in 1977 was talking about redefining marriage. That's a very recent phenomenon. So there have just been a lot of cultural changes that have dragged us, to some degree against our will, into the public-policy arena."

The idea of Dr. James Dobson, a regular on Larry King Live, being dragged against his will into a public-policy argument strains credibility. Jimmy Dobson is a very straight guy, and he has no intention of hiding the fact. His will be the revenge of all nerds.

"Marriage is the foundation," he says. "Everything else sits on the institution of marriage and family. That's how it has been for 5,000 years."

But not homosexual marriage, which he believes will dismantle the family itself -- a potential tragedy, he writes in the book I bought in Colorado Springs, Marriage Under Fire, because "marriage is a sacrament designed by God that serves as a metaphor for the relationship between Christ and His church. Tampering with His plan for the family is immoral and wrong."

He puts it less dogmatically in person: "If the definition of marriage is no more stable than the ruling of a judge somewhere who doesn't have to answer to anybody, it's only a matter of time until somebody who is in one of those other categories -- polygamy being the best example -- will be able to make the case, 'Why not me?' If you're saying its discriminatory to exclude two men or two women, why is it not discriminatory to three men and two women? I mean, there's no way legally you can make that case. . . . That's the direction it will go, and it can just weaken the fabric of the family."

The family is an instrument of the Lord; weaken it, and you weaken God's hold on earth. Rick Santorum, a Pennsylvania senator and friend, was mocked mercilessly during the U.S. election campaign last year when he said gay marriage would lead to legalized bestiality, but Dr. Dobson understands the sentiment.

"What he was saying is that, in the original Constitution, our rights come from the Creator. We're endowed by the Creator with certain unalienable rights." As soon as a court rules in a way that contradicts Biblical teaching -- say, by decriminalizing sodomy -- "your rights don't come from the Creator. Every person is entitled to his own interpretation of reality. So it's a whole paradigm shift from morality being defined by God, to morality and behaviour being protected according to anybody's interpretation." This is exactly the sort of slide into moral relativism that he fears.

Naturally, with courts so fallible, Focus has tried to solve the gay-marriage problem other ways. These include a regular conference called Love Won Out, in which formerly gay Focus staffers try to re-orient homosexuals back into the heterosexual barn. It doesn't work, but therapeutically it is effective in helping families accept their gay offspring.

All this drives the gay community insane. A massive protest at the Focus Campus is planned for May 1, but there has never been any lack of animosity between Dr. Dobson and what he calls "homosexual activists." American gays call Colorado Springs "ground zero." In 1992, Colorado voters adopted Amendment 2, which forbade governments from classifying homosexuals as a class protected against discrimination with regards to housing and hiring. Focus and Dr. Dobson were heavy backers of the amendment, and received death and bomb threats for their trouble. But the amendment was later struck down as unconstitutional, which still sticks in Dr. Dobson's long craw.

One night in downtown Colorado City, I bought a bottle of wine. I asked the woman behind the counter where I might run into some religious people, but she was serving a man and she held off answering. After he left, she said, "He had short hair. I thought he might be religious. I just didn't want to offend him."

"I realize," I said.

"Short hair. Could be religious, could be military."

"But military short hair doesn't necessarily mean religious," I said.

"No, absolutely not," the woman said. But she knew religious people who hadn't braved the town's liberal downtown in five years.

Like most of America, Colorado Springs is split between those who believe and those who don't want to be told what to believe, who refer to Dobson and his ilk as "the religious reich."

It's a town not far removed from its mining-town roots. A couple of weeks ago in the Denver state legislature, a Republican and a Democrat came to blows over whether families of fallen soldiers should get special licence plates. The same week, Planned Parenthood was forced out of a Colorado Springs school district when anti-abortion groups and a Christian on the school board questioned whether Planned Parenthood's lessons conformed with the school district's "abstinence-plus" policy. "Abstinence-plus" promotes abstinence as the best method of birth control.

Soldiers outnumber professional Christians in town, but it's the Christians you see and hear. There's a 155-page Christian Business Directory, and a Christian yellow pages called The Shepherd's Guide. Sex-free Christian comedians can make a living in these parts (sample: a good-looking girl shows up at a prayer meeting, and she's a 10 -- except that she's a Canadian, which means that with the exchange she's an 8); the $400,000 Easter pageant at nearby New Life Church (congregation 8,000) aims to sell 40,000 tickets. The football coach at the Air Force Academy was recently disciplined for forcing Christianity on his team: One locker-room memo asked his boys to pledge that they were "a member of Team Jesus Christ."

But nowhere in Colorado Springs is more cheerfully Christian that the Focus on the Family campus, whose largest brick buildings form blue crosses when seen from the sky, as if to give God the view. Women in the hallways say, "Good morning, how are you, God bless your day." Everyone who works there makes "an active profession of faith," and staff pray together daily, sometimes in the "Chapelteria" -- the chapel that doubles as a cafeteria. A quarter-million tourists make a pilgrimage here every year, just to see the place. Evangelical Christians have been famously disparate politically, but by uniting them in their concern for family values, Focus provides a rare commonality for at least 90 denominations.

Ten per cent of the 10,000 calls, e-mails and letters Focus receives every day requires the services of on-site counsellors; the rest want information and enlightenment on family issues, which Focus then provides from its vast warehouse of tapes, CDs, books and self-help literature.

Focus doesn't charge for materials in the traditional sense. Instead, operators suggest a donation. Eighty per cent of buyers meet the price, and 20 per cent give more, a system that will provide Focus's entire 2005 annual budget of $170-million. The whole thing is geared to speed and efficiency. "That way," says Paul Hetrick, Dr. Dobson's main spokesman, "driving to work, someone can hear the show, call on their cell, order what they need on Monday, for delivery on Thursday."

Then there's Focus's mailing list, 2.5-million names long. "If we want to isolate on a state, like in the recent election on stem-cell research, we can send mailings just on that," Mr. Ketrick says. It's hard to hear him -- a 12,000-piece mailing is clattering in a nearby hopper.

"We could just inform them, which is called educating voters, or we could get them to call their Congressmen, which is called a call to action."

What I was in awe of most was Dr. Dobson's command of political rhetoric, the fluidity of his answers. The night before I met him in his office, he appeared, from Focus's in-house TV studio, on Hannity & Colmes, a point-counterpoint, I-can-shout-louder-than-you-can political debate show on the Fox network. Paul Hetrick figured there was a one-in-10 chance Dr. Dobson would do it -- he'd been feeling poorly -- but he has a hard time staying out of an argument, especially if it's live TV: He avoids interviews that will be edited, as he can't control the outcome. He has turned down CBS's Sixty Minutes twice for that reason.

The subject this time was Terri Schiavo, a woman who has been in a waking coma in Florida for more than 13 years. Dr. Dobson's fellow medical practitioners long ago declared Terri Shiavo irreparably brain-damaged and incapable of thought or emotion; 19 judges on six courts had found no reason to dispute these findings, nor to deny her husband the right to shut down her feeding tube.

But her parents disagreed, and now the might of Dr. Dobson was lumbering to their aid. "I would consider it murder," he told the national TV audience, which had just seen ambiguous footage of Ms. Schiavo in bed, fluttering her eyes. I was watching him from the other side of the studio glass. "She is not in a coma, she is not on life support, she is not in a persistent vegetative state."

All of these contentions were not only debatable, but practically medical misstatements -- but Dr. Dobson kept smacking away at his simple points like a ball-return machine.

"I don't believe in the right to die," he said, the folksy voice masquerading the profoundly religious nature of his argument. "God is in control of her destiny."

Within weeks, Florida governor Jeb Bush and his legislature were trying to reverse the court order. Thanks to Dr. Dobson weighing in, at the time of writing, the fate of Terri Schiavo and her feeding tube is once again in limbo -- but now in Washington, where the House and Senate are debating the matter. So far Terri Schiavo is still alive, which is a victory for Dr. Dobson. If she dies, she will still be fodder for his cause.

Publicly, of course, he never lets up; the moral sky is always falling. Privately he admits to being at least slightly chuffed by the re-election of Mr. Bush, whom he considers an even greater ally of family values than Ronald Reagan.

"A lot of people are encouraged by what has taken place," he tells me the next day. "Not only is there a Christian in the White House, but the top four leaders of the House of Representatives are Christians, and the top three leaders of the Senate are Christians. And because of those three branches of government, the chance of reforming the judiciary is certainly a possibility."

Remaking the Supreme Court is Dr. Dobson's new holy grail, a last big chance to prevent the secularization of American morals. "Most of the problems we have today come from what I consider to be an out of control court." He traces the court's efforts to limit religious liberty from the prohibition on Bible reading and prayer in schools in the 1960s to his latest bugbear, the Lawrence vs. Texas case, "which for the first time said there was a constitutional right to sodomy."

That's prime-cut Dobsonian rhetoric: What the court actually decided was that it was unconstitutional to make sodomy legal for heterosexual couples but against the law for gays. But "a constitutional right to sodomy" has that repeatable Dobson ring. "What the unelected, unaccountable court is doing," Dr. Dobson claims, "is making more and more of the significant moral decisions that really ought to be made by the citizenry."

What makes Dobson so formidable as a lobbyist, apart from his carborundum hide, is his moral certainty, which in turn sounds like clarity -- a certainty born of his stanchion-like faith in God and the Bible and its laws. Unlike the Pats (Robertson and Buchanan), unlike Jerry Falwell, Dr. Dobson's simple faith isn't angry, or dogmatic, or hectoring, or shaming or superior: It just is. But it's also bottomless. "I know who I am," Dr. Dobson likes to say, "because I know whose I am."

What Dobson wants for all God's children, in other words, is what every child wants at home -- a steady, reliable presence; a firm, secure place to confront unpredictable life. The history of civilization is in many ways the same argument over and over again, between those willing to let men live as men are, and those who insist society can't survive without firm rules. Dr. Dobson is on the side of rules.

"It's very easy," he says, "to look back to the Forties and Fifties -- and I lived through it -- through rose-covered glasses. I mean, there was terrible racism at that time, that the white community didn't even recognize. And there were other things that were not what they should be. But the culture at that time largely supported the Judeo-Christian system of values. Not that everyone was Christian, but the value system of Christianity was largely accepted.

"And the most important thing was, the community felt the responsibility to teach those values to children. And now those values are under attack, by Hollywood, by the music industry, by the Internet, by pornography."

It was later, as I read more about Dr. Dobson, that I began to see how often and how passionately he talks about heaven. A ferocious health nut -- he brags that he has missed only 14 days of exercise in 11 years -- Dr. Dobson suffered a stroke last year, a consequence of a heart attack 10 years earlier. He missed three days of work, but the experience just convinced him of what he'd find on the other side of death.

"I fully believe that I've got many family members that are there in heaven," he told me as our conversation drew to a close on my last afternoon in Colorado Springs. "I believe I'm going to see them again. That drives me more than anything else. Sure it does. I mean, I'm 68 years old. And I know that time is short. So I'm much more motivated by the desire to please the Lord than I am to please man."

That, in the end, is why Dr. Dobson believes so fervently in the family as God's instrument. "That all goes together." he went on, and by then the light had gone gold the way it does early in the afternoon in a mountain town. "Because if my children don't make it to heaven I'll never see 'em again. So that's the driving force of parenting -- to introduce your children to Jesus Christ and to help them be productive in his work. This may sound really strange to you. But that's right. There's only one way to heaven," Dobson added. "Jesus said, 'I'm the way, the truth and the light. And no one comes to the Father but through me.' He is the one."

You might expect a man who says he first tried to pray as a one-year-old baby, before he could speak, to live that way -- as the sages advise, "with eternity's values in view." But Dr. Dobson had that lesson burnt into him in a more personal way as well. One morning in 1988, after a game of pickup, his friend Pete Maravich, the pro-basketball Hall of Famer, died of a heart attack on the gymnasium floor, in Dr. Dobson's arms. Mr. Maravich was 41.

That afternoon, Dr. Dobson took his 17-year-old son Ryan aside to remind him of the brevity of life, and to pass on his own last words, in case Ryan wasn't around to hear them when the end came

"My message to you," he said, "is be there! Be there to meet your mother and me in heaven. We will be looking for you on that glad morning. Don't let anything deter you from keeping that appointment. Because I am 51 years old and you are only 17, and as many as 50 years could pass from the time of my death to yours. That's a long time to remember. But you can be sure that I will be searching for you just inside the Eastern gate."

What I couldn't figure out is why that story shook me so much. Not the part about Mr. Maravich, sad as it was. I mean the thought of Dr. Dobson talking to his son like that. I kept thinking how fiercely he must have loved his son to speak so starkly. Or maybe it was the brave old bully's hopes for heaven: Who isn't drawn to the longing ache never to leave one's children, to meet once again the mother who left earth so early or the husband who fell so suddenly? My own hollow dread of inevitable death and heart-breaking grief was so profound I was willing to forgive anyone for imagining just about anything -- even James Dobson, with what sometimes seemed to me his irresponsible habit of living for reward in heaven, all his lessons aimed at the unknowable future, while the rest of us battled on down here, unwashed and unclean and unsaved.

But then I thought, What if heaven isn't there? I took great care on the highway to the airport the next morning.

Ian Brown is a feature writer for The Globe and Mail. Next week: Reflections.