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.
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