But those are facts, and Colorado Springs is a city of faith. A shing city at the foot of a hill. No one there believes it is perfect. And no one is so self-centered as to claim the perfection of Colorado Springs as his or her ambition. The shared vision is more modest, and more grandiose. It is a city of people who have fled the cities. People who have fought a spiritual war for the ground they are on for an interior frontier on which they have built new temples to the Lord. From these temples they will retake their forsaken promised lands, remake them in the likenss of a dream. They call the dream, "Christian," but in its particulars it is "American." Not literally but as in a story, one populated by cowboys and Indians, monsters and prayer warriors to slay them, and ladies to reward the warriors with chaste kisses. Colorado Springs is a city of moral fabulousness. It is a city of fables.

The press tends to regard Dobson as the most powerful evangelical Christian in America, but Pastor Ted is at least his equal. Whereas Dobson plays the part of a national scold, promising to destroy politicians who defy the Bible, Pastor Ted quietly guides those politicians through the ritual of acquiescence required to save face.  He doesn't strut, like Dobson; he gushes.    . . .      

No Pastor in America holds more sway over the political direction of evangelicalism than does Pastor Ted, an no church more than New Life.        . . .        Evangicalism is as much an intellectual as an emotional movement; and what Pastor Ted has built in Colorado Springs is not just a battalion of spiritual warriors but a factory for ideas to arm them.

Pastor Hayford wants to "wedge" an idea in our minds. The idea is "Order." The illustration is the Book of Revelation's description of four creatures surrounding Christ's throne. "The first ... was like a lion, the second was like an ox, the third had a face like a man, the fourth was like a flying angel." Look! Said Pastor Hayford, his voice sonorous and dignified. "All wonderful, all angels." The angels were merely different from one another. Just, he said, as we have different, "ethnicities." And just as we have, in politics, a "hierarchy." And just as we have, in business, "different responsibilities," employer and employees. Angels, ethnicities, hierarchy, employers and employees - each category must follow a natural order.      

Next came Pastor Larry Stockstill, presenting yet another variation of preacher. He took the stage with his wife, Melanie, who wore a pink pantsuit. Pastor Larry wore a brown pinstripe suit over a striped brown shirt and a golden tie. His voice was Louisiana, with "Pulpit" pronounced "pull-peet."

"There's a world," he preached, pacing across the stage. "I call it the Underworld." The Underwold, he explained, is similar to what he sees when he goes skin diving; only instead of strange fishes, there's strange people. Too many churches, he said, focus on the Overworld. "That's where the nice people are. The successful people. But the Lord said, `I'm not sending you to the Overworld, I'm sending you to the Underworld.' Where the creatures are. The critters! The people who are out of it. People you see in Colorado Springs, even. You got an underworld of people. The tattoo crowd, the people into drugs, the people into sex. You find `em . . . in the Underworld."

Which brings us back to "Order." Key to the growth of evangelicalism during the last twenty years has been a social structure of "cell groups" that allows churches to grow endlessly while maintaining orthodoxy in their ranks. New Life, for instance, has 1,300 cell groups, or "small groups," as Pastor Ted prefers to call them. Such a structure is not native to Colorado Springs; in fact, most evangelicals attribute it to Pastor Paul Cho, of  South Korea, who has built a congregation of 750,000 using the cell-group structure. American megachurches that have adopted the cell model unaltered have had only partial success.

Pastor Ted's insight was in adapting this system for the affluence of the United States. South Korea, he notes, is on the "front lines" in the war against communis, "so they needed a strongchain-of-command system." But not so Americans. "Free-market globalization" has made us so free, he realized, that an American cell-group system could be mature enough to function just like a market.
                                          . . .
Free-market economics is a "truth" Ted says he learned in his first job in projessional Christendom, as a Bible smuggler in Eastern Europe.
                                         . . .
So the Catholics are out, and the battle boils down to evangelicals versus Islam. "My fear," he says, "is that my children will grow up in an Islamic state."

And that is why he believes spiritual war requires a virile, worldly counterpart. "I teach a strong ideology of the use of power," he says, "of military mights, as a public service." He is for preemptive war, because he believes the Bibl's exhortations against sin set for us a preemptive pardigm, and he is for ferocious war because "the Bible's bloody. There's a lot of blood."

Linda Burton was "specifically called by God" to Colorado Springs seventeen years ago, though at the time she thought that she was only running from a crack-addicted man who beat her.         . . .            Now Linda is an insurance agent, and she and Aaron Michael live in a suburban home. She hears voices, but they do not disturb her. "The Holy Spirit is a gentleman," she told me one morning over a basket of cinnamon muffins still warm from the oven.
   Sitting across from me in her kitchen, she closed her big brown eyes and shushed herself, "I'm listening," she said quietly.
    "To the TV?" I asked. In the next room, Aaron Michael was watching an actin movie; the house was filled with the sound of explosions.
   "No," said Linda. "To my Spirit." She opened her eyes and explained the process she had undergone to reach her refined state.  She called it "spiritual restoration." Anyone can do it, she promised, "even a gay activist." Linda had seen with her own eyes the sex demons that make homosexuals rebel against God, and she said they are gruesome; but she did not name them, for she would not "give demons glory." They are all the same, she said. "It's radicalism.

She reached across the table and touched my hand. "I have to tell you, the spiritual battle is very real." We are surrounded by demons, she explained, reciting the lessons she had learned in her small-group studies at New Life. The demons are cold, they need bodies, they long to come inside. People let them in in tow different ways. One is to be sinned against. "Molested," suggested Linda. The other is to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. You could walk by sin - a murder, a homosexual act - and a demon will leap onto your bones. Cities, therefore, are especially dangerous.

[Author's footnote: The life of the gay man, in the evangelical imagination, seems to be an endless succession of orgasms, interrupted only by jocular episodes of male bonhomie. The gay man promises Crhistian men a guilt-free existence, the garden before Eve. As such, he is not just tempting but temptation embodied; "the Enemy," to whom Linda often refers.]

The mastermind behind the [Georgia] coup was Ralph Reed, once of the Crhistian Coalition, who had been reborn as Georgia's Republican chairman. Reed remains a fundamentalist, the same man who once tested employees' commitment to "Christian values: by asking them if they supported the death penalty for adultery, but he was too canny to talk like that in public. The term "Christian," he'd learned, is a "divider," not a "unifier," so he had left overt faith behind. He backed candidates who ran under the mantra of the exurbs: "Shorter commutes. More time with family. Lower mortgages."

This troika of exurban ambition worked on multiple levels. Just as Nixon used marijuana and heroin in the 1060's as code for hippies and blacks, Reed devised a platform that conflated ordinary personal goals with fundamentalist values. "Shorter commutes" is a ploy that any old-time ward heeler would recognize. It means: let's move the good jobs out of the city. Atlanta, like Colorao Springs has an urban core that Christian conservatives would just as soon see wither. "More time with family," of course, extends that promise of exurban jobs but also speaks in code to the fundamentalist preoccupation with "family" - that is, with defining it, with excluding not just gay couples but any combination not organized around "biblical" principles of "male headship."

As for "lower mortgages" they are lower in exurbs because cities subsidize them. The city pays the taxes that build the sewers and the roads for the exurbs. The city provides the organization that makes it possible. Exurbs are parasites. And what else does "lower mortgages" mean? More land. More space between you and your neighbors. And this, too, is necessary for Christian conservatism, which depends on the absence of conflict as one of it s main selling points. For all its talk of community. But such cultural innovation is death to today's Christian conservatism, which tosses a gauzy veil of tradition over the big-box consumerism of its megachurches.  (emphasis added)

As contemporary fundamentalism has become an exurban movement, it has reframed the question of theodicy - if God is good, then why does He allow suffering? - as a matter of geography. Some places are simply more blessed than others. Cities equal more fallen souls equal more demons equal more temptation, which, of course, leads to more fallen souls. The threats that suffuse urban centers have forced Christian conservatives to flee - to Cobb County, Georgia, to Colorado Springs. Hunded by the sins they see as rampant in the cities (homosexuality, atheistic school-teaching, ungodly imagery), they imagine themselves to be outcasts in their own land. They are the "persecuted church" - just as Jesus promised and just as their cell-group leaders teach them.

This exurban exile is not an escape to easy living, to barbecue and lawn care. "We [Christians] have lost every major city in North America," Pastor Ted writes in his 1995 book Primary Purpose, but he believes they can be reclaimed through prayer - "violent, confrontive prayer." He encourages believers to obtain maps of cities and to identify "power points" that "strengthen the demonic activities." He suggests especially popular bars, as well as "cult-type" churches. "Sometimes," he writes, "particular government buildings . . . are power points." The exurban position is one of strategic retreat, where believers are to "plant" their churches as strategic outposts encircling the enemy.

[Author's footnote: Pastor Ted is aware that his martial plans alarm some outsiders; in Primary Purpose he writes that when he began his campaign for Colorado Springs, "spiritual warfare ws not a popular subject.  . . .  I didn't speak publicly about my own experiences." Even today, in his more mainstream position atop the NAE,, Ted's belief in less than full disclosure persists. Last fall, when the evangelical journalist Ayelish McGarvey asked Pastor Ted why President Bush, as a Christian, had not apologized for the false assertions used to justify the Iraq war, or for the dishonest smears marshaled on his campaign's behalf, Ted said: "I think if you asked the President these questions once he's out of office, he'd say, `You're right. We shouldn't have done it.' But right now if he said something like that, well, the world would psin out of control!  . . .   Listen, I think [we Christian believers] are responsible not to lie, but I don't think we're responsible to say everything we know."

Pastor Ted's true genius lies in his organizational hierarchy, which ensures ideological rigidity even as it allows for individual expression. Not just anyone can lead a small group, much less a secion; a battery of personality and spiritual tests must be undergone first, as well as an official background check. Once chosen, group leaders meet regularly with their own leaders in the chairs of command, and members are encouraged to jump the chain and speak to a higher level if they think their leader is straying into "false teachings" - moral relativism, ecumenism, or even "Satanism," in the form of New Age notions such as crystal healing.

Whether the system is common sense or heresy itself - the Body of Christ atomized - is beside the point; New Lifers have found it powerfully persuasive. Pastor Ted has instituted a semester system, so that no one needs to be locked into a group he or she doesn't like for too long. And since New Life's cell groups don't limit themselves to Bible study, they function as covert evangelizing engines. In return, what Pastor Ted has given his flock are lifestyle choices.

I told James about a little man I had met in the hallway at New Life who, when I said I was from New York City, said simply, "Ka-boom!" I told him also about Joseph Torrez, a New Lifer I had eaten dinner with, who, when describing the evangelical gathering underway in Colorado Springs, compared it to "Shaquille O'Neal driving down the lane, dunking on you. Torrez had said, "It's time to choose sides," a refrain I had heard over and over again during my time in Colorado Springs.

"So which is it?" I asked. "Which side are you on? Theirs? Are you ready to declare war on me, on my city?"

"No --"

"Then Choose."

"I --"

"We can't," Lisa interrupted, from the corner.

"We can," said John, another Bible Society editor. "We do. Just by being here."