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Colorado Springs

Dateline: BOULDER

TO THE west of Colorado Springs rises Pikes Peak, 14,110 feet high, cloaked in snow. To the east lie flat prairies, covered with yucca plants and buffalo grass. In the middle sits a city famous not so much for its tree-lined boulevards or the mansions of its nicer districts as for the fact that it is a source of some of the most deeply conservative thinking in the United States.

It was a group called Colorado for Family Values (CFV), based in Colorado Springs, which sponsored Amendment Two to the Colorado constitution. The amendment denies homosexuals the right to legislation that would protect them from discrimination in housing and employment. (The right is contentious, but the motive driving CFV was often thinly veiled dislike of homosexuals.) Amendment Two followed closely behind Amendment One, which also originated in Colorado Springs. It sets tax and government spending limits, and requires the voters' approval for new taxes or increases in existing ones. Colorado's voters approved both measures in 1992.

This rigorous moralistic style has a long history. Colorado Springs was founded, in 1871, as a summer resort for the eastern industrial rich. During the 1896 Cripple Creek gold rush, when local mining towns offered dancing, brothels and liquor, the city remained "dry". In recent years the region has acquired a vast military establishment, including Fort Carson and the American Air Force Academy, on which fully half of the city depends for jobs and income.

If all this did not sufficiently stiffen the spine, a large and growing number of evangelical Christian ministries have settled in Colorado Springs in recent years. The local Yellow Pages lists 500 churches representing 90 different denominations, together with an estimated 60 "para-church" organisations. A para-church is a church's secondary support system, or a church-affiliated group. These were invited to Colorado Springs by its Economic Development Corporation in the 1980s, when military cutbacks were beginning to hurt, to bring the city some non-polluting jobs.

This idea succeeded beyond anyone's expectations. It is estimated that today 2,400 jobs in the area are produced by para-church organisations. They spend $36m a year in the local economy. One of them, Focus on the Family, employs 1,200 people. It moved here from Pomona, California, in 1992, thanks to a $4m grant from the locally based El Pomar Foundation. El Pomar, which gave away $8.8m in 1992 to a variety of groups and causes, may or may not have known what it was doing when it made this grant; it says it was promoting jobs. But Focus on the Family, which is a right-wing ministry, has given some help to CFV in its campaigns, and many people in Colorado Springs thus hold El Pomar at least partly to blame for what has happened since.

Religious organisations were also drawn in by a state law, passed in 1989, which allows property that is owned and used "solely and exclusively for religious purposes and not for private gain or corporate profit" to escape property tax. Para-church groups enjoy the same exemption. To deny them this right, in the words of the statute, would interfere with religious freedom and violate the principle of separation of church and state.

That principle is less revered when it cuts the other way. One group of Colorado Springs parents objected to teaching mythology in the public schools unless it was taught in conjunction with Christianity. Others insisted that the public schools should cut back their Halloween festivities. On summer Sundays, in poorer parts of the city, the Cornerstone Baptists have been in the habit of sending their fleet of yellow school buses to invite children to a "summertime water carnival"--ending, often to their parents' dismay, with the distribution of baptismal certificates.

These church voices might seem less strident if they had some counterweight. But although many big American corporations have plants in Colorado Springs, no large company has its head offices there. There is a university; but ten of its professors prefer to live outside the city, some of them in Pueblo, which is half Hispanic. This creates a sense of imbalance in Colorado Springs between the fervent and the tolerant.

A few citizens, disturbed by the growing tensions in Colorado Springs, are trying to redress the balance. Amy Devine, who is Jewish, and her husband Doug Triggs, who is Christian, have founded a group, Citizens' Project, for people "who believe in pluralism and freedom of speech." Miss Devine says her group is not against religion or family values, but is wary of the bigotry that sometimes hides under those words. Citizens' Project now has 7,000 members.

More divisive amendments, however, are on the way for voting day this November and in November 1996. Amendment 12 adds new restrictions to what state officials can do without first consulting the voters; and efforts are under way to overcome the objections to Amendment Two that have been raised in the Colorado courts. The city will be lucky to live up to the cheery bumper stickers distributed by the chamber of commerce: "There's a place for everybody in Colorado Springs."

PHOTO: City of righteousness