For his debut book, Jesus Springs: Evangelical Capitalism and the Fate of an American City, William J. Schultz, a 37-year-old assistant professor of American religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School, took a circuitous route to finding his subject matter.

Born in New Jersey and raised in Raleigh, N.C., Schultz says his options were narrow. “Sports was out, and after I got 28 on a calculus test, it was clear math was not on my career spectrum.” But a Catholic high school teacher inspired him to major in history at the University of North Carolina. And in studying history, he came to see that the subject “wasn’t only about big battles and presidents and world wars.” It was about why people act, build, fight, move, or stay. And often, he saw, religion played a part.

Though not particularly religious, Schultz grew up in the Bible Belt, surrounded by Baptists but knowing little about their faith. But he became curious during his doctoral studies at Princeton. “I got more and more fascinated by evangelicalism—this really rich tradition that I didn’t know anything about,” he says.

A research paper on religion and the space race led him to read the memoir by Apollo 15 astronaut Jim Irwin—and that finally inspired the book. Irwin had written that an intense religious experience he’d had during a walk on the moon prompted him to leave NASA and start an evangelical ministry called High Flight, which he set up in Colorado Springs.

Why there? Schultz wondered. “The more I read about Colorado Springs,” he says, “the more I realized that this place, nicknamed Jesus Springs, had everything I wanted to write about: evangelical Protestantism, conservative politics, free-market capitalism, the military—all in one place.”

Cate Hodorowicz, a religion editor at UNC Press, which published the book in October, calls Jesus Springs perfect for the current political moment. “It deftly shows how today’s conservative political rhetoric about the battle for America arose from military, state, and Christian nationalist ideals that came together in Colorado Springs during the Cold War era and spanned the 20th century,” she says.

Evangelicalism then was a drive to “Christianize the United States by converting the masses and recognizing Christianity as the dominant force in American culture,” Schultz writes in Jesus Springs. The economic boost of military investment around Colorado Springs after World War II helped draw megachurches and massive ministries such as Focus on the Family to the area.

However, Schultz’s book concludes, today Colorado Springs and contemporary evangelicalism are facing “an era of democratic backsliding, cultural progressivism and widespread secularization.” He also notes the rise of the New Apostolic Reformation: “a loosely aligned group of evangelical leaders who preach a conservative, patriarchal, and authoritarian form of Protestant Christianity that is particularly important to the Trump coalition.”

Currently, Schultz is turning his attention to another topic that demands a different kind of faith in things unseen: cryptocurrency. “The idea is that if you buy in, and have faith, that you will get untold riches back,” he says. His working title is The Wages of Sin: Faith, Fraud, and Religious Freedom in Modern America.

Schultz will be presiding at a roundtable discussion titled “Is Christian Nationalism White?,” Monday, 5–6:30 p.m., Sheraton, Berkeley (third floor).

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