Conservative Christian activist group Forging Pueblo held a “Jericho Walk for D70 Schools” in Pueblo Saturday.
“The goal is to pray for the board to have wisdom and direction in decision making for student safety,” said Quin Friberg, the executive director of Forging Pueblo. “And then teachers to be safe and healthy, just general things along those lines.”
The Jericho Walk gets its name from the book of Joshua, in which Joshua was instructed by God to walk around the city of Jerich seven times in order to collapse the walls of the city. After the walls fell, Joshua and his army “burned the whole city and everything in it.”
In conservative political circles, the Jericho March is a loose, pro-Trump, Christian coalition who pray, fast, and march for what they claim to be election integrity and transparency in response to Donald Trump’s accusations of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, in which then-President Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden. In December 2020, the Jericho March featured speakers promoting conspiracy theories about election fraud and framing the refusal to accept the results as a holy war. Former National Security Advisor and convicted felon Michael Flynn, who has since asserted that Trump could impose martial law to remain in power, headlined the event. Among the numerous other speakers was El Paso County resident Dede Laugesen, a 2016 Trump campaign staffer and communications consultant who called on Congress to drop everything and “resolve the vote.”
Forging Pueblo’s event has no connections to the national Jericho March organization, but Forging Pueblo has become increasingly involved in conservative politics in Pueblo. In 2022, Forging Pueblo partnered with Mark Lee Dickson, the director of Right to Life of East Texas and founder of the Sanctuary Cities for the Unborn Initiative, to push Pueblo’s City Council to adopt a municipal anti-abortion ordinance. The effort failed, but in 2023 Forging Pueblo’s political committee, Forging the Future, supported multiple candidates for Pueblo D60 Board of Education. Two of those candidates, Sue Pannunzio and Brian Cisneros, won election to the board. In October, Pannunzio and Cisneros voted in support of a policy requiring parental notification for non-legal name changes, which contradicted an existing 2016 policy and which received widespread opposition from community members who argued the policy put LGBTQ youth at risk.
Aaron Wilson, the D70 Board of Education vice president, helped Forging Pueblo organize Saturday’s Jericho Walk. “He was part of the original conversation of having a prayer event at all the different schools,” said Friberg. Wilson and other members of the majority-conservative board were elected in 2021. One of their first actions as a board was to hire conservative education attorney Brad Miller.
Forging Pueblo’s interest in education doesn’t just extend to public schools in Pueblo. In 2023, Friberg launched Veritas Academy, a private K-5 school in Pueblo West. The school is funded in part with public funds for home school enrichment through ERBOCES, whose executive director is Ken Witt, the current superintendent of the embattled Woodland Park School District.
Also winning election in 2023 was Pueblo City Council candidate Mark Aliff, who appeared in a promotional video for the group in 2019. This summer, the Pueblo City Council voted 5-1 to spend $1,500 on a fundraiser for Tamra Axworthy’s anti-abortion center. Axworthy, alongside Rep. Stephanie Luck (R-Penrose), was listed on the board of Forging Pueblo. Aliff was also one of the supporters of recent efforts to reintroduce the failed 2022 anti-abortion ordinance.
With Forging Pueblo’s growing influence in increasingly purple Pueblo County, some residents are concerned.
“Forging Pueblo doesn’t have anybody in any official positions who are elected officials,” notes Friberg. [As recently as Sept. 23 of last year group listed both current state Rep. Luck and newly elected Pueblo County Commissioner Paula McPheeters as board members] “I don’t think theocracies are actually good functioning governments. My thought is essentially this: every group of people has the right to try to influence the community in the way that they think would create the healthiest community and what would bring the best or the greatest amount of good for the greatest amount of people. I happen to believe that a lot of the biblical principles are what create wellness and goodness in a community, and help a community thrive. Those of us who believe that is, generally speaking, the wisdom we should apply to our community want to apply it in order to help people. If people disagree, that’s the wonderful thing about America — they can try to influence from another perspective and they can do their best to positively influence, even if we disagree on if it’s actually positive.”
The 15 Jericho Walkers with Forging Pueblo who arrived at Pueblo West High School were met by a group hosting their own walking event. Marisa Lopez, the community and retiree organizer for Colorado Wins, is concerned that the Jericho Walk is part of an effort to undermine D70’s social and emotional learning (SEL) curriculum. SEL, like critical race theory and gender, has been targeted by conservative activists in recent years.
“We’re working in alignment with many groups who feel that the curriculum that they have here in Pueblo West is really vital as far as protecting children and making sure there are resources for children who might feel unsafe or unsupported by some of the other mental health [programs],” says Lopez. “We had heard about this Jericho Walk, which is fine. People can pray as they want, but when you start bringing it into the schools, it makes it a little bit convoluted because not only is it a prayer walk, but a lot of these groups and the District 70 school board members themselves are helping to run this Jericho walk, which blurs that line of church and state. When you start pushing far-right political or religious beliefs into schools, it actually is detrimental to children that might not practice that. They want to push out this curriculum, which doesn’t seem fair for all children. We’re here to support all children and I mean all children.”
