Andrew Wommack has not been shy about his desire to take over Woodland Park, the small Teller County town where his global ministry has its headquarters. Ever since the prosperity gospel minister exhorted his followers to conquer the town in 2021, they have been working to do so. First, they took control of the local school board. Then they came for the city council. Now, a year after the conquering ministry’s first attempt to control the council was beaten back, forces aligned with Andrew Wommack Ministries and Charis Bible College are once again working to reshape the town’s local government, this time through recall elections.
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DAVIS: The Worst Bills of the Year (2025)
About ten years ago, when I was working in the Colorado legislature, one of my brothers made an observation. “All of the craziest people in the country are state legislators,” he said. He didn’t mean that all state legislators are crazy, or that all crazy people are state legislators, but that each legislature has among its ranks a handful of its state’s craziest citizens. In my ongoing work with state legislatures around the country, I’m reminded of the quip at least once a week – because it turns out my brother was right.
DAVIS: Bullying Kids is Bad Politics
I want you to imagine for a moment that you’re back in high school. You were a child pretty recently and you’ll be an adult pretty soon, but for now, things are weird. Your body and brain are both changing, you smell weird sometimes. You’re in the years-long process of both creation and discovery, carving your own identity out of a formless block of stone, trying to separate what you really like from what you think it would be cool to be seen as liking. Sometimes, you worry that all of your friends might secretly hate you, or that you’re ugly, or that you’re the only one who occasionally smells weird.
DAVIS: The First Time Fascism Came to America
This Monday marked the 80th anniversary of Benito Mussolini’s last journey: from a village on the shores of Lake Como, where he had been held since his capture the day before, to a farmhouse a little ways to the north, where partisans positioned him in front of a wall and executed him by gunfire. When Adolf Hitler took his own life in a Berlin bunker two days later, it became clear that the first fascist era had come to a sudden, bloody, and well-deserved end.
Invisible Hand: The Man Behind Colorado Schools’ Efforts to Ban Trans Athletes
Last week, dozens of Colorado school board members and administrators issued an open letter to the Colorado High School Activities Association (CHSAA), making what they called “an urgent and resolute demand” that the organization “immediately adopt rules” to ban trans-identifying teens from participating in high school athletics in Colorado. Signed by 80 signatories representing 14 public school districts, ten charter schools, and one BOCES (Board of Cooperative Educational Services), the letter references President Trump’s February 5 Executive Order, “Keeping Men out of Women’s Sports,” and suggests that CHSAA will be subject to federal investigation if it does not comply with the letter’s demands.
DAVIS: Allies in Unexpected Places
Schlepping my way across the campus of Colorado Christian University on Monday towards the lecture hall I had chosen as my destination, I thought I had a pretty good idea of what to expect. When the email landed in my inbox last week advertising the lecture “Christian Nationalism: Good or Bad?” hosted by the school’s think tank, the Centennial Institute, my interest was immediately piqued. I have taken a great interest in the conversations Christian communities are having amongst themselves in recent years about Christian nationalism, a force which threatens not just our shared democracy but also the particular faith which birthed it.
Bad Faith: The Narrowgate Cult
This story has been republished in light of its recognition by the Society of Professional Journalists.
DAVIS: Pete Hegseth & I Know the Same Christian Nationalists
This story has been republished in light of its recognition by the Society of Professional Journalists.
Fire on the Mountain: Inside a Secretive Colorado Bible College (Part I)
This story has been republished in light of its recognition by the Society of Professional Journalists.
DAVIS: Familiar Faces Bring Education Crusade to Southwest Colorado
In the dusty, red-hued southwestern corner of Colorado, a rural school district finds itself mired in a saga of drama and controversy which, despite receiving coverage in the local paper, has not yet broken into Front Range news outlets. On the surface, it’s a local affair, but the ongoing story in the Montezuma-Cortez School District is noteworthy for its ties to attorneys, administrators, and activists associated with Colorado’s network of right-wing education reformers, and for the way their actions in the district are flipping the script which they and their allies have run in districts across the country.