States & Territories
Colorado
West
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Colorado Springs became a national center of evangelical parachurch organisation in the late twentieth century, home to Focus on the Family and dozens of other ministries, earning the city the nickname the Evangelical Vatican. Boulder, by contrast, is home to Naropa University, founded by the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa, and a significant Buddhist teaching community. Crestone, a small town in the San Luis Valley, has become an unusual concentration of religious centers representing Zen, Hindu, Carmelite Christian and Native traditions side by side, deliberately organised as an interfaith settlement.
Facts
Religion
Leading Religious AffiliationNothing in Particular (Unaffiliated) 2 Colorado: no named religious tradition is the largest single group. Nothing in particular is 22% of adults, ahead of Evangelical Protestant at 17%. Margin of error plus or minus 6.1 points. Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/religious-landscape-study/state/colorado/ Identity
Jurisdiction Status Law and State
Establishment StatusColorado's 1876 constitution, adopted on statehood, established no church and guarantees the free exercise of religion. Geography
Census Region Origins
Origin of the NameSpanish for reddish or colored red, originally describing the silt carried by the Colorado River. 1 Learn More
The First Accredited Buddhist University, and the Poets Who Joined It
When the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa founded Naropa Institute in Boulder in 1974, he built the first Buddhist inspired institution of higher learning to gain accreditation in North America, teaching meditation and contemplative practice alongside a conventional liberal arts curriculum. Trungpa did not build it alone. That same founding year, the poets Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman established the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics within Naropa, deliberately naming it for the Beat writer whose own interest in Buddhism had helped popularize it among an earlier American counterculture, and the school drew figures from that same literary circle to teach alongside Naropa's Buddhist faculty. The pairing of a serious Buddhist institution with Beat generation poetry was not incidental branding, both traditions shared a genealogy running through the same postwar countercultural interest in Asian religion that had drawn Ginsberg himself toward Buddhist practice decades earlier.
Naropa, now Naropa University, remains active in Boulder today, a short drive from Colorado Springs, where evangelical parachurch organizations earned the city the nickname the Evangelical Vatican, two poles of the state's religious geography that Pew's 2023-24 study situates within a Colorado where no single tradition dominates, Nothing in Particular leading at twenty two percent of adults.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
This source names Colorado directly: "DiCesare, professor of art history at Colorado State University, published in Ethnohistory volume 62, issue 4 (2015), pages 683 to 706, examining the Codex Borbonicus's image of the Huey Tozoztli..."
This source names Colorado directly: "Headquartered in Colorado Springs, Colorado, Compassion International works through local church partners to deliver spiritual, educational, economic, social and physical care to children living in..."
This source names Colorado directly: "organization headquartered in Colorado Springs, Colorado."
This source names Colorado directly: "organization headquartered in Colorado Springs, Colorado, founded in 2010 by James Dobson immediately after his departure from Focus on the Family, the ministry he had led for more than three decades."
This source names Colorado directly: "published by the University Press of Colorado in 2007, reading the surviving screenfold manuscripts as dynastic and religious drama rather than mere king-lists."
This source names Colorado directly: "James Dobson launched in 2010 in Colorado Springs, Colorado, immediately after his departure from Focus on the Family, the ministry he had founded in 1977 and led for more than three decades."
This source names Colorado directly: "The organization moved its headquarters from Southern California to Colorado Springs, Colorado in 1991, where it remains today."
This source names Colorado directly: "on Hopi connections to the Little Colorado River, used narrowly here for a geographic fact that is corroborated elsewhere in this atlas's sources."
This source names Colorado directly: "and died August 21, 2025, in Colorado Springs, Colorado, at age eighty nine."
This source names Colorado directly: "master's report commissioned by the Colorado Attorney General's office, conducted by former U.S."
This source names Colorado directly: "own governing document, based in Colorado Springs, Colorado, reproduced verbatim in a packet an Alliance-affiliated local congregation posts for its own members."
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