Charles Colson
Charles Wendell Colson (October 16, 1931 – April 21, 2012), generally referred to as Chuck Colson, was an American attorney and political advisor who served as Special Counsel to President Richard Nixon from 1969 to 1970. Once known as President Nixon's "hatchet man", Colson gained notoriety at the height of the Watergate scandal, for being named as one of the Watergate Seven and also for pleading guilty to obstruction of justice for attempting to defame Pentagon Papers defendant Daniel Ellsberg.[1] In 1974, Colson served seven months in the federal Maxwell Prison in Alabama, as the first member of the Nixon administration to be incarcerated for Watergate-related charges.[2]
Not to be confused with Charles Coulson.
Chuck Colson
Position established
April 21, 2012 (aged 80)
Falls Church, Virginia, U.S.
3
Colson became an evangelical Christian in 1973. His mid-life religious conversion sparked a radical life change that led to the founding of his non-profit ministry Prison Fellowship and, three years later, Prison Fellowship International, to a focus on Christian worldview teaching and training around the world. Colson was also a public speaker and the author of more than 30 books.[3] He was the founder and chairman of The Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview, which is a research, study, and networking center for growing in a Christian worldview, and which produces Colson's daily radio commentary, BreakPoint, heard on more than 1,400 outlets across the United States currently presented by John Stonestreet.[4][5]
Colson was a principal signer of the 1994 Evangelicals and Catholics Together ecumenical document signed by leading Evangelical Protestants and Roman Catholic leaders in the United States.
Colson received 15 honorary doctorates and in 1993 was awarded the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, the world's largest annual award (over US$1 million) in the field of religion, given to a person who "has made an exceptional contribution to affirming life's spiritual dimension". He donated the prize to further the work of Prison Fellowship, as he did all his speaking fees and royalties. In 2008, he was awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal by President George W. Bush.
Early life, education, and family[edit]
Charles Wendell Colson was born on October 16, 1931 in Boston, the son of Inez "Dizzy" (née Ducrow) and Wendell Ball Colson.[6] He was of Swedish and British descent.[7]
In his youth, Colson had seen the charitable works of his parents. His mother cooked meals for the hungry during the Depression and his father donated his legal services to the United Prison Association of New England.
During World War II, Colson organized fund-raising campaigns in his school for the war effort that raised enough money to buy a Jeep for the army.[8] In 1948, he volunteered in the campaign to re-elect the Governor of Massachusetts, Robert Bradford.
After turning down a full scholarship to Harvard University and attending Browne & Nichols School in Cambridge in 1949, he earned his AB, with honors, in history from Brown University in 1953, and his J.D., with honors, from George Washington University Law School in 1959. At Brown, he was a member of Beta Theta Pi.
Colson's first marriage was to Nancy Billings in 1953; they have three children, Wendell Ball II (born 1954), Christian Billings (1956), and Emily Ann (1958). After some years of separation, the marriage ended in divorce in January 1964. He married Patricia Ann Hughes on April 4, 1964.
Early career[edit]
Colson served in the United States Marine Corps from 1953 to 1955, reaching the rank of captain. From 1955 to 1956, he was the assistant to the Assistant Secretary of the Navy (Material). He worked on the successful 1960 campaign of Leverett Saltonstall (U.S. Republican Party for the U.S. Senate) and was his administrative assistant from 1956 to 1961. In 1961 Colson founded the law firm of Colson & Morin, which swiftly grew to a Boston and Washington, D.C presence with the addition of former U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Edward Gadsby and former Raytheon Company general counsel Paul Hannah. Colson and Morin shortened the name to Gadsby & Hannah in late 1967. Colson left the firm to join the Richard Nixon administration in January 1969.
Career after prison[edit]
Prison ministry[edit]
After his release from prison, Colson founded Prison Fellowship in 1976, which today is "the nation's largest outreach to prisoners, ex-prisoners, and their families".[52][53] Colson worked to promote prisoner rehabilitation and reform of the prison system in the United States, citing his disdain for what he called the "lock 'em and leave 'em" warehousing approach to criminal justice. He helped to create prisons whose populations come from inmates who choose to participate in faith-based programs.
In 1979, Colson founded Prison Fellowship International to extend his prison outreach outside the United States. Now in 120 countries, Prison Fellowship International is the largest, most extensive association of national Christian ministries working within the criminal justice field, working to proclaim the Gospel worldwide and alleviate the suffering of prisoners and their families. In 1983, Prison Fellowship International received special consultative status with the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations. During this time, Colson also founded Justice Fellowship, using his influence in conservative political circles to push for bipartisan, legislative reforms in the U.S. criminal justice system.[54]
On June 18, 2003, Colson was invited by President George W. Bush to the White House to present results of a scientific study on the faith-based initiative, InnerChange, at the Carol Vance Unit (originally named the Jester II Unit) prison facility of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice in Fort Bend County, Texas. Colson led a small group that included Dr. Byron Johnson of the University of Pennsylvania, who was the principal researcher of the InnerChange study, a few staff members of Prison Fellowship and three InnerChange graduates to the meeting. In the presentation, Johnson explained that 171 participants in the InnerChange program were compared to a matched group of 1,754 inmates from the prison's general population. The study found that only 8 percent of InnerChange graduates, as opposed to 20.3 percent of inmates in the matched comparison group, became offenders again in a two-year period. In other words, the recidivism rate was cut by almost two-thirds for those who complete the faith-based program. Those who are dismissed for disciplinary reasons or who drop out voluntarily, or those who are paroled before completion, have a comparable rate of rearrest and incarceration.[55][56] The commonly-reported results from the study have been strongly criticized for selecting only participants who were unlikely to be rearrested (especially those who were successfully placed in post-prison jobs), and when considering all of the InnerChange study participants, their recidivism rate (24.3%) was worse than the control group (20.3%).[57][58]
Christian advocacy[edit]
Colson maintained a variety of media channels which discuss contemporary issues from an evangelical Christian worldview. In his Christianity Today columns, for example, Colson opposed same-sex marriage,[59] and argued that Darwinism is used to attack Christianity.[60] He also argued against evolution and in favor of intelligent design,[61] asserting that Darwinism led to forced sterilizations by eugenicists.[62]
Colson was an outspoken critic of postmodernism, believing that as a cultural worldview, it is incompatible with the Christian tradition. He debated prominent post-evangelicals, such as Brian McLaren, on the best response for the evangelical church in dealing with the postmodern cultural shift. Colson, however, came alongside the creation care movement when endorsing Christian environmentalist author Nancy Sleeth's Go Green, Save Green: A Simple Guide to Saving Time, Money, and God's Green Earth. In the early 1980s, Colson was invited to New York by David Frost's variety program on NBC for an open debate with Madalyn Murray O'Hair, the atheist who, in 1963, brought the court case (Murray v. Curlett) that eliminated official public school prayers.[63]
Colson was a member of the Family (also known as the Fellowship), described by prominent evangelical Christians as one of the most politically well-connected fundamentalist organizations in the US.[64] On April 4, 1991, Colson was invited to deliver a speech as part of the Distinguished Lecturer series at Harvard Business School. The speech was titled The Problem of Ethics, where he argued that a society without a foundation of moral absolutes cannot long survive.[65]
Colson was later a principal signer of the 1994 Evangelicals and Catholics Together ecumenical document signed by leading Evangelical Protestants and Roman Catholic leaders in the United States, part of a larger ecumenical rapprochement in the United States that had begun in the 1970s with Catholic-Evangelical collaboration during the Gerald R. Ford Administration and in later para-church organizations such as Moral Majority founded by Rev. Jerry Falwell at the urging of Francis Schaeffer and his son Frank Schaeffer during the Jimmy Carter administration.[66]
In November 2009, Colson was a principal writer and driving force behind an ecumenical statement known as the Manhattan Declaration calling on evangelicals, Catholics and Orthodox Christians not to comply with rules and laws permitting abortion, same-sex marriage and other matters that go against their religious consciences.[67] He had previously ignited controversy within Protestant circles for his mid-90s common-ground initiative with conservative Roman Catholics Evangelicals and Catholics Together, which Colson wrote alongside prominent Roman Catholic Richard John Neuhaus. Colson was also a proponent of the Bible Literacy Project's curriculum The Bible and Its Influence for public high school literature courses.[68] Colson has said that Protestants have a special duty to prevent anti-Catholic bigotry.[69]
Political engagement[edit]
In 1988, Colson became involved with the Elizabeth Morgan case,[70] visiting Morgan in jail and lobbying to change federal law in order to free her.[71]
On October 3, 2002, Colson was one of the co-signers of the Land letter sent to President George W. Bush. The letter was written by Richard D. Land, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention and co-signed by four prominent American evangelical Christian leaders with Colson among them. The letter outlined their theological support for a just war in the form of a pre-emptive invasion of Iraq.
On June 1, 2005, Colson appeared in the national news commenting on the revelation that W. Mark Felt was Deep Throat.[72] Colson expressed disapproval in Felt's role in the Watergate scandal, first in the context of Felt being an FBI employee who should have known better than to disclose the results of a government investigation to the press (violating a fundamental tenet of FBI culture), and second in the context of the trust placed in him (which demanded a more active response, such as a face-to-face confrontation with the FBI director or Nixon or, had that failed, public resignation). His criticism of Felt provoked a harsh response from Benjamin Bradlee, former executive editor of The Washington Post, one of only three individuals to know who Deep Throat was prior to the public disclosure, who said he was "baffled" that Colson and Liddy were "lecturing the world about public morality" considering their role in the Watergate scandal. Bradlee stated that "as far as I'm concerned they have no standing in the morality debate."[73]
Colson also supported the passage of Proposition 8. He signed his name to a full-page ad in the December 5, 2008 The New York Times that objected to violence and intimidation against religious institutions and believers in the wake of the passage of Proposition 8.[74] The ad said that "violence and intimidation are always wrong, whether the victims are believers, gay people, or anyone else."[75] A dozen other religious and human rights activists from several different faiths also signed the ad, noting that they "differ on important moral and legal questions", including Proposition 8.[75]
Later years[edit]
In 2000, Florida Governor Jeb Bush reinstated the rights which were taken away by Colson's felony conviction, including the right to vote.[81]
On March 31, 2012, Colson underwent surgery to remove a blood clot from his brain after he fell ill while speaking at a Christian worldview conference.[82] CBN erroneously reported on April 18, 2012, that he died with his family at his side[83] but Prison Fellowship later (12:30 am on April 19 and again at 7:02 am) pointed out that he was still alive as of that moment.[84][85]