As a D.C. Beltway power player, the late Charles W. Colson worked with a “Thank God it’s Monday” attitude that meant his colleagues always knew they could contact him about hot topics and decisions.
But there was one exception — visits by his autistic grandson, Max.
“If Chuck was with Max, his phone was turned off,” said Dave Carlson of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. “Max could stop him in his tracks.”
Carlson, who spent two decades as Colson’s aide and editor, says that Colson and Max’s bond was rooted in conviction. That same conviction shaped Colson’s work after his 1973 born-again Christian conversion and his guilty plea and conviction for Watergate crimes as a Nixon White House strategist. This led Colson to create the global Prison Fellowship ministry in 1976.
“It didn’t matter if you were in prison or what kind of crimes put you there. It didn’t matter if you were missing a chromosome or were autistic,” he said. Colson believed “we are all humans made in the image of God — Imago Dei. He was passionate about that until the end.”
The 80-year-old Colson died on April 21, 2012, felled by a brain hemorrhage moments after a speech about rising threats to religious liberty. His colleagues marked the 10-year anniversary by rebroadcasting that speech during a BreakPoint radio commentary.
“What we’re witnessing in our culture … is but the tip of the iceberg. It’s the latest visible manifestation of a growing hostility towards Christianity mainly because — this has always been the case — government officials feel threatened by the power of the church because we all worship a king higher than the kings of this Earth,” said Colson.
Cultural issues are bigger than mere politics, he stressed.
“Elections are important. Whoever serves in office, it makes a difference what kind of person that is and what that person believes,” he said. “But elections can’t solve the problem we’ve got. The problem we’ve got is that our culture has been decaying from the inside for 30 or 40 years, and politics is nothing but an expression of culture. So how do you fix the culture?”
Answering that question, noted Colson, will require Christians to “look in the mirror: That’s where the problem is.”
Colson’s words on that day remain relevant, said Carlson, even though “I don’t think he could have imagined where we are now. I don’t think he could have seen Donald Trump. I don’t think he could have seen the trans movement” and other developments linked to gender and fluid sexual identities. “Chuck really believed you could lay out an argument and people would listen and then consider changing their minds. I don’t think he could have imagined the current state of public discourse in America.”
In separate interviews, Carlson and former BreakPoint scribe Roberto Rivera — who wrote with and for Colson for 17 years — focused on the same three big ideas in Colson’s work.
Colson “never stopped being a prison kind of guy,” said Rivera, a lawyer who is a Roman Catholic. “Chuck’s legacy starts with this: He taught an entire generation of young evangelicals to give a damn about the lives of prisoners.”
With a law degree from George Washington University, Colson was always interested in legal trends, as well as politics. Without basic First Amendment rights, and religious liberty in particular, he believed there would be “no room in the public square in which to operate in the first place,” said Rivera. “Without religious freedom, nothing else happens.”
Finally, doctrines about the sanctity of human life informed all of his activism, whether Colson was discussing abortion, prison reform or human rights in general. He greatly admired Pope John Paul II and his writings about absolute, eternal truths and “core beliefs about what it means to be human,” said Carlson, an Eastern Rite Catholic.
While declining to predict how Colson would have handled the past decade, “I know that he wasn’t afraid of being called a heretic,” said Carlson. When he co-founded Evangelicals and Catholics Together in 1994 with the late Father Richard John Neuhaus, he knew “Prison Fellowship would take a heavy hit financially. But he believed it was the right thing to do. So, he did it.
“Chuck Colson wasn’t afraid to do something if he believed it needed to be done.”
