Bill Berkowitz
June 11, 2005

The Resurrection of Charles Colson

As he moves from spiritual to political renewal, Watergate felon can't escape his past

Despite being named by Time magazine as one of the 25 most influential evangelical Christians in America, having a Presidential Chair established in his Charles Colson name at Calvin Theological Seminary, and running a $50 million dollar faith-based prison reform organization, Charles W. Colson is likely to always be remembered as one of President Richard Nixon's hatchet men during the Watergate years. In fact, since the recent revelation that W. Mark Felt was Watergate's "Deep Throat," Colson has received more media attention than at any time since the unfolding of the Watergate Affair.

In its cover story earlier this year, Time, a publication that cast doubts about Colson's post-Watergate/pre-prison religious conversion three decades ago, named him one of "The 25 Most Influential Evangelicals In America." Under the headline, "Reborn and Rehabilitated," Time pointed out that Colson, the man who once advocated bombing the Brookings Institution, had found religion and founded Prison Fellowship Ministries "a $50 million organization that operates in all 50 states and 110 countries." The magazine also noted that Colson's "campaign for humane prison conditions helped define compassionate conservatism and served as a model for the faith-based initiatives that Bush favors."

On May 19, the Grand Rapids, Michigan-based Calvin Theological Seminary announced the Charles W. Colson Presidential Chair, which will fund the president's office of the Christian Reformed Church seminary for 10 years. According to the Grand Rapids Press, the $1.5 needed for the endowment came from a grant by the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation. While neither the Devos Foundation nor the seminary would divulge the exact amount given, the Rev. Cornelius Planting Jr., the seminary's president, told the local newspaper that it was the largest single gift the seminary had ever been given.

At a donors' banquet, Colson told the attendees that, "The culture today desperately needs the kind of men and women you're going to send forth from this seminary. Men and women out of this seminary … can change not just this denomination, but this country."

While the establishment of the Charles W, Colson Presidential Chair made local headlines, a few weeks later Colson was back in the national media spotlight as a guest on several news networks commenting about the revelation that W. Mark Felt, the 91 year-old former FBI deputy director, was "Deep Throat."

The Vanity Fair story naming Felt ended a mystery that had lasted for more than 30 years, and it also brought out a coterie of Nixon remnants -- ex-convicts, bag men, and apologists for the disgraced president -- who were not so much out to defend Nixon, but more interested in excoriating Felt.

Syndicated columnist Martin Schram observed:

"Richard Nixon's ex-convicts - who did jail time for their crimes against democracy and then profited from their crimes by writing books and becoming celebrities…returned to work one more con. Nixon's former senior White House assistant, Charles Colson, and the Nixon team's burglar-in-chief, G. Gordon Liddy, worked the cable news circuit, expressing moral indignation" that Felt was Deep Throat.

Colson, who had been chief counsel to President Nixon from 1969 to 1973, and was involved with the Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP), once famously boasted: "I'd walk over my own grandmother to re-elect Richard Nixon." According to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia,

"At a CREEP meeting on March 21st, 1971, it was agreed to spend $250,000 on 'intelligence gathering' on the Democratic Party. Colson and John Erlichman appointed E. Howard Hunt to the White House Special Operations Unit (the so-called 'Plumbers'). Colson organized the Plumber's burglary of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office in September 1971. Colson hoped that revelations about Ellsberg could be used to discredit the anti-war left."

[Ellsberg was the person who released "The Pentagon Papers," an internal Pentagon report on the war in Vietnam, to the New York Times that blew the lid off of the Pentagon's disinformation and misinformation.]

In the immediate aftermath of the Vanity Fair story on Felt, Colson told MSNBC that he "was shocked because I worked with him closely…And you would think the deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, you could talk to with the same confidence you could talk to a priest."

Later, on CNN, Colson continued in shock mode: "I talked to him often and trusted him with very sensitive materials. So did the president. To think that he was out going around in back alleys at night looking for flowerpots, passing information to someone, it's…not the image of the professional FBI that you would expect."

Colson also told Marvin Olasky's evangelical weekly World magazine's Mindy Belz that he was concerned that Felt would be treated as a hero:

"The principle being taught today in a relativistic environment is getting young people to believe that this is a noble act that he did. He could not have done the right thing. He broke his oath of office. He broke the law. He snuck off cloak-and-dagger style to convey privileged information."

Coincidentally, Colson's appearances on television and press interviews came shortly before the release of his new book, "The Good Life: Seeking Purpose, Meaning, and Truth in Your Life" (Tyndale House Publishers).

Other of Colson's Watergate cronies also had their say: On CNN, G. Gordon Liddy told Paula Zahn: "I view him [Felt] as someone who violated the ethics of the law enforcement profession." Over at MSNBC, Liddy acknowledged plotting the break-in at the Democratic Party's Watergate offices and admitted that he "planned the Brookings [Institution] break-in, which wasn't carried out because it was 'too expensive.'"

Not to be outdone, the third member of Team Nixon's Axis of Apologia, Pat Buchanan, the president's former speechwriter, went straight for the jugular, saying that he thinks Felt is "a snake."

The three amigos -- Colson, Liddy and Buchanan -- have all prospered since Watergate. Buchanan has run for the presidency, been a host and co-host of several cable news network television programs, penned a number of books and columns, and has been a high-profile political figure for more than three decades. Liddy, always considered the loopiest of the three, hosts a very popular radio talk show and is also regularly called upon by the cable news networks.

Emerging from the depths of the Watergate Scandal

In 1974 Charles Colson pleaded nolo contendre (no contest) to obstruction of justice in the Ellsberg case. Although he was sentenced to a one-to-three year term in prison, he served only seven months at the Maxwell Correctional Facility in Alabama. Shortly before sentencing, Colson became an evangelical Christian. Wikpipedia points out that "Editorial comics in several U.S. newspapers, as well as Newsweeek and Time, ridiculed his religious conversion, claiming that it was a ploy to reduce his sentence."

Later, seemingly profoundly affected by doing time, Colson reinvented himself and founded an organization called Prison Fellowship Ministries (website), which aims to reform prison inmates through their acceptance of Jesus Christ as their saviour.

After decades of relative obscurity, Colson has recently re-emerged onto the political scene. In early 2002, when one of the religious right's favorite Jews, Rabbi Daniel Lapin, the president of the Toward Tradition, got together with longtime Christian right leader Gary Bauer to found the American Alliance of Jews and Christians (AAJC), Colson signed on as a member of the group's Board of Advisers.

On October 3, 2002, Colson signed on to The Land Letter, which laid out "theological support for a just war pre-emptive invasion of Iraq," according to Wikipedia. Written by Richard D. Land, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, the letter was also co-signed by Bill Bright, then chairman of Campus Crusade for Christ, D. James Kennedy, president of Coral Ridge Ministries, and Carl D. Herbster, president of the American Association of Christian Schools.

Time magazine pointed out that Colson had "helped cobble together an alliance of Evangelicals and Catholic conservatives, advised Karl Rove on Sudan policy and put his prestige behind an anti-gay-marriage lobbying body called the Arlington Group."

The Arlington Group, which first met at an apartment complex in suburban Virginia, in July 2003, according to the Washington Post, brought together "the heads of almost every major political advocacy organization on the Christian right." Arlington Group participants included James Dobson of Focus on the Family, Gary Bauer of American Values, Bill Bennett of Empower America, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, Sandy Rios of Concerned Women for America and Paul Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation. Their primary project: Advocating for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage." (For more on The Arlington Group, see here.)

Deadlocked on language for the proposed constitutional amendment, Colson played a key role in hammering out a compromise at an October 15, 2003, meeting: An added sentence that he proposed read: "Neither the federal government nor any state shall predicate benefits, privileges, rights or immunities on the existence, recognition or presumption of non-marital sexual relationships."

According to the Washington Post, Colson claimed, "[the] wording…would bar the creation of any form of 'substitute marriage' specifically for gays. He said state legislatures still could establish civil unions, but only if they conferred the same benefits on 'any two people who live together,' such as 'an unmarried heterosexual couple or two old spinsters.'"

At an October 15, 2004, "Mayday for Marriage" gathering on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Colson spelled out his support for Covenant Marriage, telling the crowd that it was not "going to be a one-year, or a two-year, or a three-year fight. It will be fought until we prevail. He urged the crowd not to "quit" and not to "despair… [because] despair is a sin because it denies the Sovereignty of God."

Reinvention, Reform and Religion: Colson's Prison Fellowship Ministries

While Charles Colson will always be associated with Watergate, he has followed a different path than either G. Gordon Liddy or Pat Buchanan; a path made up of reinvention, reform, religion and support from a number of conservative foundations. After serving time in prison, Colson founded the Prison Fellowship Ministries (PFM), an organization dedicated to a Christian-centered approach to prisoner rehabilitation. During the period from 1998 through 2003, Prison Fellowship Ministries received nearly $4 million in grants from conservative foundations including the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the William E. Simon Foundation, and the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation.

Former Virginia Attorney General Mark Earley, who lost the Virginia gubernatorial race to Mark R. Warner, is the organization's current president, but Colson is the heart and soul behind what the Virginian-Pilot called "the nation's largest religious outreach to inmates."

According to the Virginian-Pilot, PFM claims "an army of 100,000 volunteers," and takes a rather narrow approach to prison reform, believing that "prisoners cannot be reformed without accepting the gospel."

"A person isn't going to change simply because he's spent time in prison," Earley told the Virginian-Pilot in November 2004. "Something has to change their heart. We believe one of the ways to change hearts is for someone to come into a relationship with God."

According to the Virginian-Pilot, PFM's InnerChange Freedom Initiative (IFI - website) was launched in Texas in 1997 "with the goal of reducing recidivism through acceptance of 'the life-transforming power of Jesus Christ.'" According to the IFI website, the initiative "is a revolutionary, Christ-centered, Bible-based prison program supporting prison inmates through their spiritual and moral transformation beginning while incarcerated and continuing after release."

George W. Bush, then a governor busy executing death row prisoners at an unprecedented clip, "agreed to provide a prison, guards and basic operating services at taxpayer expense. The ministry promised to pay for all prisoner programs and religious training."

InnerChange prisons also exist in Iowa, Kansas and Minnesota, and services about 1,200 inmates. "Each of these states pays about a third of costs for programs, which is about $250,000 each." InnerChange contracts "call for the ministry to pay for all religious guidance and for the states to pay for other programs such as vocational training and high school equivalency courses."

While Colson's commitment to prisoners and their families is certainly admirable, and while some believe PFM provides a beacon of light in the dark and hopeless world of prisons, there are numerous critics of Colson's faith-based approach.

Colson's faith-based projects -- Christian-centered as they are -- do not appear interested in servicing participants that are either uninterested in religion or affiliated with other religions. In a June 2002 Wall Street Journal column, Colson specifically took aim at Muslims in prison, especially those who made jailhouse conversions to Islam. Colson claimed that he had witnessed a "growing Muslim presence" in prisons and these "alienated, disenfranchised people are prime targets for radical Islamists who preach a religion of violence, of overcoming oppression by jihad."

Colson also claimed that al-Qaeda training manuals "specifically identify America's prisoners as candidates for conversion because they may be 'disenchanted with their country's policies'." Colson also pointed out "terrorism experts fear these angry young recruits will become the next wave of terrorists. As U.S. citizens, they will combine a desire for 'payback' with an ability to blend easily into American culture."

The best way to prevent conversions to radical Islam would be for prison officials to "deny radical imams access to inmates," Colson argued.

In February 2003, Americans United for Separation of Church and State charged in a pair of lawsuits that "a government-backed program that seeks to rehabilitate Iowa prison inmates by converting them to fundamentalist Christianity violates the U.S. Constitution." According to an AU Press Release, the organization claimed "that InnerChange constitutes a merger of government with religion… [and] indoctrinates participants in religion, discriminates in hiring staff on religious grounds and gives inmates special privileges if they enroll."

On April 30 of this year, the Associated Press reported that a federal judge in Des Moines ruled that the AU lawsuit would "proceed to trial."

In addition to these issues, one of the biggest questions raised by PFM's programs is whether they actually are successful.

In the Time magazine story, Colson's Prison Fellowship Ministries is praised for successfully reducing recidivism rates among prisoners. The magazine cited a "University of Pennsylvania study [which] found that graduates of the prison program were 60% less likely to be reincarcerated than was the average con."

It appears, however, that Time did not examine the record as closely as Mark Kleiman of Slate -- the online magazine -- did in his August 2003 piece. Kleiman's investigation into the InnerChange Freedom Initiative found that participants actually performed somewhat worse than the control group and were slightly more apt to be re-arrested and re-imprisoned.

The Penn study employed "selection bias" or "creaming," Kleiman pointed out, allowing InnerChange to ignore participants that dropped out or were kicked out of the program, or who, for some other reasons, never finished the program.

Reader Comments

Charles Colson in no man of god. He is a criminal who has discovered the ultimate scam - religion. He is still a scalawag and a flim flam man. He ought to still be in prison.

--- thomas r arnold | 7-7-2005 | 12:48 am