Charles Colson's Prison Conversion

During the scandal known as Watergate, Charles Colson came across as a man who had no virtues but a conniving intellect and an unshakeable loyalty to his bosses. Whatever dirty trick Nixon wanted carried out, Colson was the man to make it happen.

Then he went to prison, and there he experienced one of the most dramatic religious conversions of modern times. He spent the next forty years of his life preaching the gospel to prisoners, hoping that others could find grace behind bars as he did. Now that he has died, we can safely say that his conversion was lifelong. Michael Gerson:

Many wondered at Chuck’s sudden conversion to Christianity. He seemed to wonder at it himself. He spent each day that followed, for nearly 40 years, dazzled by his own implausible redemption. It is the reason he never hedged or hesitated in describing his relationship with Jesus Christ. Chuck was possessed, not by some cause, but by someone. . . .

Prison often figures large in conversion stories. Pride is the enemy of grace, and prison is the enemy of pride. “How else but through a broken heart,” wrote Oscar Wilde after leaving Reading Gaol, “may Lord Christ enter in?” It is the central paradox of Christianity that fulfillment starts in emptiness, that streams emerge in the desert, that freedom can be found in a prison cell. Chuck’s swift journey from the White House to a penitentiary ended a life of accomplishment — only to begin a life of significance. The two are not always the same. The destruction of Chuck’s career freed up his skills for a calling he would not have chosen, providing fulfillment beyond his ambitions. I often heard him quote Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and mean it: “Bless you, prison, for having been in my life.”

I often heard people of the populist left mock Colson's conversion, a contempt born both from hatred of Nixon's henchmen and distrust of evangelism in any form. It is a terrible mistake, though, to judge Christianity by the hypocrisy of sleazy televangelists, or the improbability of its theology. It does have the power to transform receptive people. And one of its most important ideas is redemption: the belief that no man is so far gone that he cannot turn his life around.

There is a harshness to our age that disturbs me. We are quick to write people off and say that nobody ever changes, that bastards of every sort from Wall Street operators to rapists are scum and deserve to be killed. My greatest fear about an increasingly secular society is that without the Christian insistence that redemption is possible for anyone, we will grow ever more harsh, and lose whatever faith we have left in the potential of even the most degraded life. Redemption does not come for many sinners, but it does come for some, and it is a possibility we should never discount.