The Family (30 page)

Fitz would remain a Colson client well into Colson’s “born again” phase; the dissonance between his newfound piety and “friends” like Fitz angered liberal Christians, but it wasn’t a problem for the Fellowship. When Phillips raised the subject of Jesus with Colson at Phillips’s Massachusetts home one summer night in 1973, he didn’t speak of accountability or Christian ethics; instead, he read Psalms to Colson and told him that Jesus, alone, could make the frightened dirty trickster feel whole again. Colson wept all the way home, filled with repentance for his godlessness but not for his crimes. He denies them to this day, despite having pled guilty. “Had I fought [the charges] I would have won,” he boasts to fellow fundamentalists. “But, no, God had a
plan
for my life.”
⁴²

Soon after Colson’s fit of weeping, Coe paid him a visit in Washington. Colson had no idea who he was. Coe simply walked into Colson’s law office, threw off his raincoat, draped himself sideways over a leather chair, and informed Colson that Phillips had been sharing his private, confessional letters about his growing religiosity with Coe. “I hope you don’t mind,” Coe said. Colson
did
mind, but “there was such kindness in his eyes my resistance began to melt.” Coe reached across Colson’s desk, held his hand, and asked him to pray. Thereafter, Colson was his brother, a member of the underground, eligible for advice, assistance, and counsel from all its members, not just Republicans but Democrats as well—especially a popular liberal senator from Iowa named Harold Hughes, well known for his opposition to the Vietnam War in general and Nixon very much in particular.

Hughes was a perfect frontman for Coe, sufficiently liberal that Coe could claim to have transcended politics, but also so kooky that his actions were easily manipulated. He was a former truck driver and a recovered alcoholic who turned to Jesus after spiritualism and ESP failed him. He was said to have the demeanor of an evangelist and the eyes of a mystic. In unpublished portions of his memoir, Hughes wrote that his encounters with UFOs were the source of his deep sense of perspective. That “perspective,” combined with Hughes’s faith—and, perhaps, the diminution of his career after a failed 1972 presidential bid—led Hughes to view Colson, under investigation for Watergate, as an underdog who needed his help. Hughes vowed to do all that he could to see that Colson got off lightly; a bout of on-their-knees prayer the two had undertaken had sufficiently redeemed Colson in Hughes’s eyes. Hughes lobbied hard for his new “brother,” as he called Colson, and even broke ranks with Democrats to keep Watergate pardons in the pipeline under Ford. Once Colson was in prison, Coe and Hughes worked hard for his early release. It worked; Colson ended up serving less than seven months of his one- to three-year sentence for his role in Watergate. It wasn’t hard time. “If you think what you’ve done was done for the right reasons,” he boasted shortly before he began his sentence, “then the consequences are easy to live with.”
⁴³

In prison, Colson claims, he gave up politics for God. But in a June 11, 1974, letter defending his conversion to his parole board, Colson wrote, “That which I found I could not change or affect in a political or managerial way, I found could be changed by the force of a personal relationship that men develop in a common bond to Christ.”
⁴⁴
Doug Coe, in a letter to the board dated one day later, wrote that Colson’s freedom was necessary so that a group of Christian men could put him to work on a program for “reaching youth” in juvenile delinquent homes. Upon his release, the two men collaborated on what would become the model and inspiration for what may well be a generation or more of “faith-based” governmental activism.

The story of Prison Fellowship—the largest ministry for prisoners in the world, with 50,000 employees and volunteers dedicated to helping convicts become law abiders—has been recounted in short, inspirational bursts many times since Colson founded it with Coe’s help and the Fellowship’s money shortly after his own release from prison in 1975. So many times, in fact, that it’s not a story anymore but a myth, a legend of how a brilliant but bad man got God in prison and came out a babe in Christ; of how the liberals and the cynics didn’t believe Colson at first but soon saw the light. Say what you will about Prison Fellowship’s fundamentalist Jesus, the story goes, but Colson’s Christ
works
. He saves souls. And, more important, he transforms rapists, murderers, and thieves into docile “followers of Jesus.” Even nonbelievers would rather ex-cons thump Bibles than their fellow senior citizens.

And yet Prison Fellowship—indeed, compassionate conservatism writ large—is implicitly political. Colson sees it as a bulwark against “moral decadence,” he told me, and even as an almost governmental institution. “Government, theologically, has two major roles: to preserve order—we can only have freedom out of order—and to do justice, to restrain evil.” The evil that most concerned Colson at the beginning of his Prison Fellowship days was black radicalism; today it’s “Islamofascism,” a word that in Colson’s usage functions as a warning against secularism. “To the extent that we become a decadent society,” he explained to me, “we feed Islamofascism.” What disturbs Colson most, though, isn’t “Islamofascism” or black power or any particular dissident faction; it’s simply the concept of authority being challenged, Romans 13—a key text for Colson that only begins to outline the scope of theological and political power, he told me—disobeyed. Discipline and obedience, Colson writes in
Against the Night: Living in the New Dark Ages
, were the foundations of the Roman Empire, just as “biblical obedience” should be—must be—the cornerstone of “the West’s” stand against the “new barbarians,” whether they come in the form of Muslims or secular schoolteachers.

Colson’s message breaks with the classic Christian concept of redemption through humility, argues Paul Apostolidis, a political scholar who has studied Colson’s extensive archive of radio broadcasts. In its place, Colson offers a “fundamentalist logic according to which salvation is dispensed according to obedience—and, if necessary, outright humiliation—before authority.” Colson fragments and then co-opts that which could otherwise be a potentially anarchic class of the disenfranchised. In keeping with the principles of evangelicalism, the same as those of compassionate conservatism, Prison Fellowship works on a one-by-one model, transforming adherents of “radical Islam” and other threats to the Republic—black power activists, white power supremacists, plain old thugs, prisoners who get an education—into an atomized class of isolated individuals, praying to be “broken” by God, to be “used” by His Son, to be “nothing” before the Holy Ghost.
⁴⁵

If this strikes men who’ve already been broken by the state as just one more humiliation, Colson reminds them that he offers the same counsel to CEOs and congressmen. Prisoners and senators, he tells convicts, are equal in God’s eyes—a nice sentiment that neatly separates those who accept it from the realities of a world in which the power is in somebody else’s hands. Had Colson directed his new pious energies at any other segment of society—had he tried to convert union members, for instance, or joined Bill Bright at Campus Crusade—he really might have been crucified. But Colson chose the lowest of the low, men and a few women on whom it has long been acceptable to experiment. Colson experimented, bludgeoning his way through bureaucracy with his political skills and his new Fellowship political allies to set up fundamentalist ministries in prisons around the country. A great story, according to conventional thinking. Colson must mean it; what could he have to gain from prisoners?

Colson knew the answer to that one. First there was a best-selling book, and then another one, and now there are literally dozens, books spinning out of Prison Fellowship every year. There was a movie, a comic book, and the secular press, which was not so secular after all when offered evidence of genuine jailhouse conversions. Even as the mainstream media fretted about the rising power of the new Moral Majority and the televangelists so bent on beaming their message, the mainstream media itself beamed Colson’s message. What did Colson have to gain from the prisoners? The press didn’t bother to ask, because it was the press that supplied him with his reward: more power than he’d ever had working for mean old Richard Nixon. “The kingdom of God will not arrive on Air Force One,” he has declared, dismissive of his old obsession with party politics. What he meant by this, he told me, was that he had learned through fundamentalism to pursue pure power, not partisanship. Now, Colson boasts of his access to leaders around the world through Prison Fellowship, strongmen who would have looked at him as a diplomatic challenge in his White House days. Today, according to the elite evangelicals who responded to a survey by the sociologist D. Michael Lindsay, Colson has more political influence than James Dobson or Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention.
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In a 1980 letter to Coe, Colson puts it as plainly as possible. He’s describing a Fellowship cell in Bonn with which he had met at Coe’s request. “It is a fabulous group of men. In fact, I’ve never met any group quite like it. I think we should arrange to use them as a model for leadership groups around the world. We’d better do it in a hurry, however, before they lead the next Nazi takeover out of Germany.”
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And yet the Jesus at the heart of Prison Fellowship is not the commonplace Christ of mainstream evangelicalism, but a distinct entity growing out of Colson’s political past and his subsequent philosophical passions. Colson’s work is shot through with a cagey regard for Plato’s “noble lie,” by which the elite must govern masses who don’t know what’s good for them, and a reverence for “leadership” as a semimystical quality bequeathed to a small elect who already possess the kind of confidence others might call arrogance. The idealization of strength that manifests itself even in Colson’s peculiar sense of humor is the foundation of Colson’s faith. “We should look at our churches
exactly
the way you look at Marine Corps training for combat because that’s what it
is
!” he instructs his followers. “That is how we are
preparing
today for the spiritual combat in which we live, and we should take it every bit as seriously as soldiers in the Marines preparing to go to war.”
⁴⁸
His first literary step as a follower of Christ was not the Bible but some of the more overlooked pages of C. S. Lewis, in which Lewis decries “men without chests.” Colson preaches Lewis’s “manly” Christ with the moral authority of a man who does, after all, dedicate his life to prisoners, and the political savvy of one who has been in the trenches of the culture wars since before the battle had a name. That combination allows Colson to escape the scrutiny afforded James Dobson or the Southern Baptist Convention.

It has also resulted in what might be best understood as a powerful new religious movement.
Faith-based initiatives, compassionate conservatism,
and
servant-leadership,
a term popular with evangelical politicians who insist that they consolidate power the better to help widows and orphans, can all be traced back to the model of Colson’s Prison Fellowship, a radical revision of the “Social Gospel” of the early twentieth century. Evangelicals have always been at the forefront of aid work with the poor and the suffering, but they traditionally came from the left wing of the movement—the branch that seemed to die with William Jennings Bryan, the “Great Commoner,” back in 1925. In the years that followed, evangelicals, and especially fundamentalists—elite and populist—disdained “good works,” aid to the poor, as irrelevant to salvation. The only help the poor needed was Jesus. Colson thought so, too, but he understood that for people to accept the rule of Christ, they’d need some prep work. But it wasn’t his idea; it was Coe’s.

To understand where it came from, we must go back several years to 1968, the morning of April 4, when an assassin’s bullet slammed into Martin Luther King Jr. while he stood on a motel balcony in Memphis. King was a Christian like Coe. Like Coe, he believed in the “beloved community,” the Kingdom of God realized here on Earth, and like Coe, he was willing to work with those who didn’t share his beliefs. But that is where the similarities end. Coe preaches a personal, private submission; King fought and died in public for collective liberation. Coe believes Jesus has a special message for the powerful; King believed God has a special message for everyone. Most important, in 1968, as Coe was constricting the already narrow vision of the Fellowship, King was doing as he had done his whole life: broadening his dream. King died just as he was raising his voice to speak out not only for racial justice but also for economic justice. He would pursue it not through private prayer cells but through public solidarity. And when James Earl Ray murdered him, millions of Americans expressed their solidarity with the dead not through polite mourning but through fury.

Following King’s murder, the Fellowship’s city on a hill, Washington, D.C., burned. More than 200 fires roared throughout the capital. White suburbanites in Arlington and Alexandria looked across the river and saw a sunrise at midnight, a terrifying new day dawning. Many white residents of the District had feared it for years. White flight from Washington began not with the civil rights movement but in the 1940s; it actually slowed down in the 1960s, but only because so many white people had already retreated to the suburbs. Even so, between 1960 and 1970, those suburbs grew in population by 61 percent, putting their numbers far higher than those of Washington proper, which remained static at around 800,000. In 1967, the city got its first black mayor since Reconstruction, the aptly named Walter Washington; but in 1968, twelve dead in the street after clashes between the people and the police (and then the National Guard), whole neighborhoods smoldering like they were part of Hanoi, the city seemed doomed.
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