Not Alone Anymore
Johnson, Daniel
Books in Review - "Not Alone Anymore" EUROPEAN LIBERALS THINK of the United States, they think—not without a curl of the lip—of born-again Christians. There is nothing uniquely...
...In time, Colson's repentance blossomed into redemption...
...In the end, Colson decided to plead guilty to a charge that, in normal times, would never have been brought: attempting to prejudice the rights of a defendant...
...Jonathan Aitken meticulously reconstructs the sequence of events over a period of years by which Colson descended into despair, acknowledged his own desperate plight, and clawed his way back up into the light...
...It was one sentence that cut Colson to the quick: "For Pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love or contentment or even common sense...
...Evangelicals and Catholics Together (ECT) was formed in 1992 by Colson and Father Richard John Neuhaus...
...It has since become a faith that moves not mountains, but millions...
...Yet this was also a man whose instincts were Christian even before he knew it...
...And in his refusal to desert Nixon at a time when almost everybody else in Washington was doing so, Colson passed what one might call the Gethsemane test...
...In time, Colson's repentance blossomed into redemption...
...Eventually, they parted, but on the way home Colson began weeping uncontrollably...
...It is true that Aitken's fall took place only ten—Colson's more than 30—years ago, and time is a great healer...
...Among the felons Aitken, too, touched bottom, and then turned to Christ...
...But from that moment onwards, his journey to faith had begun, with Christ by his side...
...Not only is he an expert on the Nixon years, who brings the right combination of empathy and detachment to what is still a minefield, but Aitken's own career has many similarities with the subject of this biography...
...Even before the landslide victory in 1972 that set the pattern for the Reagan and both Bush presidenDaniel Johnson is a writer in London...
...B O O K S I N R E V I E W of Alone Anymore H W EN EUROPEAN LIBERALS THINK of the United States, they think—not without a curl of the lip—of born-again Christians...
...By the time he was 38, Colson found himself at the center of it, when he became special counsel to his political hero, Richard Nixon...
...There is nothing uniquely American about the phenomenon of rebirth in Christ...
...John's Gospel: "Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God...
...This, after all, was a man who began by telling a friend who broached the subject of Christianity: "Oh, I think religion is fine, provided one has as little of it as possible...
...It didn't all happen at once, though...
...It took Watergate to humble Colson sufficiently to open his conscience to the possibility of conversion, however...
...When the perjury was exposed, he went to prison and, for good measure, was bankrupted by his vindictive antagonists...
...From Augustine of Hippo to Mother Teresa of Calcutta, from Martin Luther to Martin Luther King, Christians have responded to the Lord's injunction in St...
...He threw it all away by lying about a damaging newspaper story, suing for libel—notoriously, he claimed to be wielding the "simple sword of truth and the trusty shield of British fair play"—and repeating the lie in court...
...He was sentenced to between one and three years in prison...
...Colson later recalled that "Lewis's torpedo had hit me amidships...
...Born-again Christianity is sneered at in secular Europe, and Aitken is more reviled as one of the children of light than he ever was as a child of darkness...
...As the White House was engulfed in recriminations and plea-bargaining, Colson was an obvious scapegoat...
...The irony will not have been lost on him that his most controversial initiative has not been his work for worldly causes, such as prison reform, but his attempt to further the cause of Christian unity...
...The door chosen by Colson was marked "Southern Baptist," but he still heeds Lewis's admonition: "When you have reached your own room, be kind to those who have chosen different doors and to those who are still in the hall...
...In the summer of 1973, as the Nixon presidency began to founder, dragging Colson down with it, Colson rang Phillips and went to stay with him at a cottage in Maine...
...Lewis compares the minimalist creed of "mere" Christianity to a hall with many doors, each of which opens out into a different room...
...That, of course, is a cross that he cheerfully bears...
...He, too, was once a power in his land: a British Tory cabinet minister, rich, gifted, and handsome...
...In his early days as a brash young attorney setting up a partnership in Boston, Colson broke the color bar that had tacitly existed in the legal profession for two centuries...
...His, too, is "a life redeem-ed...
...He was grateful, but embarrassed by his own inarticulacy...
...But he had achieved this position at the price of a reputation as the most ruthless hatchet man of a ruthless president...
...Charles ("Chuck") Colson's first birth gave him no privileges but all the confidence he needed to get to the top...
...THE TALE OF COLSON'S FALL AND RISE iS a remark-able one, and Jonathan Aitken (this magazine's monthly "High Spirits" columnist) tells it very well...
...The hatchet man's cap fitted, and he wore it...
...But the British also prefer those who repent to keep quiet about it...
...Indeed, it is rare to encounter a biographer who identifies with his subject so completely that he sometimes seems to know Colson's mind better than Colson himself...
...Despite the fact that these days he is once again invited to the White House, Colson has not had an easy ride...
...It was to carry him through disgrace and incarceration, to sustain him through the skepticism and ridicule with which his conversion was inevitably received, and to impel him to divert his formidable energy from selfish purposes to his real life's work of bringing criminals to follow his example, under the auspices of Prison Fellowship, which is now a world-wide movement...
...His mother, aptly known as Dizzy, was a wild and wonderful woman, whose adoration of her only child was evidently reciprocated, however often she embarrassed him...
...Only then was he able to pray for the first time, and for the first time he no longer felt alone...
...In the book that sparked Colson's conversion, C.S...
...Yet the Catholic-Evangelical alliance, which was then only a twinkle in Colson's eye, has now become a force to be reckoned with on a whole range of issues...
...Colson had not known about the burglary, but he had been involved in so many other dirty tricks that he immediately fell under suspicion...
...Yet ever since the Pilgrim Fathers embarked on their quest for a new Jerusalem, Americans have been making the experience of Christian rebirth their own...
...It began with what Colson experienced as the direct intervention of the Holy Spirit, though a Catholic theologian present, Cardinal Avery Dulles, told Aitken in retrospect: "I am afraid I am not as sensitive to the movements of the Holy Spirit as Chuck Colson...
...Father Neuhaus believes that it is creating a new configuration of Christianity in America, and Colson considers ECT his "most significant project...
...It was a business friend, Tom Phillips, who planted the seed of doubt in Colson's stony heart...
...To his own surprise, when Charles W. Colson: A Life Redeemed by Jonathan Aitken (DOUBLEDAY, 448 PAGES, $24.95) Reviewed by Daniel Johnson B O O K S I N R E V I E W his friend asked if they might pray together, he found himself able to assent...
...For the contrast between their present status in their respective countries is a sobering reminder that far more than an ocean separates America from Europe...
...By the time Colson began his sentence, however, his world had already been turned upside down by the experience of religious conversion...
...His was never going to be an easy path to salvation...
...As the president's most trusted spin-doctor, and architect of the new Re-publican coalition of blue-collar and ethnic voters who delivered the 1972 election, Colson was one of the most influential men in America...
...Jonathan Aitken is a worthy disciple of Chuck Colson and, with God's grace, may be expected to perform many more good works, among which writing this intensely moving biography is by no means the least...
...Lewis's Mere Christianity...
...COLSON'S DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL had only just begun...
...Whereas Colson is all the more respected on account of his conversion, Aitken is still mercilessly mocked in the media...
...Since his release, he has devoted his many talents to preaching the Gospel...
...Phillips read passages from C.S...
...It has since become a faith that moves not mountains, but millions...
...When ECT went public in 1994, the wide publicity elicited a backlash from many Evangelicals, who accused Colson 76 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 2005of betraying the Reformation and cut off funding to his other charities...
...Colson's ascent through school, university, and the law was prodigious, but making money was not enough for him: What he really enjoyed was power...
...He didn't quite say, "I would walk over my grand-mother for Richard Nixon," but when the remark was attributed to him, he never disowned it...
...74 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 2005 cies, Watergate had begun to cast its long shadow over the Nixon administration...
...But there the similarities end...
...This is not surprising...
...And of all the spiritual progeny of the New World, Charles Col-son, the title of whose autobiography Born Again gave the phrase its modern currency, is one of the most quintessentially American of them all...
...Aitken understands only too well what Col-son has been through...
Vol. 38 • November 2005 • No. 9
