by Jeff Sharlet
AT THE 1970 National Prayer Breakfast, a Washington lawyer named James Bell led a seminar for college men who’d been selected by their institutions’ presidents.36 The men were told only that they’d be having breakfast with Richard Nixon, but in Washington, Fellowship brothers handed them from one instructor to the next, alternating fundamentalist theology with “private” lectures from politicians and businessmen. Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird explained that Christ had a special message for elites. The former student body president of Stanford, just back from Vietnam, spoke of the dedication of the Viet Minh as a model for evangelizing Washington. Paul Temple, a Standard Oil executive, explained how the Fellowship had won him access to key men in General Francisco Franco’s government in Spain. “Public events” had two purposes, said Bell: (1) to declare to the world “the relevancy of God in the Establishment’s life”; (2) to recruit “the up and outer.” The real work of the Fellowship that the college men had been chosen for took place in small groups, where, away from publicity, men “attack the basic social problems of America.” Bell didn’t list those problems, but he gave a hint of his meaning: “All of us cry over our martinis about law and order, but very few of us do a blooming thing about it.”37
The Fellowship did. How? Not through proposing laws or campaigning. Its politics were cultural, in the broadest sense; its method the capture of leaders’ souls, the eradication of their egos, the replacement of their will with Christ’s. Their goals were not the rollback of the 1963 school prayer decision, or antiporn laws, or the “Christian Amendment,” a perennial proposal to formally dedicate the nation to Christ. It was bigger, deliberately vague, and so long-term—think generations—that the Fellowship would never have to answer for its successes and failures. Coe made the strategy of deferral into Fellowship doctrine. The distant goal was “a leadership led by God,” said Bell. “Period.” Few men in the Fellowship expected to see it in their lifetimes. But the college boys could get in on it if they felt so called—by conscience or career. “If you want some doors opened…there are men in government, there are senators who literally find it their pleasure to give any kind of advice, assistance, or counsel.”38
Three years later, Chuck Colson, destined to become one of the leading theorists of American fundamentalism, would discover as much as he faced the prospect of prison. Colson was no ordinary criminal. He was one of Richard Nixon’s closest aides, the smartest, toughest man on his staff, Nixon’s “hatchet man”: responsible for Nixon’s “enemies list,” said to be the brains behind schemes to firebomb the Brookings Institution and hire Teamsters to beat up antiwar protesters. He was, the court would soon rule, a Watergate felon, the most powerful of the Nixon “dirty tricksters” to be sent to prison.
He wouldn’t go alone, though; accompanying him would be the Jesus of the Fellowship, whom he’d discovered was a good friend, indeed. The Fellowship, he’d write in his 1976 memoir, Born Again, comprised a “veritable underground of Christ’s men all through government.”39 Colson would later claim that it was news to him, but he was a man who understood the power of friends and the politics of religion.
A former marine from Massachusetts, a scholarship student at Brown, and a Harvard lawyer by dint of brain power and no silver spoons, Colson was (and is) a beefy, square-headed man with thick black square-shaped glasses. He’s always had the jowls of a bulldog and a natural sneer like that of late-stage Elvis—the same bloated cockiness but without any sex appeal. His job for Nixon was not to look pretty but to cut deals with constituencies Republicans had either ignored or taken for granted. He brought in the working-class vote by playing to poor men’s fears of hippies, feminists, black power, and, as always, the red tide. And he brought in the religious vote in a way no American politician had attempted to do until then: he arranged for Nixon to hold church services directly in the White House, “quasi-spiritual, quasi-political,” he’d call them. Colson recognized the political power of religion years before he was born again, before he joined the Fellowship. He brought in a different religious leader every Sunday, a photo op every week that put Nixon’s mug in the pastor’s offices of the nation’s most powerful churches. St. Dick of the Second Chance, the most enduring man on the American political scene. Billy Graham’s best political buddy; a friendship, Colson understood, worth more in a changing America than the waning power of the old city machines that had stolen the White House from Nixon in 1960. The machines were rusting; their troops were moving to the suburbs; and the suburbs were getting religion. And Colson got them, because he understood what they wanted, visible access. Proof that they mattered. Image was everything, and they wanted pictures of themselves in the White House, a new visual narrative about the distribution of power in America.
There was something almost democratic about it. Only, Colson didn’t let the multitudes in; he simply made room for the bosses, the men who ran the old machines and the new and improved ones. The unions, grinding into irrelevance, and the Jesus-engines, revving, revving, ready to bring the war home, indeed, and fight it with the discipline of the Viet Minh, the stealthiness of the Vietcong, and the revolutionary fervor of rock and roll. What Colson recognized was that in America the time for sermons was past. A new politics, raw and emotional, was being born (again), and Colson did what he could to make it work for the most overcooked, overcalculated president in history.
So, did this political fixer really not know about Abram and Coe and the dozens of congressmen networked in prayer cells before he faced prison time? Was he unaware of the White House cell that met weekly under Nixon’s Federal Reserve chief, Arthur Burns, a Jew for Jesus before anyone had heard of such a notion? Did he not know that Gerald Ford, the House Republican leader, his soul saved by a preacher named Billy Zeoli, had for years been in a prayer cell with Melvin Laird, now Nixon’s secretary of defense?
Well, he says so. White House correspondent Dan Rather found fishy Colson’s sudden discovery of prayer for himself as well as the rubes. At a 1973 press conference, Rather demanded to know why, after Colson had left the White House in disgrace, he continued to pop in on a regular basis. For prayer meetings, answered an embarrassed press secretary. Come on, Rather replied, we all know what goes on when politicians get together to talk about their souls. The press secretary shrugged, Rather gave up, and Colson continued on his amazing spiritual journey. Later that year, a syndicated columnist discouraged further inquiries into Colson’s “underground prayer movement,” lest the press undermine its ability to humbly arrange for the redemption of “big” men: “they meet in each other’s homes, they meet at prayer breakfasts, they converse on the phone…. They genuinely avoid publicity. In fact, they shun it.” 40
Colson wasn’t the only Watergate conspirator to find solace in the Fellowship as the indictments began. James W. McCord, the ex-CIA man who served as “security director” of the Committee to Re-Elect the President, CREEP (sentenced to two and a half to eight years), received “spiritual undergirding” from Halverson; Egil “Bud” Krogh, the chief of the “plumbers” (sentenced to six months), who tried to silence Daniel Ellsberg, prayed with a Fellowship prayer cell right before heading off to prison; and Jeb Magruder (sentenced to four months to ten years), who blamed his participation in the plot on the liberal ethics he’d been taught at Williams College by the Reverend William Sloane Coffin, joined a Fellowship cell just as he was pleading guilty, albeit only to get “the best possible deal.” But Colson was the one who actually made something real of his new faith—indeed, he transformed it.41
Colson’s first contact with the Fellowship came through Tom Phillips, the CEO of the missile manufacturer Raytheon. Back in private practice after leaving the White House under a black cloud, waiting to go to trial, Colson was pumping his Republican network hard for new clients. One such was the International Brotherhood of Teamsters under Frank “Fitz” Fitzsimmons, the mafia-friendly successor to Jimmy Hoffa and one of Nixon’s staunchest allies. Nixon was no friend to working people, but wit
h Colson’s help, he managed to seduce right-wing union bosses by turning a blind eye toward their looting of their own treasuries (Nixon ordered the Justice Department to drop its investigations of the Teamsters after Fitz took over in 1971) in exchange for their muscle at the ballot box and in the streets, as when Colson asked the Teamsters to crack skulls at an antiwar rally. (From the Nixon tapes: “Haldeman: Colson’s gonna…do it with the Teamsters. Nixon: They’ve got guys who’ll go in and knock their heads off. Haldeman: Sure. Murderers…They’re gonna beat the [expletive deleted] out of some of these people. And, uh, and hope they really hurt ’em.”)
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?
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sp; 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.46 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.”47
