President Bush just bestowed Presidential citizenship medals on 24 recipients, including key Religious Right figures Charles Colson (Prison Fellowship) and Robert George (Princeton). Colson, of course, is the Watergate felon who had a repentance and religious conversion; “after serving his sentence,” notes AP, “Colson founded Prison Fellowship in 1976, which conducts outreach to prisoners, ex-convicts, crime victims and their families.” Colson’s prison reform efforts have been praised from many quarters, often in extravagant terms, and I have no doubt that some portion of that praise is deserved, as with his efforts to call attention to abusive prison conditions (seldom a popular cause for a conservative to take up). At the same time, as David Plotz noted in a good 2000 Slate profile:
Secular admirers overlook the central fact about Colson’s work: He is a hard-core evangelist. Colson seeks to convert prisoners to Christianity, not necessarily to rehabilitate them. If they repair their lives, all the better, but souls matter most. This fact shadows Colson’s ambitious Inner Change project. Colson’s volunteers run the daily lives of about 200 Texas inmates. From dawn to dusk, the inmates attend prayer meetings, Bible study, and chapel. All activities are explicitly evangelical and Protestant. Though Inner Change is being widely praised and imitated, Muslims in the program complain of ostracism, and civil libertarians are alarmed at the project’s aggressive promotion of Christianity.
People interested in good governance are probably more willing to countenance church-state blurring in prison and corrections than in most other realms of government action, if only because the “normal” outcomes are so grim that you’d think mixing in religiosity could hardly make matters worse. If you can pull in a cadre of law-abiding outsiders who care about prisoners’ welfare, is it really so terrible if a certain amount of sermonizing and conversion-pressure goes on, as at an old-style Skid Row mission? So I’ve never managed to get very agitated about the arguable church-state violations. On the other hand, I get much more worried at reports (like this from 2003 by Mark Kleiman, also in Slate) that the program’s reputed success depends on cherry-picking statistics and cooked numbers: “Overall, the 177 entrants [in Colson’s much-lauded Texas program] did a little bit worse than the controls.”
At any rate, Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings and Megan McArdle at The Atlantic are now engaged in a controversy over whether Colson was an appropriate pick for the Medal. Hilzoy recites some of the crimes Colson committed as Richard Nixon’s “hatchet man”, when he was among the hardest and nastiest of a hard and nasty crew:
The one episode that will always sum up Chuck Colson for me is his plan to firebomb the Brookings Institution.
This naturally evokes comparisons to Bill Ayers, to which Megan McArdle’s response is: c’mon, Colson’s repented of his Nixon-era crimes, in what even most of his critics admit is a sincere way. And he served time. He would never firebomb the Brookings Institution now, or so much as toss a water balloon into its lobby. Is there to be no forgiveness, no prospect of regaining public stature through later acts of idealism?
I’m not sure what to think of all this. I know several scholars at Brookings, and haven’t always entirely agreed with the thrust of their work, but I don’t think it’s ever occurred to me to express my disagreements in as drastic a fashion as Colson did. (In the press coverage of his presidential medal, no reporter seems to have called anyone at Brookings to get a reaction.) But maybe bygones should be bygones.
What I know bothers me about Colson is what he is now: a seasoned wheeler-dealer who takes a hand in almost all of the theological Right’s most deplorable causes, from attacking Darwin, misrepresenting science and getting creationism into the schools (he’s been a prolific advocate of so-called Intelligent Design), through hysterical and hectic attacks on secularism (which he blamed for the Enron financial scandal; no doubt he’s dusting off the theory to explain today’s financial crisis); and on through pertinacious and frivolous litigation, as in a case I’ve written about at my main site, in which Colson’s been a leading promoter of prolonged and meritless litigation in a custody case for the purpose of making anti-gay points. The case is one in which a client represented by the misnamed religious-right group Liberty Counsel has obstinately persisted in violating a valid court order; I see (via Box Turtle Bulletin) that the U.S. Supreme Court has now declined for the fifth time to hear an appeal by Liberty Counsel trying to stave off its loss in the Miller-Jenkins case.
For a while after his conversion, Colson was praised for a rhetorical style that came across as softer and more conciliatory than many of his colleagues. But that’s changed too; now he preaches culture war with the best of them. I know he was a hard and ruthless man when he served Nixon, and I see little evidence to indicate that he is anything but a hard and ruthless man now. I wish I could believe that he got a medal despite all these aspects, but I much fear that his candidacy reached the President’s desk because of them.
[Note added: while Colson has admitted to many other Watergate crimes, he’s reportedly disputed the accuracy of at least some of the Brookings accusations, which emerged as part of other Watergate figures’ testimony and have since then been widely reported in many mainstream publications as fact.]
I see you’re applying the same zero-defect standard to Colson’s prison ministry as the left engages in regarding such evil things as the U.S. military.
secularright.org……
What a bizarre comment. Who said anything about expecting 100% success? The Mark Kleiman article suggested that the ministry’s results were no better than that of inmates who did not participate in the program, which if so signals zero net benefit.
@Walter Olson
What a bizarre comment.
Well, if you’re going to get use quantitative measures…perhaps you should re-norm for the commenter? 🙂
The fact that this is a prison, and these prisoners are required by law and the force of arms to be there, makes this disgusting mixing of the state and religion even worse.
FROM WIKIPEDIA:
“On June 18, 2003, Colson was invited by President George W. Bush to the White House to present results of a scientific study on the faith-based initiative, InnerChange, at the Texas Jester II (later renamed in honor of Carol Vance) prison facility. Colson led a small group that includes Dr. Byron Johnson of the University of Pennsylvania, who was the principal researcher of the InnerChange study, a few staff members of Prison Fellowship and three InnerChange graduates to the meeting. In the presentation, Dr. Johnson explained that 171 participants in the InnerChange program were compared to a matched group of 1,754 inmates from the prison’s general population. The study found that only 8 percent of InnerChange graduates, as opposed to 20.3 percent of inmates in the matched comparison group, became offenders again in a two-year period. In other words, the recidivism rate was cut by almost two-thirds for those who complete the faith-based program. Those who are dismissed for disciplinary reasons or who drop out voluntarily, or those who are paroled before completion, have a comparable rate of rearrest and incarceration.”
And where do you get the notion prisoners are forced to participate in prion ministries? How horrible, Chuck Colson enables Christian resources to be available to prisoners. Just reading the atheists here it is obvious why atheists create tyrannies wherever they come into power.
Yes, that Wikipedia extract quotes the claims Colson’s backers were making for the program’s success back in 2003, the same claims Mark Kleiman debunked in the Slate article I linked. Do you have anything that refutes Kleiman’s critique? Merely restating the original claims doesn’t help greatly.
Why the need to debunk it. You don’t think convicts who come into faith would be less likely to rob and steal and commit mayhem? What are you protecting? The guy runs a prison ministry and you act like he’s trying to get away with something. Anyway, Christians will work with a thousand people with no guarantee even one will come to faith. The Christian is given a biblical command to spread the Word, but the sower can’t make the seed grow:
Mat 13:3 And he spake many things unto them in parables, saying, Behold, a sower went forth to sow;
Mat 13:4 And when he sowed, some seeds fell by the way side, and the fowls came and devoured them up:
Mat 13:5 Some fell upon stony places, where they had not much earth: and forthwith they sprung up, because they had no deepness of earth:
Mat 13:6 And when the sun was up, they were scorched; and because they had no root, they withered away.
Mat 13:7 And some fell among thorns; and the thorns sprung up, and choked them:
Mat 13:8 But other fell into good ground, and brought forth fruit, some an hundredfold, some sixtyfold, some thirtyfold.
Mat 13:9 Who hath ears to hear, let him hear.
And then Jesus explains the parable:
Mat 13:18 Hear ye therefore the parable of the sower.
Mat 13:19 When any one heareth the word of the kingdom, and understandeth it not, then cometh the wicked one, and catcheth away that which was sown in his heart. This is he which received seed by the way side.
Mat 13:20 But he that received the seed into stony places, the same is he that heareth the word, and anon with joy receiveth it;
Mat 13:21 Yet hath he not root in himself, but dureth for a while: for when tribulation or persecution ariseth because of the word, by and by he is offended.
Mat 13:22 He also that received seed among the thorns is he that heareth the word; and the care of this world, and the deceitfulness of riches, choke the word, and he becometh unfruitful.
Mat 13:23 But he that received seed into the good ground is he that heareth the word, and understandeth it; which also beareth fruit, and bringeth forth, some an hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty.
Colson’s STILL a better pick than Tenet and the other bozos who got us into Iraq.
I remember when I was a kid seeing tracts at my Southern Baptist church about Colson. This was in the late 70s. It was a color comic looking thing, full of woe and despair, followed by the saving light.
As far as the medal goes, I could let this one pass, too, but the for the firebombing thing. How serious was the “plotting”? With Ayers you had actual materials being put together and acts committed. Was Colson seriously talking this up or was he just spouting off?
Walter, that Kleiman article is pretty devastating to the claims of Innerchange, isn’t it? Its almost as if the whole “faith-based initiative” thing is a scam by religious special interest groups to suck money out of the dark satanic socialist atheist tyranny (to paraphrase Panopaea). Surely not?
“And where do you get the notion prisoners are forced to participate in prion ministries?”
I said they were forced to be in prison, not in the ministry.
“How horrible, Chuck Colson enables Christian resources to be available to prisoners.”
The problem isn’t Colson. He’s just a religous dolt, doing what all you religious dolts do: spread your supersitious nonsense. The problem is the state permitting it to happen, given the Constitutional guarantees in place.
“Just reading the atheists here it is obvious why atheists create tyrannies wherever they come into power.”
Yeah, as opposed to theocratic paradises like Ancient Israel, Medieval Europe or Modern Saudi Arabia.
>I said they were forced to be in prison, not in the ministry.
So your point was meaningless. OK.
>The problem isn’t Colson. He’s just a religous dolt, doing what all you religious dolts do: spread your supersitious nonsense.
This is pretty much where many people are at when they’re sixteen.
Panopaea: How about if we had Imams in prison, handing out copies of the Koran and quoting various Suras from memory? Would you be down with that?
I almost get the sense that you’re trying to provoke a food-fight up in here.
Colson’s virtual firebombing of the Constitution is what worries me more. To the best of my knowledge, he’s never really expressed any remorse over that; worse, he continues the assault on the Constitution with much of what he does now, claiming to have a cloak of righteousness as he attacks science, literature, and knowledge in general. Atrocities of the 30 Years’ War were atrocities whether committed by the Protestants or the Catholics. Colson’s claim to have found religion doesn’t change the atrocities, to me.
@Panopaea
So your point was meaningless. OK.
If you can’t see the issue with captive populations and state inculcation of religion, that is your issue. It’s there whether you want to belive it or not.
This is pretty much where many people are at when they’re sixteen.
Let me guess, you were the queen of your junior high debate team.