New Life Sentence
Charles W. Colson: A Life Redeemed
by Jonathan Aitken
Doubleday, 2005
(436 pages, $24.95, hardcover)
reviewed by Joan Frawley Desmond
In an age that preaches tolerance and reconciliation, Charles -Colson resides in that special category of approved public villain. Tuck a book under your arm like Charles W. Colson: A Life Redeemed, and expect to draw unsolicited derision from skeptics who cross your path. Their skepticism embraces both the notion that a notorious individual like Colson could be redeemed, and that such celebrated religious conversions are the real thing and not political spin.
The cynicism is understandable enough. Charles Colson’s role in the Watergate morality play still dwarfs his thirty-year record as an energetic, courageous leader in prison ministry and ecumenical dialogue.
A one-time British cabinet minister whose fall from grace ended in a prison term for perjury, followed by a celebrated Christian conversion, Jonathan Aitken appears uniquely qualified to explain Colson’s conversion to the doubting Thomases. But Aitken’s authorized narrative, more a fireside chat than a full-scale biography, falls a bit flat, for this reader at least.
It often lacks the kind of rich historical and theological landscape found in such biographical works as Paul Elie’s The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage. Christians unfamiliar with the Evangelical world will be frustrated by the presumption that the reader knows the individuals, movements, and teachings that Colson embraced upon his conversion. These deficiencies leave questions about the relationship between Colson’s faith and his political engagement unresolved.
Further, Aitken’s often tentative treatment of Colson’s complex, rough-edged personality suggests that he doubts his audience’s capacity to suspend disbelief that Christ’s grace can truly penetrate the soul of a hardened wheeler-dealer. In his folksy description of Colson’s failing first marriage, for example, he notes the couple’s alienation, then adds blithely, “To complicate these problems beyond repair was the fact that Colson had fallen in love with a new nearest and dearest.” He assures the reader that Colson struggled to maintain a platonic relationship during a series of dinner dates, but ultimately he and his new love became “an item.”
It is possible that Aitken identifies too closely with Colson and lacks the emotional distance to offer a full examination of his subject’s story. This work, however, does supply the interested reader with the basic facts, and some thought-provoking details, of Colson’s remarkable life.
Intemperate Obsessive
A prescient political strategist who once spurred the GOP to poach blue-collar voters from the Democrats, Colson must appreciate the irony of his new position: He has emerged as both a leader and a lightning rod in the culture wars—a phenomenon he once predicted and sought to manipulate as a means to Republican electoral dominance, yet Christianity did not affect his own moral life until Watergate changed his life.
Aitken depicts Colson’s impatient struggle for success as partly an attempt to compensate for an eccentric, emotionally distant mother. The ambitious, hard-charging son of middle-class parents, Colson attracted as many loyal friends as committed enemies.
Joan Frawley Desmond is a freelance writer who lives with her husband and three children in Chevy Chase, Maryland. She is a recent graduate of the John Paul II Institute for the Study of Marriage and the Family.
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