Charles Colson, a key figure in the Nixon White House Watergate scandal died today at the age of 80. After serving a prison term for his role in the burglarizing of the psychiatric files of Daniel Ellsberg who had leaked the Pentagon Papers to the media, Colson became an influential evangelical Christian. As
Time reports in his obituary today:
Colson would turn incarceration into resurrection. Seeing the conditions of his fellow prisoners, he would be inspired to start Prison Fellowship shortly after he regained his freedom to evangelize the inmates of America's penitentiary system....
As the years went by, Colson would use his celebrity as one of America's most famous redeemed sinners to crusade for prison reform — as well as buttress the country's burgeoning evangelical movement, which was finding its political legs in the 1980s. Among evangelicals and conservative Christian groups, he became a fount of carefully worded argument, without the bombast and grandstanding of politically-ambitious preachers, even as he defended the same positions on evolution and abortion, same-sex marriage and the use of the Bible in public schools. In 2009, he started the Chuck Colson center, an online research site that he calls "the Lexis-Nexis of resources on the Christian worldview." Colson was key to forming an amalgam of conservative Christian principles that would come together as an ecumenical political front of great potency.
