Abstract
Charles Colson’s Born Again was the most celebrated spiritual memoir of the 1970s evangelical revival, and remains the best-known book-length conversion narrative of the twentieth century. Its account of how Colson—notoriously ruthless as a political aide to President Nixon—abruptly invited Christ into his life in the late summer of 1973 following a long searching discussion with a Christian friend and of how he came to submit himself completely to God’s will, inspired evangelicals to hope that the broader national crisis of morals exemplified by Watergate might be purged by the fires of revival. Colson went on, as founder of the world’s largest prison ministry and as a leading evangelical thinker and writer, to place a highly-structured model of conversion at the centre of his ambitions for evangelical mission in the world. However, as revealed by his private papers, Colson’s own conversion experience was more complex and ambiguous than either his published memoir or later works of advocacy suggest. His editor, Leonard LeSourd, played a significant role in shaping Born Again to match the conceptual norms of popular evangelicalism and contribute the force of a recent, conspicuous and apparently secure example of individual spiritual rebirth to the wider evangelical project of religious revival.
Highlights
Born Again, a memoir written by Charles Colson, disgraced former Special Counsel to disgraced former President Richard Nixon, was published on 18 February 1976
In August, a Gallup survey revealed that 35 percent of Americans claimed to be “born-again” or to have had a “born again” experience in which they committed themselves to Christ [21]
He continued to observe that the experience of spiritual rebirth, in and of itself, was not a sufficient basis for the saving of a soul—and that, it was not the only possible route of entry into the kingdom of heaven—Colson, came to place great emphasis on the role to be played by conversion in what he envisioned as a global project of Christianization—as the grounding, alongside the Bible, for a distinct, self-confident evangelical mindset and as an alternative to the failed ameliorative reflexes of secular social policy
Summary
Born Again, a memoir written by Charles Colson, disgraced former Special Counsel to disgraced former President Richard Nixon, was published on 18 February 1976. Over the three decades, through his work in prisons, Colson developed into a leading evangelical policy entrepreneur; his writings and radio broadcasts made his views ubiquitous throughout middlebrow evangelical culture He continued to observe that the experience of spiritual rebirth, in and of itself, was not a sufficient basis for the saving of a soul—and that, it was not the only possible route of entry into the kingdom of heaven—Colson, came to place great emphasis on the role to be played by conversion in what he envisioned as a global project of Christianization—as the grounding, alongside the Bible, for a distinct, self-confident evangelical mindset and as an alternative to the failed ameliorative reflexes of secular social policy. In the post-war era, American evangelical conversion discourse was neither entirely individuated nor entirely generic and invariable: its transformations serve as important markers to the progress of evangelical ambitions in and for the world
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