Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, March 20, 1993 TAG: 9303200296
SECTION: RELIGION PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By GEORGE W. CORNELL ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Long
COLSON SAYS AMERICA IMPERILED BY LOSS OF RELIGION
Charles W. "Chuck" Colson, a man who has ridden a symbolic roller coaster from high to low and back to a peak again, sees the country as plunging from high moral ground toward faithless ruin."We are stripping religion away from public life to our great and everlasting peril," he said. "It is the most self-destructive process the nation could embark on.
"We are trying to erase the indispensable role of religion in informing the moral consensus by which civilized society has survived."
Colson once hit bottom himself, spiritually and physically, a cynical White House counsel sent to prison. But he has regained a height, in service and honor, building an acclaimed, worldwide ministry in behalf of prisoners.
As winner of the $1 million 1993 Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, the previously imprisoned "hatchet man" for President Nixon in the Watergate scandal said he was reclaimed by God's "amazing grace" to serve his truth.
Besides building Prison Fellowship into an international network for mending lives of prisoners and their families and seeking prison reforms, Colson also has turned out a dozen books on contemporary culture and faith.
"We live in a post-Christian age today," he said in an interview. "We've attempted to become a city of man without a city of God. We're stripping away our religious roots."
Noting that the late world historian Will Durant concluded that no nation in history has survived without a strong moral code informed by religion, Colson said this cohesive basis is being destroyed in the United States.
"We have embarked into a `brave new world' without moral directions, of values erased from teaching, of tolerance elevated above truth, of the expunging of the last vestiges of religious symbols in the country," he said.
He cited numerous cases of prohibited religious mottos or art from public buildings, parks and inscriptions, of banned carols and the Ten Commandments from schools, the elimination of We live in a post-Christian age today. We've attempted to become a city of man without a city of God. We're stripping away our religious roots. Charles Colson group prayers at ceremonies and events.
Recalling that the late Supreme Court Justice William Douglas warned in the 1950s that such steps were creating not neutrality toward religion but a "brooding hostility" to it, Colson said:
"That's exactly what we've got now. We're no longer neutral about religion but hostile to religion. On most every front there is an increasing secularizing of America."
He said movies and TV entertainment, now a pervasive influence, usually treat religion as nutty or nonexistent, and it is marginalized or disparaged in other media, although 43 percent of adults attend worship each week.
"Among some of the media, there's a genuine hostility toward religion, seeing it as interfering with people's individual free choice of lifestyles," he said.
That aversion also prevails in the academic atmosphere of most secular universities, he said, and has reached the point that professors risk losing their jobs if they let it be known they are Christian believers.
"The basic presupposition has developed that we are no longer a Judeo-Christian culture," he said.
Colson, 61, a Baptist whose commitment to Christianity came in the Watergate crisis, classes himself an evangelical. But he's a special variety, advocating cross-denominational cooperation, Protestant and Catholic, to uphold biblical principles in society.
"God never intended us to be spiritual lone rangers," he said. "That's one of the curses of modern evangelicals, their rugged, individualistic, entrepreneurial approach to Christianity. It's an abomination."
He tackles the problem in his latest book, "The Body," published by Word, stressing the essential unity of faith. "We have to see ourselves as part of one holy, catholic, apostolic church, as one body," he said.
Colson, who spent seven months in prison for obstructing justice, founded Prison Fellowship in 1976. Based in Reston, Va., its full-time staff of 280 and about 50,000 volunteers work at 800 U.S. state and federal prisons, and has branches in 54 other countries.
It carries on a variety of programs, ranging from Bible study and work furloughs for community projects to readying prisoners for jobs. It also offers seminars on marriage and an "Angel Tree" program for providing Christmas gifts to prisoners' children.
Colson lectures widely and appears before state legislators discussing prison reform. He maintains that people convicted of nonviolent crimes - nearly half the 900,000 behind bars at an annual cost to taxpayers of about $18,000 each - should instead be sentenced to community service to make restitution to victims.
He said the Templeton Prize money will go into the fellowship's operation, as do royalties from his books. He limits himself to an annual salary of $59,000.
Without religious underpinnings, "society collapses," he said. "But the pervasive view in America today is that religion is totally private, something we don't talk about, something without any influence on life."