Of all the religions and philosophies in the world, Christianity is the most interested in people who’ve made mistakes, because it says you can repent and be forgiven and start over again

Every conversion story is, at heart, a story about being wrong. Whether they are agonizingly slow or all but instantaneous, whether they happen in a garden or in prison or on the road to Damascus, conversions don’t just represent the embrace of a new worldview. They also represent the utter rejection of the convert’s past. Consider, for example, Chuck Colson, and the strange tale of how Slate.com once up it: “a Watergate crook became America’s greatest Christian conservative.”

Today, Colson is a prominent evangelical leader and founder of the Prison Fellowship. During the Nixon administration, though, he was, by all accounts (including his own) secular, self-obsessed, and scary. Officially, he was special counsel to the president. Unofficially, he was Nixon’s hatchet man and “the White House tough guy.”

In 1973, as the waters of Watergate rose around him, Colson simultaneously found God and found himself in prison for obstruction of justice. Below, he and I talk about why he converted, what he regrets most about his involvement with Watergate, and why Christianity is “the religion of second chances.”

You have a fairly dramatic conversion story. What first prompted it?
…I met a man who’d been a client of mine before I went to the White House. I’d not seen him the whole time I was in the White House, and when I went back to be his general counsel again, he was totally different, completely changed. I asked him what had happened to him. And he said these words: “I’ve accepted Jesus Christ and committed my life to him.”

Read More: (The Staff of The Aquila Report encourages you to read this entire, long interview. It is one of the most revealing interviews ever granted by Colson): http://www.slate.com/BLOGS/blogs/thewrongstuff/archive/2010/10/20/from-the-white-house-to-the-jailhouse-to-the-pulpit-chuck-colson-on-being-wrong.aspx

Kathryn Schulz is the author of Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error.