Critics doubted and mocked Colson’s conversion. His Nixon administration adversary, former Attorney General John Mitchell, jibed that if Colson were a Christian, “I’ll take my chances with the lions.”

For the first time in 34 years, Chuck Colson won’t be in a prison for Easter. The famous Watergate figure and Christian convert usually spends the day ministering to prisoners, but is recovering from surgery to remove a blood clot on his brain.

Colson, 80, is a giant of our time. He is a reminder of the true meaning of redemption, a concept that has been debased in our Tilt-a-Whirl media culture that can’t distinguish between notoriety and fame. In contemporary America, redemption begins sometime between the first check-in into rehab and the first cable-TV interview, and reaches completion when everyone gets distracted by someone else’s attention-grabbing disgrace.

Colson’s personal redemption was wrenchingly sincere, a shattering experience that brought him through that great narrative arc of conversion: worldly success, crushing humiliation, and then victory in terms he never would have imagined when he was at the pinnacle of power by the side of the leader of the free world.

Colson was known, in the words of a Wall Street Journal headline that stuck with him, as Nixon’s “hatchet man.” He helped build the sinews of the Silent Majority with outreach to constituencies such as labor, and was an all-around fixer. Nixon loved his ruthlessness. Colson had every reason to feel proud of his status. He was in the swim of events, a big man, a tough guy, talked about, respected, and feared. But pride is the great villain in Colson’s classic autobiography, Born Again.

When he gave the valedictory at his high school in Cambridge, Mass., he emphasized pride. When he turned down a full scholarship to Harvard, he did it out of pride — to stick it to all the swells. In the Nixon White House, he served a man drunk on pride.

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Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review.

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