Archive for the 'prison ministry' tag

On the occasion of Chuck Colson’s death, I’d like to take one final opportunity to point out the online discussion I had with him before he died. I was too young for Watergate.  In fact, Richard Nixon resigned one month to the day before I was born.  Or as I like to think, Nixon saw me coming and said to himself, “Well, the jig is up.” That being the case, the first time I became aware of Chuck Colson was when I used to listen to Christian radio and run into his five minute “Breakpoint” series.  Colson was one of those folks who, like Jerry Falwell, liked to perform rants about how everything going wrong in the country is the fault of people who aren’t religious enough. I’ve gone over the details about his prison ministry a few times, but it’s worth bringing up again because of its remarkable dishonesty, and a prime example of how you can fake scientific conclusions by “creaming the data.”  Colson considered his ministry the crowning achievement of his life, and so did his friends.  You can tell because it’s one of the first things that everybody brings up when they eulogize him. “Observers suggest Colson will likely be best remembered for his prison ministry…” — Christianity Today “And he was consumed — utterly consumed — by his calling to serve prisoners, ex-prisoners and their families.” — Michael Gerson “Except that there was also something that set the post-conversion Colson apart from the average G.O.P. partisan, and that was his zeal for prison ministry and penal reform, embodied by Prison Fellowship, the group that he founded after his own stint in behind bars.” — Ross Douthat This is remarkable when you consider the fact that the main study that Colson has always proudly referred to, actually showed  that the ministry did not work. What Colson claimed was that they studied the recidivism rates of...
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