Digging for the Truth in Colson’s Column

In last week’s Regarding Media, an item concerning a column by onetime Nixon aide Charles Colson in the evangelical magazine Christianity Today attracted attention among media watchers and caused consternation in the Colson camp.

The column, “Post-Truth Society,” decried the ubiquity of lying in contemporary America. Colson, who founded a prison ministry after doing federal time for obstructing justice in the Watergate affair, cited as exemplars of this trend football Coach George O’Leary, Tawana Brawley, feminist Gloria Steinem, contrite ex-conservative David Brock, George Stephanopoulos and historians Joseph Ellis and Stephen Ambrose. The latter two were singled out for “dealing in deceit.”

These characterizations appeared in a column under Colson’s photo and byline. But according to current and former employees of his ministry, he did not write it. The author, they say, was Anne Morse, one of two full-time writers Colson employs.

In a phone conversation Monday, Colson, who was not available last week in time to comment on the allegations, acknowledged that he had not written his column but maintained that it reflected his thinking. “Fifteen years ago,” he said, “I realized that there just wasn’t enough time to run our prison ministry and to write everything I was being asked to do. So I hired some folks to work with me. It has never been a secret. It was published in Christianity Today. Since then, I’ve come to realize that applying a biblical world view to contemporary problems requires expertise in so many areas that we’ve also drawn in a large number of other distinguished scholars and theologians. We run things past them all the time. We like to make sure we are right.”

Colson said he believes the process of collaboration and discussion that goes into his columns, daily radio commentaries and the 38 books he has produced makes his work “stronger and gives it greater depth. I often recommend movies or books that I haven’t seen or read,” he said. “I don’t have nearly enough time to read, and I haven’t been to a movie in several years. But our listeners and readers want some guidance on these things, and when a staff member who has the expertise and who I trust brings a book or movie to my attention, I have no hesitation about recommending it.

“I do believe, though, that when we Christian leaders use the talent of others, we are ethically obligated to publicize that.” In fact, when Colson’s daily radio commentary is distributed by e-mail, a roster of his contributing staff is attached. His books acknowledge, as he says, “both general and specific contributors.” When Colson received the prestigious Templeton Prize, he acknowledged Michael Gerson, now a speech writer for President George W. Bush, as the writer of his memorial lecture.

In the case of the Christianity Today column, Colson says, the process of composition began “when I read a piece on the problem in the New York Times. I drafted a memo to the staff saying this was something we should tackle. Later, when the Stephen Ambrose plagiarism controversy came up, Anne drafted, and I edited, a radio commentary. I told her I wanted to turn it into a longer piece for Christianity Today and she did. It’s a pretty good example of the way we work.”

Why not share credit, as he did for many years with former staff writer Nancy R. Pearcey?

“Nancy was an excellent writer and thinker,” Colson said. “I would do an outline, and she would flesh it out. My relationship with Anne could possibly get to that point. If she got to the point where she was expressing her own ideas, as well as mine--as Nancy did--then I would share credit.”

Last week’s Regarding Media quoted Pearcey as saying that her name was not originally in ads and on the cover design for a bestselling book on which she collaborated with Colson, “How Now Shall We Live.” She was, however, given credit after what she described as several months of negotiations.

Wednesday, Christianity Today’s editor, David Neff, posted his account of these events on the magazine’s Web site (ChristianityToday.com). Neff reports that after he “talked to Chuck and to some of his staff,” he concluded that “after about 18 months of solo writing, Chuck returned to relying on his staff writers for help with his columns.” Neff reported that he is satisfied that “Chuck was thoroughly involved in writing ‘Post-Truth Society.’ Colson, he said, “orchestrated the process by which the column came to be. The staff added illustrations, consulted the reference people he pointed them to, and wrote smooth, easy-to-read copy for two ... radio scripts and one [Christianity Today] column. They made a great contribution. But Chuck didn’t just sign off on a staff written piece: the column has his fingerprints all over it.”

Colson told The Times that “Anne [Morse] was the one who finished the column for CT. I have no problem with telling anybody that. I complimented Anne on the job she did because I thought it was the best work she’d ever done.”

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Flanagan Leaves Legacy of Historical Fiction

The man many regarded as America’s finest writer of historical fiction died suddenly last week in Berkeley. Thomas Flanagan was 77, and though he was a critic and scholar of great distinction--professor of English at Columbia University, UC Berkeley and the State University of New York at Stony Brook--he will be best remembered for his epic fictional trilogy recounting the evolution of Irish national consciousness from the rising of 1798 through the end of the civil war in the 1920s.

Those novels--”The Year of the French” (1979), “The Tenants of Time” (1988) and “The End of the Hunt (1994)--made Flanagan deeply admired by serious writers in Ireland and the United States. “Those books,” the late novelist Brien Moore once said, “are what Tolstoy might have done--if he’d read James Joyce.”

Flanagan had recently completed the manuscript of a book on Irish-American writers. His last critical essay--a review of William Kennedy’s most recent Albany novel, “Roscoe”--will appear in the forthcoming issue of the New York Review of Books, which also contains an appreciation by Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney. “Since our first meeting in 1970,” Heaney writes, Flanagan “was like a father to me and like a typical Irish son I felt closest at our times of greatest silence and remoteness....”

Noting that Irish Times earlier this month identified Flanagan as a “novelist and scholar,” Heaney writes that when the paper “called him a scholar, they could have been using the word in the older Irish vernacular sense, meaning somebody not only learned but ringed around with a certain draoicht or aura of distinction, at once a man of the people and a solitary spirit, a little separate but much beloved.”

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Gary Wills’ Next Work: ‘Why I Am a Catholic’

Gary Wills is adjunct professor of history at Northwestern University and the author of numerous books, including a forthcoming biography of James Madison. “I have just finished going over the galleys of my next book, which is called ‘Why I Am a Catholic.’ It’s essentially an answer to the many criticisms I received after the publication of my book ‘Papal Sins,’ saying, ‘Well, if you disagree with the Pope, how can you be a Catholic?’ In this book, I show that Catholicism and the papacy are not the same thing and, historically, often have been at odds. The papacy actually is a rather modern event in the history of the Church. It took about 1,000 years to develop into something like its current form and, even afterward many councils were at odds with the pope and constituted a more authentic expression of the faith.

“I also talk about how my own attitude toward the church formed and what it means to me to be a Catholic, which is to believe in the creed, which contains nothing about the pope or, for that matter, the institutional church.”