Book Review: Born Again

Title: Born Again

Author: Charles W. Colson

Date: 1976

Publisher: Chosen Books

ISBN: 0-912376-13-9

Length: 346 pages

Illustrations: black-and-white photos

Quote: "As I wrote, it became clear to me that Watergate could work a healthy cleansing in the nation if it is understood for what it truly is. Were Mr. Nixon and his men more evil than any of their predecessors?"

That, readers have to decide for themselves. This book answers other questions readers might have asked, such as "Does Colson admit any wrongdoing and, if so, what?" and "Does Colson have the thickest lower lip you've ever seen on a White man?"

There are, unfortunately, questions Colson was not willing to answer, such as: "If Truman exposed the world to radiation sickness, Likable Ike may have been part of murder conspiracies, Kennedy really got us into Vietnam, Johnson kept us there and also recklessly endangered noncombatants by driving his own car, Ford was never even elected, and so on for as many former Presidents as we care to remember, is it even remotely possible that Nixon didn't do anything worse than Watergate?"

I never have been able to like Charles Colson. He stuck to the plans and pledges he outlined for himself at the end of this book; one must respect him for that. It's the generation gap thing. Mr. Nixon and his men didn't like my generation, and it was mutual. Younger or older readers don't have to share this feeling.

Of all the books Colson wrote in his life, Born Again is the one that's most about Colson. So I can't say I liked it. I find his discussion of his role in Watergate weirdly reminiscent of Nixon's famous "Checkers speech." I feel little sympathy for high-profile politicians who get tired of being high-profile and then bash "Washington" in ways that make it clear that they're talking about their jobs, and know nothing about the city itself. Reading the passage about Colson's fear of imprisonment, I find myself trying to remember whose column--Cecil Adams?--tried to quantify the precise degree to which men overestimate their homosexual appeal.

Maybe this lack of sympathy qualifies me to say that Born Again has historical and inspirational value. Literary value? It has no Poetic Sensibility, but some people prefer a straightforward narrative of facts in order. All memoirs have to skip quickly over some events; whatever you might suspect Born Again of leaving out, it does present the events discussed in a straightforward chronological order.

Perhaps the greatest value of this book is its realistic discussion of what a spiritual experience is like. The experience is real, and for adults it's transformative, but not in the obvious way experiences like physical diseases are real. It's more like "falling in love." People who've not had a similar experience (yet) become skeptical, bored, or nervous when we even talk about it. The only way to prove that anything happened is to act differently over a long period of time...which Colson has done.

What transforms a craven, lying, backstabbing, self-aggrandizing homophobe into an authentic minister? Colson didn't suddenly develop High Sensory Perceptivity; he didn't take "sensitivity training," and in Born Again the words in which he talks about women and the working class make it very obvious that he doesn't believe any of these people could have enough in common with an overprivileged White man to be considered friends. He remained a buttoned-up, low-energy, humor-challenged man who managed to seem "old" so long before acquiring his first white hair that I always used to be surprised to read that he was still alive. He changes, over the course of the events narrated in Born Again, from being a stereotypical "suit" whose primary concern is to protect himself by making lots of money and keeping others unempowered, to being a stereotypical "suit" who actually cares about other people, who admits that he needs brotherly love from other Christian men, and who thinks about the plight of the least empowered people. His idea of a decent lifestyle is still based on what is, by global standards, obscene wealth, but he does come to see the advantages of maintaining that lifestyle by helping and bonding with others rather than cutting them down.

Who needs to read Born Again? Well, I did. People my age who suspected that "getting religion" was just another way for another Nixon crony to dodge being a National Scapegoat, but have seen Colson stay with his ministry and decided he must have been real after all, may need to read his now obscure first book. It won't make us like him, personally, but it will make us appreciate the awesomeness of the Great Spirit.

For that reason, Born Again sold even better than the usual celebrity memoir. The picture at the top of this page shows the expanded, updated edition Colson was asked to publish, while living, after sales of his book had passed the two-million mark. That's a collector book; if you buy it online from this web site, this web site will regretfully have to demand $10 per book plus $5 per package plus $1 per online payment. What happened to the original edition? Wouldn't old, cheap, worn copies...actually, according to Amazon, we'd have to start with $15 per copy of the first edition! Is this fair? Is this right? Is Colson even in a position to use the $1.50 or $2 he'd get if these were Fair Trade Books? Methinks Amazon has quietly bought up all the cheap copies in order to promote its new line of "Audible" (brand) audiobooks. Copies of Born Again that you can actually read are overpriced; copies you can listen to online are free! Meh...I just fed a manuscript into the Audible promo-monster myself, and who am I to complain if that manuscript gets published on a web site along with books that sold two million copies of the first edition, woo-hoo. But if you can find a better deal on Born Again at some other book site that this site is not about to mention, feel free to take it and buy some other book from this web site. There is no way a book that sold that well, that recently, is all that hard to find.