Review: Lies That Go Unchallenged
By John H. Adams, The Layman Online, October 19, 2005
Charles Wendell “Chuck” Colson turned 74 this month. He was 43 when he was sent to federal prison for his part in the Watergate scandal. Considering that he was converted shortly before they locked his cell, that makes him something like 31 years old as a Christian, a prime age for an athletic defender of the faith.
For his brothers and sisters around the globe, it’s been a productive 31 years, starting with Born Again and never slowing down. The Colson books, many scholarly but all packing an evangelical blue-collar punch, would fill a long bookshelf.
Squeeze in another; this one, like most of what Colson does, has an attitude stamped into its title: Lies That Go Unchallenged (Tyndale House Publishing, Ó 2005 Prison Fellowship, 371 pp., $12.99).
Lies may sound too harsh, too condemning. After all, doesn’t postmodernism tell us that we all possess our own truth? And isn’t truth relative?
Let’s have none of that drivel, Colson would say. The claim of Christ comes with a sharp, two-edged truth. Don’t try to blunt it with the notion that discussing religion and politics raises unnecessary hackles. Engaging the architects of cultural disintegration is not about being nice. We can’t all get along with everyone when the fabric of American society is being ripped asunder – sometimes with the blessing of the mainline church.
Lies is not the work of a mellowing grandpa. Colson is a 21st-century Caleb, ready to go to battle and intending to come back a winner. The battle is the disappearance of Judeo-Christian ethics in politics, education, the courts, the family and the media – and the acquiescence of Christians to the corruption of society.
On page 103, in what could well serve as the synopsis of Lies, Colson says with Churchillian zeal,
- Often Christians say that the culture war is too much for us. We’re losing all the battles; we can’t win; maybe we should just give up and take care of our churches. No. No. No. Never despair. Never give up.
Or as Winston Churchill said to a class of British prep students: “NEVER, NEVER, NEVER give up.”
The hot topics in Lies are newspaper headlines: Judicial activism, life and family, religious freedom, government intrusion, blaming others for our woes. Under them are subheads: abortion, the Ten Commandments, religion in the marketplace, government seizure of private property for economic development, homosexual marriage and parenting, school vouchers, etc., etc., etc. They are not topics that bore.
Colson wants you to wrestle with them, gather with friends, use your Bible and your head, and mince no words. He wants you to become indignant, to fire off letters to politicians, to consider the consequences of cultural and political depravity. He wants you to stand up – and stick your neck out – as a Christian.
He wants you to be willing, for the sake of Christ, to become an enemy of political and cultural accommodation. He wants you to brace up for conflict fully aware of what C.S. Lewis said about Christians in a secular society; they will ultimately “be treated as the enemy.”
Colson says,
- Whatever the cost, we must proclaim God’s judgment on a state that denies protection to the vulnerable and then denies the citizens’ right to redress the injustice.
It won’t be soothing, Colson says, just as it wasn’t easy for evangelicals in Nazi Germany to stand apart from the “official” church. He holds up the Barmen Declaration, an ultimatum challenging the Christians who supported Adolf Hitler’s regime. Choose you this day, he says, faithfulness or accommodation.
Throughout Lies, Colson is a myth-buster: The First Amendment was not intended to repress religion but to foster it. Your assignment, too, he says, is to read the constitution, American history and the Federalist Papers and see why that’s so. Where’s the right to an abortion when it destroys the right to destroy the life of the unborn? What are the consequences of same-gender marriages and same-gender parents? Why should activist judges be allowed to reject the democratic process?
He gives you a sample of his own indignation. In 2002, the Senate Judiciary Committee rejected the nomination of Judge Charles Pickering to serve on the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. Pickering made the mistake of telling a young man whom he sentenced for murder: “It’s not too late for you to form a new beginning … You can become involved in Chuck Colson’s Prison Fellowship or some other such ministry and be a benefit to your fellow inmates and to others and to their families.”
That statement was cited during the committee hearings to demonstrate that Pickering was soft on separation of church and state. He was not confirmed.
Colson says,
- It says something about how distorted the confirmation process has become that an act of compassion can disqualify a man from sitting on the Federal Court of Appeals.
In fact, from a strictly secular view, inmates’ participation in Colson’s Prison Fellowship is a money-saver for the criminal justice system. Numerous studies have demonstrated that the participants are less likely to commit infractions while they are in prison – and far less likely to return to prison after they are released.
Although it ranges widely, Lies is an orderly text. It introduces a topic – many of them digests of Colson’s Breaking Point radio commentary – and then follows with two brief sections titled “Things to Consider” and “Group Study.” Each of those vignettes is covered in two to four pages.
Colson leaves the hard work to the reader. At the end of the book, he includes 12 pages of source material in small type.
Summed up, the contents are more than enough to raise the vigilance of Christians who are not content to let their communities and nation – as well as their churches – continue to slide down forbidden paths.