Born Again

What Born Again is

Born Again is a first-person memoir written by Charles W. Colson and first published in 1976. It runs roughly 350 pages and covers the arc from Colson’s years as special counsel inside Richard Nixon’s White House, through the unraveling of the Watergate scandal, to a late-1973 conversation with a Christian friend that set him reading C. S. Lewis and, soon after, praying alone in a parked car. The middle of the book follows the legal reckoning — Colson’s decision to plead guilty to obstruction of justice in the Daniel Ellsberg case — and the final third takes the reader inside Maxwell federal prison camp in Alabama, where the title’s promise of new life is tested against the daily reality of incarceration.

It is published by Chosen Books, the imprint historically associated with Baker Publishing Group, and has stayed in print across multiple editions since its release. The book is the foundation stone of what became Prison Fellowship, the ministry to prisoners and their families that Colson launched in 1976 after his release and led until his death in 2012. Born Again was itself adapted into a 1978 film, and its title became a cultural touchstone for an entire wave of public conversions in the mid-1970s.

Why readers across every tradition keep returning to Born Again

The single biggest practical difference between Born Again and most conversion memoirs is the height of the fall. Colson was not a struggling everyman who found faith in a hard season. He was one of the most powerful unelected men in America — the aide a sitting President trusted to handle what no one else would touch — and the book lets you watch that man lose everything: the access, the reputation, the self-image of the tough operator who never broke. The conversion lands because the pride being broken is so vividly real. You believe the tears in the driveway because you have spent a hundred pages with the man who would have been mortified by them.

That arc — from the White House to the parked car to the prison bunk — is the reason readers across every Christian tradition return to this book. Colson writes in a register that evangelicals, Catholics, Latter-day Saints, Orthodox, and mainline Protestants have all received as their own, because the turning point is rendered through experience rather than doctrine. It is the thoughtful person’s memoir of starting over: a story not about a man getting religion but about a man being remade against his own resistance, and then spending the rest of his life on the people the culture had written off.

Inside the Nixon White House: the making of a “hatchet man”

Roughly the first third of the book covers Colson’s years as special counsel to President Nixon, and it functions as the setup the whole memoir depends on. Colson does not soften the portrait. He recounts the long hours, the bare-knuckle political instincts, the reputation he cultivated as the man willing to do whatever the President needed — the operative of whom it was said, only half in jest, that he would walk over his own grandmother to reelect Nixon. He writes about the access and the adrenaline of proximity to power, and about the quiet emptiness underneath it that he could not name until much later. The Watergate scandal builds in the background of these chapters as colleagues are subpoenaed, stories break, and the administration begins to come apart.

Colson recounts this recent political history factually rather than as a defense brief. He was at the center of events that reshaped American public life, and he neither minimizes his role nor uses the page to settle accounts with the prosecutors, reporters, and former colleagues who populate the story. The result is a rare thing — an insider’s account of Watergate that is interested less in who was right than in what the whole episode did to the man telling it. For readers who lived through 1973 and 1974, these chapters are a firsthand vantage point; for younger readers, they are a vivid, if dense, tour of how a scandal swallows the people inside it.

The conversion: a friend, a parked car, and a borrowed C. S. Lewis

The hinge of the book is a conversation in the late summer of 1973. Colson visits Tom Phillips, a business executive and friend who has recently become a Christian, and finds him changed in a way Colson cannot account for. Over the evening Phillips reads aloud from C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity — the chapter on pride, “The Great Sin,” which describes the very vice Colson had spent his career perfecting — and the words land with uncomfortable force. Colson takes a copy with him. Sitting alone in his car in the driveway before driving home, he finds himself unable to leave, overcome by something he had no category for, and he weeps. It is the scene the book is named for, and Colson narrates it without melodrama, which is exactly what makes it land.

What follows over the next chapters is not a tidy before-and-after. Colson, a lawyer by training and a skeptic by temperament, works through his doubts deliberately, reads more Lewis, prays haltingly, and slowly comes to a settled faith even as his legal situation worsens. The detail that the moral law in Lewis’s argument was what first pierced him gives the conversion an intellectual spine that distinguishes Born Again from purely emotional testimonies. For the many readers who have themselves been handed Mere Christianity, this is one of the most cited real-world examples of that small book doing what it was written to do.

The guilty plea and prison: where new life met a federal fence

The final third of Born Again is its proving ground. As the legal net tightens, Colson — now a professed Christian — makes a decision that surprised even his own attorneys: rather than fight the charges that were likely beatable, he pleads guilty to obstruction of justice in connection with the Daniel Ellsberg case, telling the court he could not in conscience contest a charge he believed reflected what he had done. He is sentenced to prison and serves several months at Maxwell federal prison camp in Alabama. The chapters inside are unsentimental about what incarceration is — the boredom, the indignities, the separation from family, the men around him with no advocates and no prospects.

It is inside the fence that the memoir turns from a story about one man’s soul to a story about a calling. Colson begins meeting with other inmates, praying with them, and turning over a conviction that would define the rest of his life: that the men the country had locked away were exactly the people the gospel was for, and that someone had to go back in after them. Out of that prison-yard conviction came Prison Fellowship, founded in 1976, which Colson built into a worldwide ministry to prisoners and their families. Born Again ends not with vindication but with vocation — the rare conversion memoir whose last act is the beginning of the author’s real work.

Pricing

Where Born Again falls behind

Dated political detail. Born Again was written for readers who were living through Watergate, and a great deal of its middle assumes you already know the players — the senators, the hearings, the machinery of a 1970s Washington scandal. Most of it is still followable, but a first-time reader in 2026 will hit stretches of names and procedure that slow the pace and may want a short Watergate primer alongside.

Written too close to the events for hindsight. Colson finished the book within roughly two years of the story it tells. That immediacy is its great strength — you feel the rawness of someone still processing — but it also means there is little of the perspective, qualification, or self-correction a memoir written decades later might offer. The reader gets the experience as Colson understood it then, not as he might have weighed it from a distance.

A specific story, not a general theology. This is one man’s account of one particular redemption — a powerful political operator brought low and remade. It is not a systematic treatment of conversion, repentance, or grace. Readers wanting the doctrine underneath the experience should pair it with something like C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity (the very book that moved Colson) or J. I. Packer’s Knowing God.

Light on the other side of the story. Because the memoir stays tightly on Colson’s inner experience, the people around him — adversaries, former colleagues, the wider cast of Watergate — appear mostly as they figured in his own reckoning. Readers who want a fuller, multi-sided account of the scandal itself will need a dedicated history; this book is the view from one chair.

Born Again vs. The Cross and the Switchblade vs. God’s Smuggler

These three Chosen Books titles form a recognizable family of twentieth-century first-person Christian narratives, and each does something different. Born Again (Colson, 1976) is the conversion-from-power story — a man at the summit of political influence brought down by scandal and remade, told with the pace of a thriller because that is how the author lived it. The Cross and the Switchblade (David Wilkerson, 1963) is the conversion-of-the-streets story — a country preacher who moves into the gang world of 1950s New York and watches hardened young men change. God’s Smuggler (Brother Andrew, 1967) is the call-to-the-impossible story — a Dutch missionary running Bibles past Iron Curtain border guards on nothing but nerve and prayer.

Different strengths. Born Again is the best on pride and public failure — the rare book that lets you watch a self-made hard man come apart and be put back together. The Cross and the Switchblade is the best on faith reaching the people a city has given up on. God’s Smuggler is the best on trusting God at the edge of what seems possible. All three were shaped, in part, by the same writing hands — John and Elizabeth Sherrill collaborated on Switchblade and Smuggler — and all three carry the readability that house was known for. Most readers who love one eventually read the others.

All three are read widely across Catholic, Protestant, Latter-day Saint, and other Christian traditions, because each tells its story through lived experience rather than tradition-specific argument. If you are starting from the question “can a hard, successful person really change?”, Born Again is the one to begin with. If your question is about reaching people on the margins, start with one of the other two.

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