Charles Colson

There is nothing as sanctimonious as a reformed rake. Proof of that dictum is the regurgitation of convicted felon Charles Colson in the Saturday “religion” pages (“U.S. in Moral Plunge, Colson Says,” March 20), blaming the supposed decline of the U.S. (and by extension, one presumes, his own offenses) on society’s “stripping away our religious roots”--specifically the banning of religious mottoes and art on public buildings, the Ten Commandments from display in public schools and organized prayer from public forums.

Colson is 61 years old. Like me, he went through elementary school, high school and college in an America nearly suffocated by conformity to the symbols and compulsory public prayer of a quasi-state religion, even as his ideological allies (Sen. Joseph McCarthy et al.) defaced our money by substituting “In God We Trust” for the old national motto “E pluribus unum” and inserting “under God” into the Pledge of Allegiance in 1955. Like all organized religion, these efforts were designed to stifle questioning of authority and intellectual independence--free thought, if you will.

Perhaps if Colson had examined the absurdities he was parroting and had instead worked out his own moral code based on reason and logic, he might have have become, like me, a happy and law-abiding atheist, instead of being sentenced to federal prison for blindly following his unindicted co-conspirator Richard Nixon (who prayed on his knees with evangelist Billy Graham before becoming the only U.S. President in history to resign in disgrace).

JAMES E. BRODHEAD

Sherman Oaks