The devil made them do it

Charles Foley

Los Angeles What have Charles Colson, Timothy Leary, the Manson family, Jerry Rubin and Jimmy Carter in common ? Only that they have been, as the title of Mr Colson's book puts it, 'Born Again'. They have undergone, in this form or that, a conversion which has changed their lives; and in this they are very far from being alone in today's America.

Something odd is happening around the country : the spiritual crises through which so many celebrated ranters, ravers and radicals have passed seem to be symptomatic of a deeper trauma in the nation's collective soul. By the hundreds of thousands, young and old are finding new beliefs and new cults, and they all want to tell you about it.

It is very tiresome. My postman arrives on the doorstep at II am on a Sunday morning demanding that I Come to Christ. Japanese Buddhists, brilliantly disguised as Californ

ian teenagers, waylay me in the street and invite me, in no uncertain terms, to a prayer meeting. It has become impossible to visit the supermarket without being harangued, often very rudely, by frantic young evangelists from the Revd Sun Moon's Unification Church. Should I be sent to prison for striking down one of these pests, I would find myself at the mercy of whole tribes of missionaries, in T-shirts emblazoned 'GET ZAPPED BY GOD", pushing their holy books at me through the bars.

Nor can I call my soul my own at home. I turn on the telly, and there is presidential candidate Jimmy (never James) Carter, a born-again Christian explaining that he has only loved one woman in his life. If not Jimmy, Jerry, who has apparently not loved any women at all—presidential candidate Brown of California trained to be a Jesuit priest, and although he was released from his vow of celibacy on turning to politics, remains unmarried and blatantly uninterested. (No, he is not Gay—just works a lot.) How did it start ? What does it all mean? Many believe that revelations about the corruption of the Nixon years, with all the disillusionment produced by Watergate, have much to do with the new wave of spiritual revival. Their faith in 'the system' in ruins, people are seeking comfort in cults. One must, it seems, believe in something.

In 'Mr Colson's case, of course, the former President was directly responsible. 'I went to prison for doing what Mr Nixon told me, but I forgive him,' writes the former White House counsel. 'If it took Watergate to bring me to God, it was worth it.'

Born Again, written during his six months in prison for 'obstructing justice' in the Ellsberg break-in affair, tells of his pilgrim's progress down the joyless, hubris-filled corridors of power in Washington DC, towards the gates of Maxwell Prison. Nonbelievers may find his encounters there with faith healing, the Holy Spirit, and Satan almost as distasteful as his experiences as a presidential Mr Fixit. However, the book has sold more than a quarter-million copies in the United States and may become a film. Colson, his editor tells us, now devotes himself to 'a full-scale prison ministry'.

It was in prison, too, that Eldridge Cleaver 'accepted Christ' last January, at the hands of a former Black Panther who is now a Baptist minister. And again Richard Nixon can be held at least partially responsible. The manner in which Nixon was toppled and subsequent changes in the American scene convinced the ex-Panther chieftain that he could end his seven-year exile and return I() the States without being lynched.

Currently awaiting trial in a San Francisco jail on a variety of charges related to his oilt he-pigs revolutionary days, Cleaver says he does not wish to talk about his conversion, lest his judges feel he is using it as a lever to win favours.

While in his comfortable, high-rise 'metropolitan correction centre'—America's plushest prison, known locally as 'the Holiday Inn'—Cleaver was able to make peace with an old enemy, fellow-inmate Timothy Leary, who was serving sentences for drug-smuggling and escape from jail. The former guru of the stoned generation and the author of Soul on lee communed daily and at length. Mutual forgiveness was extended for the unpleasantness which occurred during their joint, but brief, sojourn in Algeria. (Cleaver put Leary under 'revolutionary arrest' for taking too much LSD: Leary fled.) And the two men agreed that, for all Its faults, America is indeed, as the anthem has it, The Beautiful. Last April, Leary was paroled and freed. Now he has popped up as a writer for arch conservative William F. Buckley's National Review, blasting away at the media, radical lawyers, Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger and much. much more. In a letter to Buckley, he ex: plained that 'Cleaver and I have both lived In exile under Left dictatorships; both lived underground with American radicals. On the basis of these real experiences [Leary is telling his old radical friends they don't know what they're talking about], we agree that the Soviet system is the greatest threat to freedom, that the American system offers the greatest individual freedom, politically, culturally, and intellectually.' Leary, by the by, practises Hinduism : he has accepted Krishna.

Even California's favourite Satanists have stopped giggling and started singing. Three of Charles Manson's leading lieutenants, Susan Atkins, Tex Watson and Bruce Davis, all serving life sentences in California prisons, recently announced that they had taken Christ as their personal saviour'. Miss Atkins, who once described the Sharon Tate murder with such orgiastic relish CI just kept stabbing her till she stopped screaming'), is now the pride and joy.of Frontera Institute for Women. The staff, who are inclined to scepticism towards such instant conversion, agree that she is indeed a changed woman.

'I feel,' says Atkins, who is now twentyseven, 'just like a brand new baby. Tears of Joy sprang from my eyes the night I received Christ. I lay on my bed and felt, for the first time in my life, clean. I have never known such joy.' Even Manson himself is said to be Weakening. He has long talks with a prison missionary, reads the Bible, but cannot be Persuaded that the wicked do not need to be sacrificed before the deity is appeased. 'He's Still kind of spooky,' the minister confesses.

And the list goes on. Jerry Rubin, the Yippie leader in war paint and gunbelt who told the cheering young to burn down their colleges and kill their parents, has written a book (Growing (Up) at 37) explaining how he got that way. Fresh-faced, clean-shaven, he on the TV talk shows constantly, telling how yoga, transcendental meditation, psychic therapy and heaven knows what else transformed his life. Rennie Davis, of Chicago Eight fame, has become a chief disciple of Guru Maharaj-ji, the tubby teenage saint of Malibu.

At least three million Americans are members of this or that odd cult—the Revd Sun M. Moon, an avatar from South Korea, fills the Yankee Stadium, and his pockets; the Divine Light Mission reported an income of S3 million (tax-free) last year; somewhere in the desert waits a 'UFO cult', whose members have given away their all in expectation of the imminent arrival of a Saviour in a Spaceship.

Many more millions—the current estimate of born-again Christians in the United States runs as high as 45 per cent of the Population—are seeking the Godhead (or Perhaps just one more authoritarian image) in traditional fashion. Small wonder that the

candidates in this presidential election year Peak of 'wrapping up the God vote', that Jokes abound about the Revd Jimmy Carter and his can-they-be-an-accident initials, that ltitOnald Reagan concludes every speech with ;1is belief that America has been placed bewe en the Oceans and given over to free enterprise by a divine plan.