As a D.C. Beltway power player, the late Charles W. Colson worked with a "Thank God it's Monday" attitude that meant his colleagues always knew they could contact him about hot topics and decisions.

But there was one exception -- visits by his autistic grandson Max.

"If Chuck was with Max, his phone was turned off," said Dave Carlson of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. "Max could stop him in his tracks."

This bond was rooted in a conviction that shaped the Nixon White House strategist's work after his 1973 born-again Christian conversion and guilty plea for Watergate crimes that put him in federal prison, said Carlson, who spent two decades as a Colson aide and editor. This same conviction led Colson to create the global Prison Fellowship ministry in 1976.

"It didn't matter if you were in prison or what kind of crimes put you there. It didn't matter if you were missing a chromosome or were autistic," he said. Colson believed "we are all humans made in the image of God -- Imago Dei. He was passionate about that until the end."

The 80-year-old Colson died on April 21, 2012, felled by a brain hemorrhage moments after a speech about rising threats to religious liberty. His colleagues marked the 10-year anniversary by rebroadcasting that speech during a BreakPoint radio commentary.

"What we're witnessing in our culture … is but the tip of the iceberg. It's the latest visible manifestation of a growing hostility towards Christianity mainly because -- this has always been the case -- government officials feel threatened by the power of the church because we all worship a king higher than the kings of this earth," said Colson.

Cultural issues are bigger than mere politics, he stressed.

"Elections are important. Whoever serves in office, it makes a difference what kind of person that is and what that person believes," he said. "But elections can't solve the problem we've got. The problem we've got is that our culture has been decaying from the inside for 30 or 40 years, and politics is nothing but an expression of culture. So how do you fix the culture?"