Keyes: 'The victory is for God'

Two weeks ago, a wild-eyed Alan Keyes stood in front of news cameras in a hot, crowded Arlington Heights banquet hall sweating profusely, yelling and shaking his fist as he enthusiastically accepted the Republican nomination to run for U.S. Senate in Illinois.

"I will promise you a battle like this nation has never seen," Keyes shouted with the passion of a preacher talking about spiritual combat with the forces of evil, thrusting his fist heavenward for emphasis. "The battle is for us, but I have confidence because the victory IS FOR GOD!"

A few days after he delivered the fiery speech that was replayed time and again on television newscasts across the nation, a decidedly different Alan Keyes is seated behind the desk of a spartan office in what was until recently the Jack Ryan for Senate headquarters on North Clinton in Chicago.

On this particular afternoon, the 54-year-old Maryland conservative, political pundit and two-time presidential hopeful is about to spend more than an hour, one-on-one with a reporter, in an interview about his personal faith.

He's in tie and shirtsleeves, leaning back casually in his chair. Two small, gold charms -- a crucifix and twin Ten Commandment tablets -- that usually dangle from a long gold chain are tucked into his breast pocket, the chain pulled across his chest at an angle giving him just the faintest air of a bishop.

"The boss and the rules," he'll quip later as he pulls the charms out of his pocket and allows them to fall on top of his silk tie.

Whether his mood is irascible or reflective, Keyes, a lifelong Roman Catholic, wears his faith on his sleeve as well as around his neck.

When asked to describe himself spiritually, Keyes is reasoned, sincerely thoughtful and significantly more reserved than that man behind the lectern on TV.

"Well, in the fullest sense, I describe myself as a Christian," he says. "I believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God, came amongst men in order to redeem us from original sin and to offer us a way to his father, which he offered us in his words and examples and exposed to us the truth: that God loves us as individuals and knows our weaknesses because Christ has experienced them.

"And therefore, with really infinite understanding and mercy, is ready to welcome us into his home if we are willing to turn around and accept his grace," he says.

"One of the essential characteristics of Christianity is that it is about faith. Christ often says, 'Your faith has saved you,' to people. And that means that your willingness to acknowledge in truth the authority of God and the mercy of God in the person of Jesus Christ, is the route to salvation," he says, without hesitation.

"We are transformed by our knowledge of Christ, and that's why there is going to be a manifestation in us of that change, which shows itself in the different way we start to relate to people."

Born in a New York military hospital in 1950 while his father was serving in Korea, Keyes describes himself as an "Army brat." Along with his sister and three brothers, he was raised on military bases across the United States, and, for a time, in Italy.

His parents, Alison and Gerthina, both now deceased, were converts to Roman Catholicism.

Keyes says his first concept of what God is like is inextricably bound to Catholicism.

"My earliest idea that I remember was Jesus Christ, he was my idea of what God was like," he says. "When you grow up Catholic, I remember being encouraged to think of Jesus as your friend. Just a friend, like the friends you had on the playground, or in school. And I can remember that that was a part of my developing thought life when I was a child, having conversations with Jesus in my head, as if he were one of my playmates. . . . He was a child, just like me."

"He's grown up," Keyes, who is married with three children, says, busting out in a belly laugh. "He's grown up. And I hope, I've grown up a bit. But I think that depth of it hasn't changed. We go through 'times.' We advance, we retreat, we struggle, we wrestle."

Keyes insists his faith has remained fairly constant throughout his life, though there were times when he says he felt more distant from his faith than he does today.

"I think the Bible is right [when] it says that you raise up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it," Keyes says, paraphrasing a passage from the 22nd chapter of the Biblical book of Proverbs. "That obviously implies -- doesn't it? -- a kind of gap. There's something in youth that somehow implies that people do depart from it a little bit. But if you raise them in the way they should go, then the roots take over again. And one returns."

When he was a doctoral student in the late 1970s at Harvard working on his dissertation about constitutional theory, Keyes says, he struggled a bit spiritually.

"When you're a graduate student, you go through your ups and downs and sometimes you hit really great lows. Some people, as a result of that, give up and they never reach their degree," he recalls. "At a moment of crisis for me -- I'll never forget -- I was feeling just that low, sort of thinking, 'I've been working at it and I'm never going to finish and it's just hopeless.'

"I called my mom, and that conversation, in which she really did nothing but listen to me and remind me that I'd gotten through different things in my life through faith -- sparked an experience I still remember," he says, his voice breaking with emotion. "And it transformed my sense of what my faith meant to me."

He received his Ph.D. in government from Harvard in 1979. He also earned his undergraduate degree from Harvard in 1972.

Keyes describes a mild crisis of faith that had grown alongside his intellectual pursuits.

"In American academics, it's difficult to be a person of faith. There's a certain kind of patronizing, a sense of, 'Oh, you'll grow out of it,' " he says.

"So you begin to push your faith into the background, and maybe not really want to show it and so forth and so on. You start to doubt whether or not you are being intellectually honest if you are relying on premises of faith."

Keyes would never make himself out to be some sort of Biblical scholar, but when it comes to Scripture, he knows what he's talking about.

He reads Greek -- he travels with a laptop loaded with Bible software, including a copy of the Septuagint, the Greek version of Hebrew Scriptures -- and can wax eloquent at length about the etymology of certain words and how they correspond to theological principles.

"I try to read or think about some element of the Bible every day," he says, leaning back in his office chair, and propping his feet up on the desk.

When asked what portion of the Bible he most enjoys reading, he says, without hesitation, "Genesis."

"I often tell people that my greatest problem in the Bible is that in any serious way I've never been able to get past Genesis," he says, chuckling. "Now, I have read the whole Bible and I read other books, but what I mean is the book that I keep going back to over and over again is Genesis.

"For the longest time, I was really going back over and over again, thinking and writing about, the creation myths, because it seemed to me that there's an enormous depth of kind of philosophical implication," he says.

"People will think this is strange I suppose, but . . . there are books like Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and Hegel's Logic and things like that, and every once in a while I get hit by this mood and I have to wrestle with these books that are very abstract and that are kind of philosophy in the viewless realms where you are really dealing with concepts that have no corresponding material images or anything to go along with it," he says, excitedly. "You just have to go with pure concepts to think about things. And I think, in the sense of that kind of philosophical thinking, meditation and reasoning, Genesis is an enormously powerful experience."

This launches Keyes into a 20-minute discussion of what he describes as his latest "breakthrough" in examining a portion of Biblical text.

Specifically, the candidate says for four or five months he had been reading, re-reading and picking apart several dozen verses from the 4th, 5th and 6th chapters of Genesis, beginning with one of those "begat" passages.

So and so, son of so and so, begat so and so, father of so and so, who begat.. ..

These particular begat passages start with a descendant of Cain, the son of Adam and Eve who murders his brother Abel, and end with Noah -- the fellow with the ark.

With an almost childlike enthusiasm, Keyes recounts how he traced the lineage of Noah and the descendants of Cain, examined the ancient roots of certain words, and learned, according to his interpretation, that God's covenant with Noah after the flood included the institution of capital punishment for the first time.

"It's fascinating, don't you think?" Keyes asks, smiling broadly, when he's concluded an exegesis of the text that, at least in its methodology, would give any seminary professor or preacher a serious run for his money.

Keyes could be a preacher, a Biblical scholar, or professional apologist for Christ. But instead, he's chosen to enter the secular political realm.

His eyes turn red, he stops talking for several minutes, stares at the ceiling, drums his fingers on the desk, and apologizes for his loss of composure.

After several attempts to begin speaking, only to have his voice crack with emotion, Keyes tries again to explain what he's feeling.

"I'm sorry, I'm getting a grip," he says, eyes red with tears. "When I was young, I encountered a problem, I guess. A challenge. And I guess it was an encounter that disillusioned me, yes, in the literal sense. And that was my first encounter with the reality -- intellectually and emotionally . . ." he pauses again, his voice trailing off for a few moments. " . . . Of what the slave experience meant to my ancestors. And I think I've been working that out ever since.''

When pressed to explain just what this "encounter" was, Keyes reveals that it was, in fact, an intellectual incident.

When he was about 15, he read Lerone Bennett's book Before the Mayflower: A History of the Negro in America, 1619-1964. And it broke his heart, he says.

"It's sorrow," he says, explaining why 40 years later he's still so emotional about something he read as a teenager. "It's not a sorrow for yourself, it's not a sorrow for individuals, it's a sorrow for the reality of our kind of sad experience . . . of life without God."

And it's that sorrow and outrage that in part has led him into politics, Keyes says.

"It's a problem of justice and to understand it and resolve it somehow is not an intellectual exercise. You have to meet the challenge of it in your own time and life. And at some level, that's what politics remains at its heart, in America," he explains.

"It's impossible to be a Christian and really live out your relationship with God apart from life and action," he says. "And that action requires that you kind of be aware of and sensitive to how in fact the injustice that was involved in slavery is like one of those difficult plants where you cut off what appears on the surface but the root is still there. And it springs up again in another place, in what seems like another form, but it is the same evil. It's the same root."

So, what did he mean, exactly, back at that podium in Arlington Heights, when he exclaimed that "the victory is for God"?

Was he saying God is on his side -- the side of the righteous -- and not on that of his Democratic opponent, Barack Obama, a man who professes the same Christian faith?

"Well, professing is the operative word," Keyes says, in a moment of snarkiness conspicuously absent from the rest of the interview.

"I thought it was pretty clear. Maybe it wasn't," he says, reflecting on his acceptance speech a few days earlier. "What I meant by it was the victory is in God's hands for his will and decision. That's why I couldn't promise it to people. I might lose. I don't know. None of us knows.

"The notion that you can stand there and say, 'Rah! We're gonna win!' I know you're supposed to do that, but I find it very difficult to say stuff that I know, even if it's rhetorical, is not true," he says.

Keyes is puzzled by the idea that some people would be afraid of the notion of "God on our side."

"I rather want people to think God is on their side, because that means they know he's watching them, and that his rules still apply to what they do," he says, smiling. "I hope that's the result."

"I often tell people that my greatest problem in the Bible is that in any serious way I've never been able to get past Genesis. Now, I have read the whole Bible and I read other books, but what I mean is the book I keep going back to over and over again is Genesis."

Technically, no.

I don't agree with the triangulation strategies employed repeatedly on domestic issues, or with their tendency to support left-of-center Republicans over mainstream or right-of-center conservatives in key congressional and state races, or with their habit of ignoring conservative candidates financially after conservatives have won primaries.

Ronald Reagan is the man who brought me to the conserative movement, and the GOP, politically, so I will always be a child of Reagan or a 'Reagan Republican'.

"Obviously you don't read my posts. I spelled out in exact detail the reasons the attempted smear is wrong"

I do read your posts. I read this one at #331:

"He has offered substantial support to President Bush, both in 2000 and 2004. In fact, it is easy to make the case that the good Dr.'s endorsement and the efforts of his organization in '00 made the difference between victory and defeat."

I've also read this article:

I am not a Bush Republican!

And I read your post at #341:

"I'm not a Bush Republican, either. Big deal.

I'm not sure what you consider giving substantial support to President Bush, but writing an article declaring myself NOT A BUSH REPUBLICAN, is not what I consider support.

As I told you last night, in 2000 I voted for Alan in the primary in my state, and when he lost, I went to work for then Governor Bush to elect him. Alan proved what he was about following that primary season, and most of his followers continue to take the same line. It's wrong, and IT is divisive to the party.

When he took on this senate race, I was hoping for something better than what I've seen. But he started his campaign with the reparations disaster. Pity.

And yet, Arnold is doing a great job. If abortion is your only litmus test, then life is easy, no hard choices in your life! But, by you not voting for Arnold, you would end up with a worse person, go figure!

So, how does that statement square with your stated decision not to support Keyes? You seem to have a raging double standard going here.

Any conservative with an IQ over 50 knows that Keyes will be 10,000 times better than Obama on a whole range of issues.

Like I said, they are all for free speech, as long as it is their free speech. It must be so easy to live in a black/white world, where you can judge your opponents by placing them in one of two categories. Doubtless that these folks were cheering on Alan when he was ripping (rightly) Hillary for carpetbagging, but nowadays, its too important of a thing to critisize a vessel of God who does the same thing.

Dogmatic thought that is non analytical and monolitic is on display here. Keyes is gonna hurt the party, not win, and alienate prospective voters to the Republican side, but they won't believe logic, they are thinking with their hearts not their heads.

There are concerns being expressed in Illinios that the tax breaks for blacks "feaux pas," might depress some voter turnout in the midwest region and threatens the fiscal conservative support on a few critical representative seats that were in play for us Republicans.

Alan's supporters here, are apparently not "bush republicans" as we have seen confessed just above on this thread... so I guess Alan or his representatives here don't care that much.

Why Alan is running when it seems clear he does not fully support the President or agree with his own party that is composed largely of fiscal consevatives (via the race-based tax plan he proposed), is beyond me.

How attacking the core principles of the fiscal conservative base is helpful to actually winning? I am apparently not brilliant enough to figure out. I can only wait for it to unfold.. if it ever does.

Why his supporters here would post "I am NOT a bush republican" is beyond me too. At least they are not jumping up and down with 'glee' whilst proclaming it.

This overall election is about national security, the good job our President is doing, or whether he is not (in the view of the electorate)... and it is not really about tax exemptions of 70 years duration for 'blacks only."

But rest assured, I have been told to "hang it up" just for pointing it out or asking... Asking, you see, MAKES you an obama supporter. And being asking questions of those here who are admittedly NOT "a Bush republican," apparently does too. sigh.

whatever.

Nothing to apologize for. What he posted wasn't true.

I already challenged you to show me what I "lied" about and I'm still waiting for an answer.

SHOW ME.

The fact is you haven't done it because you CAN'T. PERIOD.

I back up everything I said with Keye's OWN words.
Yet you don't have the decency or grace to admit you wrongly accused me of lying. Not nice. .

First of all, realize that putting Keyes against Obama is a guarranteed loss, add in the fact that putting in a nut like Keyes is going to be a loss that hurts other republicans. If you want to go to the polls and hand out koolaid to voters do it, but putting a proven loser like Keyes in the race is like salting the earth. Illinois is a Democrat state, from time to time Republicans win, but not often, and after Keyes has his fiasco, there will be less of a chance for other Republicans to win.

Funny, you wouldn't vote for Arnold on principle, but you condemn other people who wouldn't vote for Keyes? H-Y-P-O-C-R-I-T!

So,if God's chosen candidate loses, what then?

More attempts to rewrite history.

Keyes and his organization backed Bush fully after Philly in 2000.

How do I know this? I was Alan's national political director, as most here know. What they don't know, and what I don't generally talk much about other than peripherally, in pure defense, is the fact that I worked directly with Karl Rove and Don Evans to rally the Keyes forces in the general election. We held the right flank of the party, and I get damned sick of being slandered by ignoramuses who weren't even there, and don't know what the hell they are talking about.

That's all I'm saying about it, other than to call liars liars here when they lie.

Good night.

The intolerance of the Keyes supporters is one of the main reasons he is a proven loser who cannot win an election. His followers have blinders on to the reality of the situation, they are like Charlie Brown, hoping against hope that Lucy won't pull the football away.

But, if we who care about the party voice a concern, we just get branded as a Obama supporter. Life is easy in cartoon land.

Yes,I know and can't argue with any of your points at all.

For them,it was okay to support Alan,when he was ripping President Bush the very first week of his presidency,but somehow,it is now NOT okay for anyone,ANYONE to find fault with such truly offensive statements made by Keyes,as the reparations garbage.They tie themselves into knots,attempting to legitimize/spin it. And if that weren't bad enough,they rum to Jim,in private,writing damned bloody lies about what others are posting.

Funny, you wouldn't vote for Arnold on principle, but you condemn other people who wouldn't vote for Keyes? H-Y-P-O-C-R-I-T!

Unlike you idiots, when Arnold won the election, over an eminently qualified conservative, by the way, I SHUT UP.

This is a completely different situation, and YOU don't have the sense to keep your mouth shut or to realize that your words and actions are doing nothing but helping a freakin' communist by the name of Obama.

The intolerance of the Keyes supporters is one of the main reasons he is a proven loser who cannot win an election.

You, or those others doing what you are doing, have been attacking Keyes without letup on FR since his name was first mentioned for this race.

The so-called 'intolerance' (doh) of those who are supporting the Republican nominee, is simply a product of the constant mudslinging that has been going on here.

Someone has the guts to give you a little of your own medicine back, and you whine to no end.

Go back and read the thread for yourself and quit whining.

You're the one who's been whining about anyone daring to criticize Keyes.

You make false accusations against posters who disagree with you and then when challenged to back them up you come up empty and as we see above like to hand reading assignments while you slither away.

Your total lack of regard for the truth is astounding. Somehow I doubt Keyes would be pleased to have you as an advocate.

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