Posted on 08/22/2004 6:15:20 PM PDT by EternalVigilance
First impressions can be misleading.
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.
How does he define what a Christian is?
"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."
Cradle Catholic
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."
And now what does he think God is like?
"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."
It's a conundrum Keyes seems to have resolved with a vengeance.
The word became flesh
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.
In addition to his Biblical studies, Keyes is a philosophy buff.
"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.
A boundless sorrow
Keyes could be a preacher, a Biblical scholar, or professional apologist for Christ. But instead, he's chosen to enter the secular political realm.
Why choose a field that can so often obfuscate faith?
It's a question, apparently, that moves Keyes to tears.
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."
Christus victor?
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."
http://www.suntimes.com/output/falsani/cst-nws-keyes22.html
This one has always given me extra hope and encouragement. May it do the same for you.
In Christ,
k2
Psalm 139
For the director of music. Of David. A psalm.
1 O LORD , you have searched me
and you know me.
2 You know when I sit and when I rise;
you perceive my thoughts from afar.
3 You discern my going out and my lying down;
you are familiar with all my ways.
4 Before a word is on my tongue
you know it completely, O LORD .
5 You hem me in-behind and before;
you have laid your hand upon me.
6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me,
too lofty for me to attain.
7 Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?
8 If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
9 If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
if I settle on the far side of the sea,
10 even there your hand will guide me,
your right hand will hold me fast.
11 If I say, "Surely the darkness will hide me
and the light become night around me,"
12 even the darkness will not be dark to you;
the night will shine like the day,
for darkness is as light to you.
13 For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother's womb.
14 I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.
15 My frame was not hidden from you
when I was made in the secret place.
When I was woven together in the depths of the earth,
16 your eyes saw my unformed body.
All the days ordained for me
were written in your book
before one of them came to be.
17 How precious to me are your thoughts, O God!
How vast is the sum of them!
18 Were I to count them,
they would outnumber the grains of sand.
When I awake,
I am still with you.
19 If only you would slay the wicked, O God!
Away from me, you bloodthirsty men!
20 They speak of you with evil intent;
your adversaries misuse your name.
21 Do I not hate those who hate you, O LORD ,
and abhor those who rise up against you?
22 I have nothing but hatred for them;
I count them my enemies.
23 Search me, O God, and know my heart;
test me and know my anxious thoughts.
24 See if there is any offensive way in me,
and lead me in the way everlasting.
Check out this vanity by Jim Robinson if you want to know what he thinks about Alan Keyes and his candidacy:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1198026/posts
I came into the Republican party because of Reagan and his stand on the sanctity of human life.
He's been doing that to me for 2 weeks now.
I've come to the conclusion that he's a prime example of "there's none so blind as he who will not see".
You can't say I didn't give you a chance to take your foot out of your mouth.
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.
Your secular cynicism is only half-baked. What ever happened to "find a dog who'll eat a dog"?
There is nothing wrong with Alan Keyes's religiosity. If anything, it will keep him in the fight long after the rising darkness has hidden the sun and your enemies are everywhere. We need people like him, not people who spit on him.
That's my vote.
Concurring bump.
Someone who can make a sneaky-snarky "submarine" liberal journopolemicist like David Broder drop his mask and snarl like a dog just at the mention of his name can't be all bad. In fact, Keyes sounds like part of the answer to our problems.
[Victoria del Soul] Nope, he'll blame the GOP for not supporting him.
Have you read the comments some of those palsied Illinois RiNO's have made about Keyes and his supporters? Their support could not be more wan and half-hearted if they were all cardiac ICU patients.
"If Republicans get sucked into this false reckoning of the political landscape, we deserve what we get. The Bush family has never represented conservatism, and there is not much reason to think that it does so today."
Just how do you work that into an "attack" on President Bush by Alan Keyes?
The Bush family has always represented the business wing of the GOP, not the conservative wing. X41 opposed Reagan for the nomination in 1980, remember? And he did so as the inheritor of all the support that went to Gerald Ford when Ford successfully opposed Reagan for the nomination in 1976. Nelson Rockefeller, Ford, both Bushes, and Bob Dole have all represented the New York money-center wing of the party and the interests that operate through the financial centers and law firms in Manhattan (see Theodore White, The Making of the President 1964), whereas Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, Bob Taft, and Newt Gingrich all represented, or came from, the conservative wing.
That's just basic Republican geography. Keyes's reminder that the Bush family are not conservatives is in no way out of line.
I see, they don't like to argue, so they go running for the censor. Is that what the Keyes camp wants? No argument, just think like we do! No wonder he never wins.
I gave that info as a frame of reference from where I'm coming from.
If I continue to look at Reagan's greatness in the times he was given, I will never give Bush his due for the issues he must deal with today.
I admire both men for their accomplishments. I'm just disappointed when I hear or read when others are placed in Reagan's mold and is found lacking. And their eforts are counted unworthy.
"President Bush not pro life enough for you?
If that is your point, Baloney."
So, no that wasn't my point.
I assumed he still believed in his basic reasons for supporting FR, but you are right, I should have mentioned the date.
Well, I cannot speak *directly* to this issue, but I can certainly parallel it to another big item in the news. If you recall, there was a big hoopla about the Swiftees and the linking of Corsi to his FR postings that could be used to discredit him. Several posters here (primarily FRNers) had posted the Corsi's identity and his screen name. Opposition research found this quite easily. I would assume (since I haven't bothered to look)that googling Keyes would bring people to FR and some of these threads. So, yes, this could help - even to the point of publicizing and exploiting the "great divide" within the R party. I know you've been around enough to see that FR and some of our fellow posters do end up in the news, for better or worse.
On a side note, thank you for working for Keyes as well. I was not aware that you live in IL as well! You have to add our state flag to your profile (not that I would recognize it anyway).
I understand that there are those with misgivings. I don't need to agree with everything that Keyes says in order to do independently work for him (the best I can do in my limited time). In fact, I am a non-theist and get turned off by the talk of God. But, I've seen very few politicians with whom I agree on all of my issues. For the non-IL people on the thread, well, they just would need to experience the IL GOP to really understand what we are going through here. The die is cast, and I am supporting Keyes as the candidate. It's that simple. To spend my time arguing with those not living in IL, well - it's a complete waste of time. FWIW, I am working with unspun on a couple of things, so I can confirm that s/he is really doing things (for all of the non-believers out there!).
What are you talking about? FR is the only conservative board that is taking the Keyes candidacy seriously. I bet we have about 150 threads on it. Some boards have only a handfull. While other sites are (wisely) steering away from this iceberg, we've plotted a course directly for it.
For this race to have a chance to impact the composition of the Senate, Keyes would first need to be in a position to actually win. Something which by any measure appears exceedingly unlikely.
By your logic, then, you were a Bustamante supporter.
spoken like a "true" anti-republican.
By the logic of certain posters here, this would imply support for the Democrat candidate.
In all seriousness, what contest? Keyes is down by 41 points. For any of this to matter, Keyes would have to have some chance of winning. That's not looking very likely.
Oooh - you're just trying to stir the pot here!
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