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Courtesy of The Illinois Leader
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
It's not my fault I came late to the thread! :o)
All it takes to find out is a click, CR.
Written in 2001 and there are many FReepers who agreed then and now with his sentiments. Then, perhaps most.
Keep calling, np.
Have a nice day.
**Neither I nor my wife will vote for either candidate for the US senate this election.**
Please rethink your position -- you are basically giving two votes to the leftist, Obama, if you do not cast your two votes for Keyes.
(Yes, I live in Oregon, but things here are changing slowly -- due to the fact that many people cast their ONE conservative vote!!!!!)
As a libertarian, I have grappled with this issue for a long time. In 2000, against the grain, I voted for Bush for a couple of important reasons. Rather than say that you are 'giving votes' to the other person, I think of it as 'failing to cancel a vote for the other person'. Makes voting for someone that you otherwise would not vote for a bit more palatable.
That statement is utterly absurd. And it's absurd because you people (no offense meant by that phrase) from god knows where, but NOT from IL, know nada, zip, zilch, zero - BUPKISS about the IL Republican Party - period!
FYI, The IL party is in shambles (ever hear of ex-gov George Ryan?) and near complete ruin. Secondly it's 'run' by RINO's and thirdly it's controlled by "The Combine".
Now I wouldn't expect people from say.. Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi or Kalifornia to be 'up' on the IL party hierarchy and their past treachery with the Daley Machine, or of the notorious and nefarious "Combine" But I'll put it this way; the crooks in New Jersey politics are choir boys in comparison.
As such, you don't 'like' Keyes - hey that's okey-dokey, but kindly refrain from pretending to know what Alan Keyes would 'do' to the "IL Republicans". As right now, Alan Keyes is the ONLY one who can save the IL Republican party from permanent destruction. And from IL being controlled forever by the 'cronies, crooks, bag-men & bribers' (and those are the republicans), the Daley Machine and the communists of the democRAT party..
Oh and when Alan (or someone equally evil in your eyes) runs for the Senate from YOUR state feel free to vent your hate and objections, otherwise -- kindly (and I mean that), ahhh ... stick a sock in it. We here in IL will deal with Alan AND God willing, get him elected.
No personal offense is meant and have a nice day :-)
FYI, The IL State Government was controlled for over TWENTY YEARS by ... REPUBLICANS. And on more that ONE occasion. It's the dems who occasionally have won the Governorship. That is until they get indicted and sent to prison.
And the State House has been historically controlled by ... Republicans.
Your knowledge of IL is ZERO! Do some reading before you post idiotic statements. Or stick to posting about Arizona 'issues'.
And if you're offended, this time -- tough noogies.
So someone from another state can come to Illinois to run for Senate, and someone else from another state shouldn't comment on it?
No apology neccesary. You posted a link, where the date could be viewed. You didn't do anything at all misleading.
It wasn't your post I was commenting on; it was the subsequent one, where the text appeared without the date.
"I will never give Bush his due"
Of course they are... following their OWN logic.
these folks actually hate the republican party and repeatedly push the idea that it is NOT prolife, or profamily enough... and they seem to want to either take it over, or take us down.
they never repent the evil things they, or their leades have said about our president... and they have the nerve to do it in an election year.
who does that make them for really?
what are they really up to?
Alan Keyes is the ONLY one who can save the IL Republican party from permanent destruction
You might actually, instead of going for the snappy rejoinder, read his entire post and reply to his point.
[swheats] It shouldn't be amazing that many who are black will not walk lockstep just for the sake of the party. We did that under the democrats. Keyes learned under the best in working for Reagan. But he is his own man with his own ideas and should be given an opportunity to speak concerning the issues. And not be judged by the hand of other writers who have an agenda or two.
He also added a line about a "gift horse".
Could it be you simply didn't take his point, because you didn't like it?
RiNO's like to woof about how they're all about "big tents" -- and never moreso than when they're busily kicking conservatives out of one -- and how they want to "reach out".
Unless I misunderstood him, swheats was telling you, look, here is your crossover candidate who can really reach into the black community and talk about things that matter to them about why their kids need stable homes and good schools. Alan Keyes went to a good school -- Harvard -- and his bearing and presence annihilate every ancient stereotype about the educability of black men, and the appropriateness of a liberal education to people born to labor. He is a one-man trade show of what a real education can do for a person, not the kind the NEA specializes in.
Alan Keyes is the candidate who can, forcefully and with convincing power, penetrate the old hagiology of black citizens as a client class dependent on the Democratic Party. This is your outreach candidate, your really big tent candidate. Are you going to throw him away because he's "too conservative" for you? He might not be "too conservative" for black voters with kids on the south side of Chicago. Not if he gets up and starts talking about education and what kids really need, and why it isn't the kind of formulaic, New-Deal-warmed-over tripe that Barack Obama will be offering.
Don't let yourself be chased away by the distastefulness of some of those attacking you and Keyes. At least one is a longtime cheerleader for homosexuality and probable troll. Many others want conservatism to be the more conservative wing of the Godless moral anarchy party. Sorry to have been away during this firefight.
You aren't reading his posts for comprehension, you're just swatting them. Picking one phrase out of a whole paragraph and using it as a peg for a putdown.
You ain't impressing me over here. The man is trying to make a serious point, and you won't even talk to him. And what is all this godfatherly "kiss the ring" stuff, anyway? This isn't Skull and Bones. This is Free Republic, not Kennebunkport. Manor Bush's writ doesn't run here, and nobody grovels before those people.
Alan Keyes is the candidate who can, forcefully and with convincing power, penetrate the old hagiology of black citizens as a client class dependent on the Democratic Party
The signature sneer of RiNO's who think they don't have to discuss issues.
You guys are going out, and this is the reason why.
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