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
I'm not sure I see your point. I don't want Barack Obama to reach national prominence either. I agree that President Bush is closer to Reagan than any president we've had since, and I think he may be more conservative in some ways. During the Reagan retrospectives, I was amazed at the similarities between Reagan and Bush II.
I'm not pro-abortion, and I think President Bush has supported the pro-life cause very well. IIRC, cutting payments for certain abortions overseas was one of his first acts as President.
So far as Keyes goes, it's the "differences in personality and style" that concern me. I was quite offended by some of Keyes' actions during and just after the last election, and I've come to the conclusion that, unless he changes his approach, he's unelectable. I am also afraid that in some ways (such as "I am not a Bush Republican!") Keyes does more harm than good to the conservative cause overall, if you agree that at present the Republican party is the only viable representative of conservatism.
Comment on what you know about, not the details specific to Illinois. Also, please learn about contextualizing words such as Keyes pre 9.11.2001, who verbalized much of the skepticism about George W. Bush which FReepers from coast to coast also had.
You recall no skepticism and criticism about W., in FR, especially before 9.11? O-k. I recall otherwise.
You might also add the perception of financial irregularity that has followed all or most of Keyes' previous campaigns (paying himself out of campaign funds, still owes money on his 2000 presidential run, etc...), his private life (that tax "misunderstanding" that was only cleared up a week before he declared in Illinois), and the idea that his principles aren't as bedrock as he proclaims, after he condemned Hillary for carpetbagging & now is doing it himself, and is supporting reparations.
Of course, those are only minor things....
That's not what you said. You said most FReepers agreed with the "I am not a Bush Republican!" article. That article wasn't skeptical; it was downright hateful and nasty, with a good portion of sour grapes thrown in.
I'm sure it's posted somewhere on this site, unless it got pulled because of flame wars, and I'm pretty sure if you find it you'll find pretty much the same people defending Keyes, and a lot of other people who are really upset with him.
Why do you continue to campaign against Alan Keyes with mistruth? Did you not see the definition of "carpetbagger?"
No, unless you copied it wrongly, here is what I said: "Written in 2001 and there are many FReepers who agreed then and now with his sentiments. Then, perhaps most."
I didn't happen to quite agree with Keyes' degree of criticism of Bush, then. However, I also believe that the US Senate (and the present Illinois) don't need more weaklings in the GOP.
Let me ask you once again, why are you so intent on campaigning against this strong and important conservative?
Please say it once, get it out of your system and stop chasing after people who appreciate his standing strong for actual conservatism instead of conservative of the paralyzed, moderated and mushed kind.
No, unless you copied it wrongly, here is what I said: "Written in 2001 and there are many FReepers who agreed then and now with his sentiments. Then, perhaps most."
I didn't happen to quite agree with Keyes' degree of criticism of Bush, then. However, I also believe that the US Senate (and the present Illinois) don't need more weaklings in the GOP.
Let me ask you once again, why are you so intent on campaigning against this strong and important conservative?
Please say it once, get it out of your system and stop chasing after people who appreciate his standing strong for actual conservatism instead of conservative of the paralyzed, moderated and mushed kind.
No they're not, they're leftist anti-Keyes talking points.
Oops. Looks like somehow I asked you twice again.
As opposed to what, being a cult of one, Central Scrutinizer?
Come to Illinois. I will show you the lemmings in the GOP. They are not those who invited and have welcomed Alan Keyes.
But please sum it up. Look into your souls, each of you. Then tell me, please. What bothers you (I mean you, personally) most, about Alan Keyes? What really bothers you inside, when he speaks?
sorry unspun... I have been asked of late to not criticize alan. jim rob supports alan.. it is his forum.
feel better now.
First you are telling posters who disagree with you what topics we can or cannot respond to on FR boards.
Now you are laying down the boundaries as to precisely what context we are allowed present our comments in.
All this to cover up the fact that you are unable to respond directly to our challenges. Nice try:)
Well maybe the question still helps.
Show me one of your anti-conservative-Keyes challenges posed to me that I did not answer.
I wasn't limiting you; I was just offering you a bit of wisdom.
See my #506. I have this sneaking suspicion that the IL Republican establishment would love to see Keyes go down in flames, effectively marginalizing the conservative wing of the party for the foreseeable future.
Here;
____________________________
unspun sez; Is that what you get from his essay? Oh, my.... Try reading it from end to end maybe a half dozen times.
Jorge sez;What essay?
I got it from this speech Keyes made in 2001.(And you'll only need to read it once.)
KEYES ASSAILS BUSH'S STEM CELL DECISION
Fort Worth Star Telegram 08/26/2001 Ben Tinsley
Keyes said Bush's decision was more damaging than anything that Bill Clinton, often called the villain of the right, could have done.
"The evil that you know, the evil that inspires you to fight again is not the worst evil," Keyes said. "The worst evil creeps behind your lines and dominates your leadership."
___________________________
… "He accused Bush of being evil," said Chuck Lutz, president of the Tarrant County Republican Assembly. "I don't think anyone in that room would say George W. Bush is trying to see how much evil he can get away with. "I have heard him go off the deep end before. I can't say I was surprised, but I did not expect it." ….
__________________________
I showed the proof in Keye's own words to back up my claim, and you suddenly had no answer, but decided instead that I had no right to participate in the Keyes debate if I was from another state. LOL!
What bothers me is that he is a loose cannon, says incredibly stupid things and makes Republicans look like a bunch of snake handling evangelical idiots. That and the fact that he loses every election he is in, and is unwittingly in it for comic effect. But since my Grandfther died in Chicago about 14 months ago, I may fly in to vote for him on election day.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.