Mr. Keyes himself was not lacking in confidence. A Ph.D. from Harvard, a protégé of Jeane Kirkpatrick, and U.S. ambassador to the UN Economic and Social Council under Ronald Reagan, he had burst into the public eye first as a two-time candidate for a U.S. Senate seat from Maryland and then as a two-time candidate for the GOP presidential nomination. He had been clobbered in all four races, but those losses had done nothing to diminish Mr. Keyes’s reputation in the eyes of his supporters; for them, electoral failure seemed only to confirm his uncompromising devotion to conservative principles.
There was no doubt that the man could talk. At the drop of a hat Mr. Keyes could deliver a grammatically flawless disquisition on virtually any topic. On the stump, he could wind himself up into a fiery intensity, his body rocking, his brow running with sweat, his fingers jabbing the air, his high-pitched voice trembling with emotion as he called the faithful to do battle against the forces of evil.
Unfortunately for him, neither his intellect nor his eloquence could overcome certain defects as a candidate. Unlike most politicians, for example, Mr. Keyes made no effort to conceal what he clearly considered to be his moral and intellectual superiority. With his erect bearing, almost theatrically formal manner, and a hooded gaze that made him appear perpetually bored, he came off as a cross between a Pentecostal preacher and William F. Buckley.
Moreover, that self-assuredness disabled in him the instincts for self-censorship that allow most people to navigate the world without getting into constant fistfights. Mr. Keyes said whatever popped into his mind, and with dogged logic would follow over a cliff just about any idea that came to him. Already disadvantaged by a late start, a lack of funds, and his status as a carpetbagger, he proceeded during the course of a mere three months to offend just about everybody. He labeled all homosexuals — including Dick Cheney’s daughter—“selfish hedonists,” and insisted that adoption by gay couples inevitably resulted in incest. He called the Illinois press corps a tool of the “anti-marriage, anti-life agenda.” He accused me of taking a “slaveholder’s position” in my defense of abortion rights and called me a “hard-core, academic Marxist” for my support of universal health care and other social programs — and then added for good measure that because I was not the descendant of slaves I was not really African American. At one point he even managed to alienate the conservative Republicans who recruited him to Illinois by recommending — perhaps in a play for black votes — reparations in the form of a complete abolition of the income tax for all blacks with slave ancestry. (“This is a disaster!” sputtered one comment posted on the discussion board of Illinois’s hard-right website, the Illinois Leader. “WHAT ABOUT THE WHITE GUYS!!!”)
In other words, Alan Keyes was an ideal opponent; all I had to do was keep my mouth shut and start planning my swearing-in ceremony. And yet, as the campaign progressed, I found him getting under my skin in a way that few people ever have. When our paths crossed during the campaign, I often had to suppress the rather uncharitable urge to either taunt him or wring his neck. Once, when we bumped into each other at an Indian Independence Day parade, I poked him in the chest while making a point, a bit of alpha-male behavior that I hadn’t engaged in since high school and which an observant news crew gamely captured; the moment was replayed in slow motion on TV that evening. In the three debates that were held before the election, I was frequently tongue-tied, irritable, and uncharacteristically tense — a fact that the public (having by that point written Mr. Keyes off) largely missed, but one that caused no small bit of distress to some of my supporters. “Why are you letting this guy give you fits?” they would ask me. For them, Mr. Keyes was a kook, an extremist, his arguments not even worth entertaining.
What they didn’t understand was that I could not help but take Mr. Keyes seriously. For he claimed to speak for my religion — and although I might not like what came out of his mouth, I had to admit that some of his views had many adherents within the Christian church.
His argument went something like this: America was founded on the twin principles of God-given liberty and Christian faith. Successive liberal administrations had hijacked the federal government to serve a godless materialism and had thereby steadily chipped away — through regulation, socialistic welfare programs, gun laws, compulsory attendance at public schools, and the income tax (“the slave tax,” as Mr. Keyes called it) — at individual liberty and traditional values. Liberal judges had further contributed to this moral decay by perverting the First Amendment to mean the separation of church and state, and by validating all sorts of aberrant behavior — particularly abortion and homosexuality — that threatened to destroy the nuclear family. The answer to American renewal, then, was simple: Restore religion generally — and Christianity in particular — to its rightful place at the center of our public and private lives, align the law with religious precepts, and drastically restrict the power of federal government to legislate in areas prescribed neither by the Constitution nor by God’s commandments.
In other words, Alan Keyes presented the essential vision of the religious right in this country, shorn of all caveat, compromise, or apology. Within its own terms, it was entirely coherent, and provided Mr. Keyes with the certainty and fluency of an Old Testament prophet. And while I found it simple enough to dispose of his constitutional and policy arguments, his readings of Scripture put me on the defensive.
Mr. Obama says he’s a Christian, Mr. Keyes would say, and yet he supports a lifestyle that the Bible calls an abomination.
Mr. Obama says he’s a Christian, but he supports the destruction of innocent and sacred life.
What could I say? That a literal reading of the Bible was folly? That Mr. Keyes, a Roman Catholic, should disregard the Pope’s teachings? Unwilling to go there, I answered with the usual liberal response in such debates — that we live in a pluralistic society, that I can’t impose my religious views on another, that I was running to be a U.S. senator from Illinois and not the minister of Illinois. But even as I answered, I was mindful of Mr. Keyes’s implicit accusation — that I remained steeped in doubt, that my faith was adulterated, that I was not a true Christian.
IN A SENSE, my dilemma with Mr. Keyes mirrors the broader dilemma that liberalism has faced in answering the religious right. Liberalism teaches us to be tolerant of other people’s religious beliefs, so long as those beliefs don’t cause anyone harm or impinge on another’s right to believe differently. To the extent that religious communities are content to keep to themselves and faith is neatly confined as a matter of individual conscience, such tolerance is not tested.
But religion is rarely practiced in isolation; organized religion, at least, is a very public affair. The faithful may feel compelled by their religion to actively evangelize wherever they can. They may feel that a secular state promotes values that directly offend their beliefs. They may want the larger society to validate and reinforce their views.