Alan Keyes
Trojan Horse of the Christian Right

For example, Keyes holds a no-compromise position on abortion and advocates the abolition of the federal income tax. Many Christians are inspired and motivated by his dynamic presentation. For these and other reasons, this writer confesses to having voted for Alan Keyes in at least one Presidential primary, if not more.

It is the common ground that Conservative Christians share with Alan Keyes that makes him potentially dangerous. Many Christians fail to grasp that Keyes's philosophical base is decidedly not Christian. This is true in spite of the fact that he refers frequently to God and the rule of law. In the philosophy of Alan Keyes, there are many beautiful branches, but the root is infected.

The basic problem with Alan Keyes from a Christian perspective is that he has substituted the Declaration of Independence for the Bible as his source of authority for life, morals and government. In the statement of core beliefs on his web site, Alan Keyes starts out on the right foot. "As a free people, our way of life depends upon certain moral ideas," says Alan Keyes, "and I believe that Christianity most perfectly embodies those ideas." So far so good.

But then he takes the fatal misstep, an error almost as old as Christianity itself. Assuming that the non-Christian will not accept the Bible, Keyes declares that we must search for a source of governing authority outside the Bible that will be acceptable to all. Alan Keyes finds this common ground in the Declaration of Independence. According to Keyes:

"...since Americans come from many different religious backgrounds, in dealing with issues of public policy we must derive these ideas from sources that are open to support from all the people. Nothing meets this purpose more completely than the principles and logic of our own Declaration of Independence."

With these two brief sentences, Alan Keyes stumbles headlong into the heresy of natural law. From here on out it is all downhill. He thereby dispenses with the Bible and never mentions it again in the statement of his core beliefs.

It is this reliance on the Declaration of Independence that makes Alan Keyes one of the foremost contemporary preachers of America's civil religion. This religion entails a zealous devotion to America's founders and founding documents.

Keyes points back to the Declaration as America's "sacred text" and to Abraham Lincoln as the latter day prophet calling a wayward people back to that icon. In so doing, he misinterprets both the Declaration and the motives of Abraham Lincoln as expressed in the Gettysburg Address.

In the first place, Keyes overlooks the fact that the "laws of nature and nature's God" describe a natural law worldview, rather than a Biblical worldview. It is the natural law of the Roman Senator Cicero, defined by him as "right reason in agreement with nature." Echoed by Jefferson's, "We hold these truths to be self-evident...." verbiage.

The framers copied the Roman Senate, they assumed Roman pseudonyms in their debates, they adopted Roman architecture, they borrowed Roman natural law and in effect they embraced the religion of the Roman Pantheon: religious and political pluralism -- all gods are welcome here as long as they bow to Caesar. Thus, would Alan Keyes lure the unwary Christian away from the Bible; perhaps Keyes himself is not even aware of these connections and their consequences.

Thomas Aquinas spent his whole life in pursuit of this illusion: the "classical synthesis" and natural law. As a Roman Catholic, Alan Keyes has an affinity for the natural law approach of Aquinas.

Unfortunately, our efforts to prop up the Word of God in this fashion almost always have the unintended effect of undermining its authority. Rather than building a bridge, as Keyes may hope, we find that we have erected a wall between the unbelieving world and the truth they so desperately need. If we use any other authority to demonstrate the authority of the Bible, we have established that "other authority" as a higher authority.

Moreover, he seems unaware that Rome is just one of the unorthodox philosophical strains that infected Jefferson and the framers. To Rome we could add the secularized, Republicanism of the British Commonwealth Men (Harrington, Milton, Locke, etc.), the Utilitarian, "greatest happiness" theory of Jeremy Bentham, the common sense rationalism of Thomas Reid and John Witherspoon, the mechanistic Deism of Isaac Newton, the watered-down common law of William Blackstone.

Even Adam Smith's conservative, semi-Biblical, free-trade arguments persuaded Madison that political centralization was desirable to reduce trade barriers. The New England Puritans weren't even completely successful in resisting all of this, let alone the exalted founder/framers. Biblical Christianity is fortunate even to have gotten lip service. It doesn't fare much better with Alan Keyes, who makes a fetish of the Declaration of Independence.

In the second place, Alan Keyes completely misinterprets the Declaration on the one point that Jefferson seems to have gotten right. Keyes forgets that the main thrust of the Declaration was to establish the right of the colonies to separate themselves from an abusive tyranny, namely England's George III. It was the Southern states that were attempting to exercise this right during the War Between the States.

On this point, Abraham Lincoln, Alan Keyes 18th Century idol, completely missed the boat. First of all, Keyes notes correctly that Lincoln's motivation in the War Between the States was not to free the slaves, but rather to save the Union (Human Events, August 11, 2000).

Keyes quotes Lincoln as saying during the war, "My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all slaves I would do it." He notes that this statement "can seem almost scandalous", but concludes that Lincoln believed the union was the prerequisite of all other good, including freeing the slaves.

To prove this, Alan Keyes points to Lincoln's famous words in the Gettysburg Address. According to Keyes, Lincoln called for a united effort to restore principles of freedom in the Declaration as the foundation for eventual abolition, even though it might be painfully long in coming. "But if it was necessary to endure that delay rather than admit that we could not govern ourselves under the principles of the Declaration," Keyes explains, "Lincoln was prepared to do so."

But Keyes (and apparently Abraham Lincoln) overlook the fact that prior to the war the vast majority in the South was looking for ways to gradually abolish slavery. The majority of "anti-slavery societies" were located in the South. Furthermore, he overlooks the fact that it was the antebellum South that was trying to call the North to refrain from its repeated attempts to burst the bands of limited, Constitutional government. When every effort to do so, proved futile, the Southern states finally seceded.

The Gettysburg speech was at once the shortest and the most famous oration in American history...the highest emotion reduced to a few poetical phrases. Lincoln himself never even remotely approached it. It is genuinely stupendous. But let us not forget that it is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense.

Think of the argument in it. Put it into the cold words of everyday. The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination -- that government of the people, by the people, for the people, should not perish from the earth. It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves.

Thus, Christians should mark well the words of Alan Keyes. They may follow and support him at those points where he coincides with Scripture, but must abandon the natural law thinking that undergirds Keyes' political philosophy.