Alan Keyes
March 31, 2001
Washington, D.C.

As I look at the state of American life and society, [I] contemplate what has been and remains for me the central issue of my involvement in public life and politics. That is the issue of our liberty, and how we hold on to it. I know that a lot of Americans still profess a belief that this is terribly important. I think that is especially true in Republican and conservative circles, where the word "liberty" still has a cache for most people--will lift the spirits, make the heart beat high. It is, in fact, in many respects the essence of American patriotism. We are a nation about freedom.

And yet, if you look around over the course of the last several decades, it is more and more apparent that, in many ways, one aspect of that freedom--or some aspects of it--have become more of a curse than a blessing.

Our Constitution says that we are to pass on to our posterity the blessings of liberty. By implication, that would suggest that we are supposed to try our best to limit the curses, I would think. But, sad to say that we always forget that there was another side to this, that if there are blessings, there are also curses--licentiousness, disorder, violence and tragedy. The curses that can undermine the cohesion of family, destroy the motivation for education, undermine the ability to find that motivation and discipline which can produce quality products that sustain the horizons of economic prosperity.

The curses of liberty were, in fact, so predominant in the consciences of human beings and their thinking and their lives for not only centuries, but millennia, that the very idea of a free society was not even considered to be joke. It was considered a travesty. It was considered to contradict the essential elements of order and decency and discipline that any society needed to sustain itself. I think it's always good to begin from that point.

Indeed, you can still look around the world today and find that the overwhelming majority of the world's population live in the condition that falls far short of anything like real liberty. And because we take it for granted, we not only have a tendency not to take seriously the curses that can attend upon it, I think we don't take seriously the very hard work that, over the course of many centuries of human existence, went into the insights that made it possible for a generation finally to assert the idea that it would be possible to establish a society that would be based on respect for the human capacity for self-government.

That's what our Founders thought in America. That's what they thought they were doing. They wrote about it in their letters, in the Federalist papers and so forth. This was going to be the nation, the experiment that would prove that, in fact, human beings by deliberate choice could establish a society that was going to vindicate the capacity of human kind for self-government. It's a beautiful idea. And in many ways, it's an idea that is possible because of the precious insights that had become possible for the human heart and spirit as a result of the most important event in human history, the coming of our Lord, Jesus Christ. I think we forget that, too.

As a matter of fact, these days we not only forget it, we're supposed to be embarrassed by it and quiet about it. We're supposed to look every way but at the truth. And that truth is that concept, the very idea of the individual, which makes it possible for us to conceive of an orderly society in which human individuals will be called upon for their consent to the laws. The very possibility that such a society will not simply result in anarchy and chaos and disorder and death is a result of the Christian insight. The possibility of a self-governing individual--an individual who responds not merely to external stimuli and force and control, but who is responding to and living according to an indwelling discipline, a law that has taken up residence in heart and mind--that is a Christian possibility. [It's] the idea that St. Paul put so eloquently when he makes it clear that, as a consequence of our acceptance of Christ, we in fact become free of the external law.

And that didn't mean we became lawless, did it? No. We become free of that external law because the law becomes for us an indwelling principle. The will that has informed the law becomes our will--and as a consequence, our consent becomes an expression of what? Our allegiance to and our acceptance of the will of God. In effect, that understanding is a way of allowing God to be the sovereign without the need to assert that sovereignty by human force and oppression in any form. As He is sovereign of the hearts of individuals, He becomes, through their consent, the sovereign of that nation [which is] governed according to their consent. That is the concept of self-government that, in fact, our society is founded on.

If you have human individuals for whom that discipline is possible, then freedom is a blessing. If you abandon the promise that makes that discipline possible, then freedom becomes again what it was thought to be for millennia. For all the centuries of conscious human thought, it was thought to be an impossible curse. And apart from the insight that Christ brought us, about the connection that is possible between the will of each individual and the will of God--without that insight, freedom is a curse. It cannot bring with it anything but tragedy.

Now, I say all of that, and it sounds reasonable. See, this is the great problem. You all think this sounds very reasonable, and it makes sense, and it's logical. And yet, in so many ways, we have moved now into a society where we are embracing things that absolutely contradict the very possibility of this discipline. That's why it's so incongruous to me now that people say it has become so unusual--though less so now in the last few years, and I'm encouraged by that.

It's supposed to be so unusual to talk about God and His authority in the context of our politics. If what I just said is true, then there can be no concept of liberty that corresponds to the idea that is the basis for our institutions, if God does not exist. If God does not exist, liberty, in that sense, cannot exist. Because, if God does not exist, then there is no sovereign will--orderly decent will, the connection with which can make us capable of imposing a sovereign discipline on our passions, on our willfulness, on those things that would otherwise destroy us. In that sense, I think we ought to recognize the truth that lies in the belief that there is slavery in our passions.

There is a sense in which we are no more free of the impulses of our instincts than any animal. We are helpless. We will be moved about, shifted with the winds of that nature so much more powerful that anything we can bring there. Left to our own devices, we are in fact just slaves--natural slaves, because the impulses that govern our will seem to us irresistible. I know we can forget this; sometimes we do. Sometimes it's more obvious to us than at other times. See, because nothing reminds you of the unruliness of our passions and the extent to which they seem absolutely irresistible to us. Nothing reminds you of that more readily than watching your children, who will very often give a very good imitation of people who cannot, for the life of them, resist the impulses that assail them at any given moment.

There ought to be a salutary reminder that we're not that different. I think the Apostle again reminds us of this when he says, "When I was a child, I thought as a child, acted as a child." [cf. I Corinthians 13:11 ff] What makes the difference between the child and the adult in that sense? Ultimately, what makes the difference is the relationship with God Almighty. We do not bring order into our own lives. We discover the possibility of order in our lives once we acknowledge and accept and rely upon our relationship with the Sovereign who orders all things. Through that discovery, we become individuals who can, in fact, govern ourselves, control our passions.

We have a standpoint that gives us superiority over them. Not as a consequence of ourselves, but as a consequence of the fact that God shares with us an element of that truth which is a consequence of His creation of the world. All the rules He made subject to His will. All the powers He created subject to His will. If anyone can clear a space for us in which the peace and calm of deliberation is possible, in which the winds of passion are held at bay, in which the terrible storms that can assail us are quelled--if anyone can create that space into which we can speak a word of wisdom, from which we can derive a true counsel, it is the Lord God who made it all possible. But there again, an intimate connection between God and liberty.

This is why I so often want to tell people: without God, there is no liberty. Without faith, there is not freedom.

And yet again, I say, we have come to a time when that statement is considered controversial. It's considered terrible. I don't understand what has brought us here. I really don't. It seems senseless to me in some way. Not at the level of intellectual history, or anything like that. What seems to be inconceivable is that people of common sense would so easily surrender the simple logic of our situation, whether that logic is presented in the context of Christian understanding, or whether it is presented in the context of our civic principles. After all, we were a nation founded on the belief, as I am always fond of telling people, that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with uncertain unalienable rights.

I do a fair amount of reading, and one of the things I have really been interested in is politics and political theories. So I have read a lot of the books about that, and I haven't found anybody who was able to present a viable understanding of our rights without reference to our Creator. And as a matter of fact, I think it is so difficult that they don't even try anymore. Basically, folks are coming forward now and talking us out of our freedom, talking us out of those things that are essential to sustaining it without offering us anything. And we are so enthralled these days by other benefits that they are supposedly offering us, that we don't care.

So we are talked out of the idea that God's choice determined our rights, because we want the choice to kill our babies in the womb. We get talked out of the idea that God's authority established the structures and institutions for our relationships, including our sexual relationships, because we want the license to fornicate and do as we please in sexual terms. We get talked out of the understanding that there is in fact a law that ought to govern our compassionate relationships with others, because we want freedom for our greed and license to indulge our selfishness. We get so caught up in the pursuit of all those little goods that are dangled in front of us that we don't realize that there is only one intention in all these distractions, and that is to turn our eyes from God. And by turning our eyes away from God, [they] will lead us to forget our liberty. That's all it's about.

It's one of those things that I am continually intrigued by, too, because there are so many people who profess to be Christians, and they go to church and this and that. But when it comes to making decisions about political issues, when it comes to public things, [they] forget about it. And yet, the insights we derive from our Christian beliefs are essential to the possibility of liberty. One of those insights has to do with the real nature of our passions. I wonder if folks really understand what the Apostle meant when he said there is a law in our members. [cf. Romans 7] Think it through, because what is one of the characteristics of law? Thomas Aquinas talks about this, and he makes clear a point I think is true: ultimately, there can be no viable concept of law apart from an irresistible force that, in fact, compels submission to the law.

That notion of enforcement is essential to our understanding of law, in the true sense of the term. So when St. Paul said there is a law in our members, what did he mean? He means there is an irresistible force. There is a force that compels submission. That force of our passions, therefore, is like a tyrant within us, armed against our puny wills with all the force necessary to make that will submit. And in the face of that law, what are we? Subjects. Slaves. Unchecked, the rule of passion, therefore, becomes itself a bondage. And that, of course, is precisely the Christian understanding of sin.

We're in bondage. We're enslaved to sin. It becomes for us the master. But why do we forget, then, that if sin is bondage, a society lured away from truth to the indulgence of sin is a society in bondage? It is a society where the work of those who would become the temporal tyrants and masters is already three-quarters done. They have but to apply a little bit more. And we, so involved and distracted in our submission to the tyrant within us, will hardly notice when the shackles are put on by the tyrants without. I think that, in fact, this is the future that we are being prepared for as a people.

And I don't know why we would think this unusual, since there has been a little hiatus in the saga of human despotism in the course of this country's history. It's just that. It's a little parenthesis so far. And it has lasted what is--in historic terms--not a very impressive length of time. There were tyrannies and despotisms of various kinds that have lasted far longer than this little bit of freedom that we have had. Imperial Rome strutted about for 1,000 years. The Islamic Empire strutted about for about 1,000 more. Empires and dynasties in China, based upon principles of despotism, went on for 1,000 and 1,500 years. This little 200-year thing that we have going is nothing compared to that. This little moment in which people glimpse the possibility of freedom--what makes us think that it isn't just a snap of the fingers in history?

We must think that through, because we seem so easygoing about the prerequisites. The hard-won insight that allowed us to see the kind of human character and soul that was required to make freedom possible in a community, we are now giving up--in exchange for what? Well, I will tell you. In exchange for things that you can and will get in any tyranny anytime. Look at the saga of human life, and you will find that, by and large, tyrants are quite willing to let people fornicate, in so far as they are pleased to fornicate, in any manner, shape, or form that they like. They will give, pretty much, free reign to the greed of individuals. The only thing you are not allowed to do by most tyrants is to try to shake off the chains of your bondage to them. They will let you remain in bondage to every vice, to every sin, to every disease of human character that you can stumble on or invent, so long as it keeps you quiet while they rule.

And in so far as we move into the future, I know we all are convinced that we are going into an era of great progress. Our scientific knowledge is wonderful. I do not know whether I am more intrigued or frightened by the possibility of our future in that regard, since one of the things that is becoming increasingly clear is that the principle of individual emancipation applied intellectually has unleashed scientific possibilities that are placing in the hands of human beings enormous powers, such as we have not even been able to envision in the past.

The possibilities of human oppression, the things that we could do to one another, extend mainly to the terrible forms of torture and death that we could inflict on the body today. For, as we have tortured physical nature, we are now unlocking the keys with which we shall torture human nature itself, until, for whatever purpose, we are able to produce human beings who correspond, essentially, to the needs of whatever wicked purpose we could imagine. And we will do so without the qualms or questions about our God-given condition of who and what we are. At the moment in which we unlock this enormous power over ourselves, we are what? More and more turning our back on the principle that might offer us some discipline in our use or abuse of those powers.

I look back on the 20th century, and I see a century filled with human slaughter. But you know, I don't think it is going to hold a candle to what the 21st century might bring, if we continue down the road that abandons that sense of justice and conscience which alone made it possible for the world to finally triumph over the evil that threatened it in the last century. And I say that because we played a critical role in beating back the shadow of that evil.

This nation was powerfully, providentially important at every stage of that struggle. We were providentially important, at least in part, because we represented a more perfect principle of human justice than had ever before been applied to any human society. And why do I say this? Because it was a principle of justice that corresponded to the Christian insight about our human condition. That insight makes it clear that, not just on the whole, not just as a people, not just as species, but each and every one of us as individuals has access to that gift which Christ both represented and brought. It is possible for each and every one of us to have a personal and intimate relationship with the Power of all powers. And that relationship extends all the way back to the time, to the very moment in which He created and preconceived our place in His universe, and that mercy which He would extend to us even as we, burdened by the consequences of our sin, labored in a world of darkness that had been made by our rejection of His will.

Our understanding, therefore, that all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with uncertain unalienable rights--what's that an assertion of? It's an assertion of the truth. God takes an interest in each and every one of us. And He didn't just come to save this or that type of people. He came to save each and every one of us. He had a thought for us, a particular, clear, perfect thought--a word that He spoke so that we might exist. And the beauty of our principle of self-government in America is that it acknowledges this truth. It acknowledges the truth that each and every person represents a word of some spoken truth that reflects the will of God, and that must therefore command respect from every human will and every human institution.

If what I just said, though, is true, the intimate relationship between our acknowledgment of God and our claim of rights and liberties is crystal clear. We can't have one without the other. Give up the one, you give up the other. And at the same time that you give up the claim, you also give up the foundation for that discipline that allows you to erect, on the basis of the claim, an orderly society, based on the principle of liberty.

Now, all that we are doing, as we move to greater power--all that we are doing is moving away from the moral discipline, and moving away, as well, from that principle which invests each individual with the protection of God's will. Power increases, discipline decreases, and the basis for respecting the integrity of individual human life is eliminated. Doesn't this sound to you like a recipe for disaster? It sounds like it to me. In a world where conscience is armed with this truth, it took enormous effort to defeat principles of totalitarianism and evil. In a world where conscience has been disarmed, what will stand against such evil reasserting itself? And whose fault will that be? Don't put the blame on God, because He is still there.

The problem here isn't that God has abandoned anybody. The problem here is that we are abandoning Him. The problem here is that we have gotten ashamed of Him. The problem here is that, even though He providentially put us, in particular, in the context of a society where we were invited to enjoy the fruits that come from our submission to His will, we have, through a combination of willfulness, laziness and indifference, let it slip away. It's like it doesn't matter.

And believe me, there might be some folks [who] think we have the right to breathe a sigh of relief after the last election and to think, "Gosh, we've got that one out of the White House. That solves the problem." Well, it doesn't. And at one level, I think it makes the problem more dangerous. There was one thing we could be sure of while Bill Clinton was President, and that is that no decent self-respecting person of conscience would think that the moral condition of this country was safe and secure. There was no mistake about the crisis, as long as this man was out there representing, everyday, the depths to which we could sink even at the highest level. At that level, he was kind of a providential gift from God. Strange one, but the Lord is mysterious in His ways. And in this particular way, maybe He just wanted to shake us and wake us up.

But now he is gone, maybe not far enough for some of us, but at least for the moment he is not occupying center stage. And so, therefore, some people will be lead to believe that the crisis is over. But the only way you could think that is if you were fooled into believing that the crisis was a man, or that the crisis was a moment that was in an administration. Bill Clinton was a mirror held up to America. And what we read in that mirror was not something about him, but something about us. It read clearly the consequence of our character, self-discipline or institutions, and our possibilities, as long as we embrace the willful principle that worships our own indulgence and lusts instead of the authority and will of the God Who gave us our rights. As individuals, I know many Americans profess the acceptance of God's will, but as a people, we have abandoned it.

The nation was founded on the principle that we are all "created equal, endowed by our Creator." [But], we live now according to the principle that no human being has any rights--beginning with the right of life, itself, that is not subject to, conditioned by, and a consequence of a human choice, regardless of God's will. In that sense, the republic founded on the principle of real self-government and liberty is gone. It died when this nation embraced the lie epitomized by the Roe v. Wade decision. It's one of the reasons, by the way, that ought to warn us against being complacent right now.

We cannot restore liberty in America until we overturn the lie that human choice is the basis for human rights. We've got to put the Creator back where He belongs. And we can't do that except by continued, ongoing, principled efforts to get rid of the lie, and put back in its place the truth that our Founders gave us in the first place. We look not for innovation; we look for renovation. We do not look to put in place some new and radical thing; we look rather to restore what has been the strong foundation of our liberty. In addition, there is no way that this can be a matter for compromise or accommodation, unless we are willing to be so compromised that our slavery is comfortable. That is a choice we have.

And once we have backed away from that, and are no longer committed to the struggle to put back in place an allegiance to that truth, other things will quickly fail. Because, there are many things that we cannot understand, once we have lost our understanding of the connection between liberty and faith. We cannot understand the basis for marriage and society's support for the privileges of marriage. See, once human will becomes the conditioning reality, then it is the conditioning reality for all of our institutions. Once you have said that the child exists only by virtue of the mother's choice, then what is the parent's obligation to that child? Conditioned also only on the basis of that choice. And when the will is no longer there, what then supports the application? I don't say that as a matter of simple abstract principle, because what is being done in our society right now in many ways is to take the family off of its foundation of natural law and divine will, and to make it into an institution that is simply based on human willfulness.

Now, they can dress this up and at one level, it can even look kind of nice. I was watching a commercial the other day. It's for some kind of food product, and they have aging and has-been stars who are all cooking, and they are all talking. Sally Jesse Raphael is talking to Mr. T, and the punchline is that cooking makes a family. When you cook together, you are a family. You see how absurdly trivial this is? But they don't think it's trivial. The whole commercial is, in fact, conveying that there is no natural basis for the family. Family is simply a matter of human will. "I choose my friends, and everyone will be a family based on our choice." But what they don't tell you, once human choice is the basis for family--what obliges you to respect the bonds of family when that emotion fails, when that will turns away? What sense of duty, what sense of obligation will be left? Is there a reliable one in our passions?

If that passion is alone to be the basis of family life, then family will come and go. Family will be made and dissolved as quickly as are the relationships that are made by the winds of changing sentiment. But it goes farther than that. That effort to substitute willfulness for God's authority as the basis of family life extends to more serious agendas.

The homosexual agenda--people think it is just about homosexuality and sexuality, but it's not. Ultimately, the homosexual agenda is about our understanding of our nature--who we are. I come forward, and I tell you that "you have to accept and tolerate my sexual orientation, because it is genetically determined. It's like race. I have no control over it." You accept that premise, and what have you said, not just about me but about your own inclinations? What have you said about the sexual inclinations of any human being? Isn't all sexual inclination encoded in our genes? I think it is. We are, all of us, genetically predetermined to perpetuate the species by the means of response to these animal passions. There is no secret about that. It's been around for a long time.

We are now discovering, perhaps, a little more detail about the mechanism for transmitting the information that we respond to. We didn't invent insight. People have seen it ever since before the Apostle said there was a law in our members. It's understood. So they come along and say, "Since I have this law in my members, you must accept what I do as moral." You think that is what someone is saying just about sexual relations? Well, if you think that, it's because you have forgotten that we have a lot of other passions encoded in our genes. Anger. Jealousy. Greed. All of these things are a part of the warp and woof of our nature.

If, then, the inclination that arises from this natural law in that sense is irresistible, then what are we? We are, as I said before, merely slaves--people who can be structured and manipulated on the basis of those passions. If you think about it, if this is who we are, then the only way we can have decency and order in society is if we live in a structured environment in which we are going to be, by external constraint and manipulation, kept from harming each other, and compelled to cooperate. If you think that through, that means that over here you have the premises of the homosexual agenda, over there you have totalitarianism, and the one leads to the other.

Once you have discarded the idea of our human condition that is required for freedom, how will you sustain the freedom? Once you have embraced the understanding of that human condition which makes external constraints necessary, how will you escape the need to impose that constraint? If we are what they say we are, then no decent human being would stand in opposition to totalitarianism, because if we are what they say we are, freedom is a curse in the absence of external control. These agendas all tie together.

Once we turn our back on the moral understanding, we lose the basis for the most rudimentary application of our moral understanding that extends even to the protection of our innocent children, and sexual matters, especially. This is the world that we are moving towards. Nothing has changed about the things that have set us on this path by any political event or the presence of any person in office.

Indeed, sadly, we are now in a position where some people think that we are safe. We'll relax our vigilance and allow [ourselves] to be overwhelmed. Some people who are embracing ideas on which good labels have been placed will fail to see that the content does not correspond to the principles in which we profess to believe.

In conclusion, I don't want to, in any sense, efface the good spirit that I think we all can share. But I think we need to focus in our good spirit on the truth of our situation. And the truth of our situation is that the crisis is yet upon us, and it is upon us now in a more dangerous form than ever. For, the greatest danger is not the bullet you hear but the one you do not, [the one] that kills you because you have been distracted. And I think that is the danger we shall face the next several years.

If we do not consciously work to keep in focus the importance of those moral principles that, in fact, dictate so much of what we care about in American political life, if we are not clear and conscious in our grasp of them and our application of them, then we will be, in the end, manipulated. And our influence, which ought to be and can be for such good, will be destroyed.

Thank you very much.