New Contributing Editor on The Wire

Welcome to new contributing editor Darren Grem! Darren is working on a PhD in History from the University of Georgia. His dissertation: ""The Blessings of Business: Christian Entrepreneurs and the Politics and Culture of Sunbelt America." Darren also has extensive interests in religion and music and religion and popular culture generally. His first contribution concerns HBO's much-acclaimed series The Wire. The show hasn't captured the same national obsession as, say, The Sopranos, but some have argued that this may go down as the best dramatic series in television history. Anyway, welcome to Darren, and we look foward to more provocative contributions such as his thoughts on The Wire, and religion, below.

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“Way Down in the Hole”: Finding Religion in The Wire’s America

Darren E. Grem
University of Georgia

At first glance, HBO’s cop/crime drama The Wire seems to have nothing to do with religion. Created and produced by David Simon, a former Baltimore Sun beat reporter, the show explores the political, economic, and cultural landscape of the contemporary American metropolis. This isn’t new territory for Simon. He has dealt with the subject throughout most of his career and repeatedly used the city of Baltimore to do it. Simon’s 1991 book Homicide showed Baltimore from the perspective of the city’s homicide unit, as did the ‘90s network television series of the same name. His 1997 book The Corner – which he co-wrote with Ed Burns, another of the show’s producers – looked at everyday life among the users and dealers of West Baltimore and inspired an Emmy-winning miniseries that aired in 2000.

The Wire revisits many of the themes raised by Simon’s previous work, but it dramatizes them, one at a time, season by season. Season one examines the complexities of the much-touted “war on drugs.” Season two, according to Simon, serves as "a meditation on the death of work and the betrayal of the American working class." Looking at city hall politics and drug legalization, season three reflects “on the nature of reform and reformers, and whether there is any possibility that political processes, long calcified, can mitigate against the forces currently arrayed against individuals."[1] All in all, the result is one of the most tightly written and thematically mature shows on television.

Fundamentally, The Wire is about failing institutions. As such, religious institutions seem only tangentially important, if at all, in the lives depicted onscreen.[2] Places of worship are rarely shown and, when shown, they are like fossils, providing hints of one-time vibrant religious communities, now extinguished by the urban crisis (or, more likely, exported to the suburbs along with everything else). For instance, in season one a detective unit uses an abandoned church tower to conduct surveillance on a West Baltimore drug organization. Young black dealers, some no more than eleven or twelve years old, sling heroin and cocaine in the courtyard, completely unaware that the church’s spire might have once been of importance in their community.

In season two, a dockworkers’ union chief donates a new set of stained glass windows – depicting diligent stevedores – to the neighborhood church. This sets off a personal and petulant feud with an east-side major, who wanted his own stained glass tribute to the city’s Polish police officers installed. Though both men exhibit a certain loyalty to the church, it would be a stretch to call it devotion. They want their life’s work monumentalized by their generosity, and their religion is a means to that end. In season three, Cutty, an ex-con just out of the joint, turns to a black minister for help. Cutty had tried to make ends meet as a day laborer but became disillusioned about his long-term prospects. When the minister informs Cutty that the church has little to offer him other than help with getting a GED, Cutty walks out on the minister and heads back to the street life. Eventually, Cutty leaves both the drug trade and day labor behind and finds direction in trying to set up a boxing gym for youth in the neighborhood. His salvation, however, comes only after dedicating himself to his mission (and after getting the minister’s assistance in pushing the paperwork past the downtown bureaucracy and persuading his former drug boss to donate equipment to the gym). The institution of the church, struggling itself in a community changed, can help only those who help themselves. Even then, that’s often a dicey affair.

Other religious and quasi-religious sentiments cameo at various points in the show. The dealers respect a weekly Sunday morning truce, on the principle that violence should not be done while people are trying to pray. A stick-up artist named Omar lives by a strict code of ethics, vowing never to hurt “civilians.” Still, he stands at the ready with his trademark shotgun for those in “the game” who need “to get got.” Brother Mouzone is a feared hit man from New York City, a devout Muslim who acknowledges that he is “at peace with my God,” despite his history of brutality. An addict named Bubbles finds brief solace with Narcotics Anonymous, until the wiles of heroin and the winds of circumstance lure him back to the shooting galleries. Aside from these allusions, however, religion has little obvious role in the drama at hand. It is in the background, often peripheral and fleeting. For the most part, all that’s left in West Baltimore, is “the game,” where as Omar observes, “It's play or get played. That simple.”

According to Simon, The Wire explores “the very simple idea that, in this Postmodern world of ours, human beings – all of us – are worth less.”[3] Since religious institutions have historically provided answers to human inquiries about value and worth, it’s not surprising that in The Wire’s landscape religious institutions do not bring straight answers any more readily than the other institutions of urban life. Yet, it’s not because religious institutions have been beaten out by in a freewheeling religious market, where the privilege of preference directs how much religion you want in your life (maybe that’s the case in the other-world of suburban Baltimore). Rather, in the Baltimore of detectives, dealers, and dope fiends, the course of history has left people to their own devices to maintain faith and find meaning.

And, as the show’s theme song implies, that’s often an uphill battle:[4]

When you walk through the garden
You gotta watch your back
Well I beg your pardon
Walk the straight and narrow track
If you walk with Jesus
He's gonna save your soul
You gotta keep the devil
Way down in the hole

He's got the fire and the fury at his command
Well you don't have to worry
If you hold on to Jesus hand
We'll all be safe from Satan
When the thunder rolls
Just gotta help me keep the devil
Way down in the hole

All the angels sing about Jesus' mighty sword
And they'll shield you with their wings
And keep you close to the Lord
Don't pay heed to temptation
For his hands are so cold
You gotta help me keep the devil
Way down in the hole

I think shows like The Wire are necessary viewing for those interested in contemporary religious life because they remind us that, despite the seeming secularity of it all, the post-modern, post-industrial American metropolis is still a religious landscape. Religious cultures and institutions are created, maintained, and killed off every day in a manufactured environment that thrives off the untidy ironies of modern American history. As The Wire quietly and effectively demonstrates, the view from way down in the hole teaches us that the presence – and absence – of religious cultures and institutions are symptoms of deeper shifts in American life, shifts that determine who ultimately has value in our society and who does not.

During one particularly memorable scene, Bubbles rides along with detective Jimmy McNulty to the suburbs beyond the city limits. They go to a soccer game, where McNulty introduces Bubbles to his ex-wife (who, out of disgust and bewilderment at McNulty’s choice in associates, refuses to shake Bubbles’s hand). Later, as McNulty drives them both back to West Baltimore, Bubbles peers out their unmarked cruiser at the boarded-up storefronts, the darkened alleys, the teenage slingers, and the homeless addicts. Bubbles comments off-hand, “Thin line between heaven and here.”

Those “thin lines” are the story of modern America, from New York City and Chicago to the Sunbelt booster-lands of Los Angeles, Atlanta and Houston. They exist in Pittsburgh, Detroit, Baltimore, and countless other cities and small towns in between. As Simon illustrates, the lines have been drawn in terms of race and class but also in terms of value and worth. How religious institutions and cultures help to draw, confirm, and challenge those lines should direct our looks at the world that The Wire portrays, a world far too like our own.

NOTES

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wire_(TV_series).
[2] I have yet to watch season four, but I hear it uses Baltimore’s public schools as a setting for examining the role of education in the contemporary city. When asked about the fourth season’s thematic focus, co-producer Ed Burns replied, “it's not about education as you're thinking about education. Everybody is going to get educated. It's just a question of where. Some people get educated in the classroom, some people get educated in a boxing gym; some people get educated on a corner.” The season may or may not have anything to say about how churches or other religious institutions are educational as well, but I’ll have to wait until it comes out on Netflix to see. Read the interview with Burns at http://www.hbo.com/thewire/interviews/ed_burns.shtml
[3] http://www.slate.com/id/2154694
[4] Written by Tom Waits. The Blind Boys of Alabama performs the tune during season one, Waits during season two, and The Neville Brothers during season three. DoMaJe – a vocal group composed of five Baltimore teenagers – sings season four’s version of it.

Randall Stephens, Creationism and ID at Home and Abroad

"Creationism and Intelligent Design in America and Abroad," by Randall Stephens

Are creationism and intelligent design unique to America?" That's what I asked Kenneth R. Miller, renowned author and Brown University professor of Biology, after he delivered a spectacular multi-media presentation on intelligent design (ID) at the Open Theology and Science conference here at my college in July. Miller, along with Anna Case Winters, and Karl Giberson, participated in a forum on "God, Darwin, & Design: The Struggle for America's Soul."

I was surprised by Miller's answer. He said: no, in fact, it is not uniquely American. Creationists of various degrees populate the European continent, the U. K., and, most significantly, the Muslim world. That seemed fascinating. I had tended to think American evangelicals and conservative fundamentalists were exceptionally belligerent on the issue of human origins. What of the court cases in Kansas, Pennsylvania, Arkansas, and Georgia, pitting fundamentalist against "godless" textbook writers? Creation "scientist" Ken Ham recently built a $27 million creationist museum in Kentucky. Match that, Luxembourg!

Isn't this strident theo-science peculiarly American? Apparently not. A recent piece in the New York Times, "Islamic Creationist and a Book Sent Round the World," was confirmation enough that I was off the mark: "In the United States, opposition to the teaching of evolution in public schools has largely been fueled by the religious right, particularly Protestant fundamentalism. Now another voice is entering the debate, in dramatic fashion. It is the voice of Adnan Oktar of Turkey [aka] Harun Yahya." Yahya has mailed a beautifully illustrated creation science textbook to leaders in the field at top universities across the United States. Darwinian evolution is a demonic plot of the West, so goes the argument. Those who have found this massive tome in their mail box have commented on how visually stunning it is. The recipients, nonetheless, were unconvinced.

Yet this development in the East could pose new challenges to public schools in the US and abroad. Will American Muslims buy the religion-dressed-as-science Yahya is hawking? Less likely, but no less interesting, might Christian conseravtives and Muslims find common ground on the issue?

According to Miller, the influence of creationism and ID extends far beyond religious right groups. A January 2006 survey conducted by the BBC showed that quite a few Britons are "unconvinced on evolution." Surveys are often flat of foot and leave as many questions as they offer answers. This survey, however, of over 2,000 participants, "asked what best described their view of the origin and development of life," is a little startling. It showed that "22% chose creationism, 17% opted for intelligent design, 48% selected evolution theory, and the rest did not know." That last bit speaks volumes. How much do English men and women care about the subject?

The survey was conducted for an installement of the BBC's Horizon - A War on Science. It can be watched in full on Google video. The 2006 documentary examines the roots of ID and exposes its all-too-close resemblence to creationism. As a pundit once put it, ID is creationism dressed in a cheap tuxedo.

The film is a superb introduction to the subject. Its coverage of the now-famous Dover, PA, trial is especially interesting. Interviews with Michael Behe, William Dembski, Richard Dawkins, and Kenneth Miller provide excellent context. The film is, though, quite heavy-handed at times. It's over-the-top score reminds me of the ridiculously grim music playing behind the Daily Show's faux-news magazine interviews. Minus that and some unecessary grandstanding on both sides (Dawkins calls Darwin's doubters "yapping terriers of ignorance"), this is the best treatment I've seen. I plan to use selections from it for my American Religion and Culture course. The film's setting, America's Bible Belt, presents the subject in stark relief.

Prius Envy

The following comes to us from my old friend on Valparaiso University's intramural basketball courts, Jon Pahl, now professor at Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia.
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Prius Envy, By Jon Pahl

I succumbed to Prius envy. I’ve been tempted for a long time. But I wasn’t aware how tantalizing this auto-seduction had become in American history until I drove the car home and stood staring at it, for minutes on end, sitting in my driveway. I wanted to bow down to it. It was like the proverbial golden calf of biblical lore. Except it’s red. And it’s a car.

Several of my colleagues owned the economical and environmentally-friendly hybrid autos before me. When I was considering buying a new vehicle, I asked them about their experiences with the Prius. They each replied, independently: “I love it.”

Now, I know that love is a many, splendored thing. But what does it mean about the state of a culture—about our collective unconscious as a historical by-product, when people resort to “loving” their automobiles? I can’t say that I love my Prius, yet. I like it a lot. I’m fond of it. And I probably even felt lust in my heart in the days leading up to my acquisition.

But how did it come about that the word “love” so easily became attached to a commodity—a ton or so of steel and plastic and rubber? This is a historical question of considerable significance. Is “love” in a market economy merely a reflection of something’s economic value? Perhaps this book has already been written. Call it—Auto-Love: How We Learned to Love Our Cars, and To Hell with Everyone Else.

And, yes, there is a webpage: http://www.autolove.com/. It’s worth a visit, and will not be blocked by your porn spamfilter. Katharine T. Alvord’s suggestion: Divorce your Car! (it’s on Amazon), seems a little extreme. But in an effort to purify my soul, I’ve been finding things not to like about the Prius. I need to keep it in its place.

For starters, the push button starter strikes all the wrong erotic notes, for me. I’ve taken to actually inserting my “smart key” into the slot in the dash where it can go, but doesn’t have to. Part of this is practical: that way I don’t lose the key. Part of it, though, feels like a more spiritual thing: the idea of riding around with the key for a car in my pocket, rather then securely cocooned in its slot, seems positively a waste of energy.

Then, the navigation system is creepy. I’ve never owned a car with a global positioning system before. It’s an eerie experience, to me anyway, knowing that as I drive down Chester Road here in Swarthmore, there’s a satellite somewhere in the sky with its eye upon me.
I picture this satellite as a Cyclops-God hybrid. When I was in Sunday School, we sang a song that recently came to mind as I was driving: “Oh, be careful, little hands, what you touch,” I sang, “There’s a Savior up above, and He’s looking down with love, so be careful, little hands, what you touch.” I never could figure out why I had to be careful if the Savior was so loving, but that’s another column, at least.

And now, four decades after Sunday School, the suspicion is ingrained in me, and there really is a Thing in the sky looking down on me. I hope the satellite is loving. I fear it’s just indifferent.

And when I’m really paranoid, I imagine it as Dick Cheney.

Another spiritual feature of the Prius that I hadn’t reckoned with is that it fosters self-righteousness. I felt this acutely shortly after I drove the car off the dealer’s lot. A big SUV drove by, and I positively gloated, as I glanced down at the touchscreen display and noted that I was getting 39.7 miles per gallon. “Sucker,” I thought to myself. Probably I could get a bumper sticker to advertise my spiritual superiority: “What Would Jesus Drive?” The answer would be implicit in my own choice, which, conveniently, would incarnate the automotive preferences of the Eternal One.

And then there’s the nagging question about just how eco-friendly the car really is. It was made in Japan, which meant it took tons of carbon dioxide, spewing from an ocean-going cargo-container vessel’s smokestacks, to get it to me here in Pennsylvania. It contains batteries laced with bad chemicals and metals. What will happen to them when I’m done with it?

All in all, then, I’ve managed so far to keep from loving my Prius. I’m pretty much in synch, I think, with Jane Holtz Kay, who in Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take it Back, suggested that when we love our cars we love a “sealed chamber of isolation.”

But the Prius does have a killer sound system, and I do love hearing Diane Schuur’s silken voice singing “Just the Thought of You” through its speakers, as I silently, and carbon-dioxide emissions-free, slip my way through Swarthmore.

Jon Pahl is Professor of the History of Christianity in North America at The Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia, and he teaches at Temple University and Princeton. He’s the author of Shopping Malls and Other Sacred Spaces.

Studying the Religious Lives of Children in Jesus Camp

Below is Kelly Baker's post on the film Jesus Camp. Just a pre-script -- besides the film itself, I highly recommend the directors' commentary included with the DVD of the film. They provide a fascinating window into the making of the documentary, and have some interesting things to say also about Ted Haggard, who appears briefly (and not very likably) in the film. Anyway, Kelly provides some good thoughts below on studying the religious lives of children, so enjoy!
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Kelly Baker -- “Don’t be a promise breaker, be a history maker”

The documentary, Jesus Camp, explores the evangelical camp, “Kids on Fire,” and the lives of some of the participants. Becky Fischer, a Pentecostal children’s minister, runs the camp because of her belief that children are so “open and usable” in Christianity. Throughout the documentary, Fischer’s dictum about children seems to play out (sometimes painfully). We also follow Levi, Rachel, and Tory in their experiences of camp as well as their renderings of both their faith and their nation. Levi, who wants to be a preacher, is home schooled. His mother is his teacher and proponent of Creationism. Rachel shows the most enthusiasm for evangelizing and bowling, and she combines the two when witnessing to a young woman at the bowling alley. Tory listens to Christian heavy metal and dances for God rather than the flesh. Throughout their journeys at camp, the children embrace Fischer’s opinion on sin, abortion, and the decline of America. Levi preaches a sermon in which he tells the other children that they are the “key” generation to bring about the Second Coming of Christ, and Tory sobs when the camp counselors discuss the need to break the power of the enemy -- I suppose these are non-evangelicals, or the American government. What was most striking about the documentary was the reaction of children as they were being trained to be an army of God. Children sobbed over their supposed hypocrisies, raised their hands quickly to give their lives for God, and confessed while weeping how hard belief really is.

I watched most of this in a strange state of awe and discomfort. I was fascinated by the raw emotions of the children at the same time I had empathy for their self-loathing and tears. They were just kids after all. Yet as an American religious historian, I could not help but wonder if this film actually provided an accurate portrayal of the lived religion of these evangelical kids. Were these boys and girls always committed to becoming soldiers? Did they understand the red “LIFE” stickers adults placed over their mouths? Were these kids always so serious and committed? There were occasional glimpses of the children having fun from dancing exuberantly to Christian rap to boys scaring the wits out of each other with ghost stories. (The boys were reprimanded by adult, who suggested ghost stories were not quite holy).

Moreover, this film made me think about the religious lives of children. In his Between Heaven and Earth, Robert Orsi examined the religious lives of Catholic children among many other topics, and he argued that “[c]hildren are uniquely available to stand for the interiority of a culture and to offer embodied access to the inchoate possibilities of the culture’s imaginary futures” (78). Children, then, are often the place markers for a culture to present the future. To repeat Becky Fischer, children are “usable.” The counselors and the parents strived to create foot soldiers for the evangelical movement to take back what “rightfully” was a Christian nation. Yet with our great hopes for children also comes the possibility of failure. They might raise their hands, but they still want to tell ghost stories. For American religious historians, children pose an interesting problem. We have to realize how they represent the “interiority of the culture” while also seeing the children for themselves. How do we differentiate between the expectations of Fischer and the child’s own desires and needs?

For me, Jesus Camp was more an interesting exploration of the lives of evangelical children. Many were shocked and awed not only by the children’s behaviors but also the political message. The political message was not necessarily shocking, and I think it was handled (slightly) better by Michelle Goldberg in Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism. The more confounding puzzle is still how to study the religious lives of American children because as Fischer rightly noted children are future “history makers.”

(Interestingly, Fischer has closed the “Kids on Fire” camp due to the negative response associated with the documentary.)

Blum(ing) Around with DuBois

Some good weekend reading: BaldBlogger's interview with author Ed Blum, and a chapter-by-chapter summary and analysis of Ed's book W. E. B. DuBois: American Prophet. A little snippet from the interview:

I decided to write on Du Bois after that for a number of reasons. He was the great critic of the white supremacist America of the nineteenth century; religious historians ignored him basically; scholars on him, like David Lewis and Arnold Rampersad, had ignored religion. Finally, I found as I was reading Du Bois that I was learning so much about religion and society. I found that Du Bois seemed to understand the joys and the pains, the hopes and the disappointments that had come from faith and religious ideas in the American experiment. So I wanted to join his journey.

Photo from UMass Digital Archive.]

Billy Graham Channels Jonathan Edwards

John Fea, Billy Graham’s Rendition of “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”

The Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale has a fascinating on-line exhibit on Billy Graham’s preaching of Edwards’s famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Graham preached the sermon during his 1949 Los Angeles Crusade, the same crusade that made the evangelist a national figure when William Randolph Hearst urged his newspaper editors to “puff Graham.”

The exhibit includes several audio excerpts from the Graham’s version of the sermon, a video analysis of the sermon by Ken Minkema and Harry Stout, a transcript of Graham’s version, and an excellent paper on the 1949 crusade by Andrew Finstuen, one of Valparaiso University’s current Lilly Fellows in Arts and Humanities. Minkema’s comparison between the way Edwards and Graham preached the sermon is particularly interesting. Both he and Stout also make some astute observations as to why this sermon by one of the founders of American evangelicalism would probably not work very well among today’s evangelicals.

H-AMSTDY Reviews

KELLY BAKER, H-Amstdy and American Religions (or read the reviews from my h-net network)

As a book review editor for H-Amstdy, I thought it might be nice to post snippets of recent reviews in the realm of Religion in American History. This is also a way for me to shamelessly promote our network and highlight our reviewers.

LEADING OFF: Amanda Porterfield on David Holmes, The Faith of the Founders

Porterfield examines Holmes’s attempt to discredit scholarship that suggests the founders were Christian. To do this, Holmes tracks church attendance and membership as indicators of religiosity. While some might find fault with this method, Porterfield strives to understand what this means in this contentious battle over the founding. She writes:

Responding to recent claims about the deep commitment to Christianity among America's Founding Fathers, David L. Holmes sets the record straight in this comprehensive examination of the Founders' religious beliefs and behaviors. The men who conducted the American Revolution, ratified the U.S. Constitution, and served as president during the nation's early years espoused a variety of different beliefs, grouped by Holmes into three main types--non-Christian Deism, Christian Deism, and Christian orthodoxy. Holmes shows that only Samuel Adams, Elias Boudinot, and John Jay anticipated salvation through Christ, embraced the Trinity of the Godhead, and engaged regularly in prayer and Bible devotion. Most of America's early leaders were Deists of one form or the other whose religious beliefs and practices do not match the claims about them advanced by Tim LaHaye, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and other evangelical myth-makers.

NEXT UP: Tracy Neal Leavelle on Todd Kerstetter, God's Country, Uncle Sam's Land: Faith and Conflict in the American West.

Leavelle explores Kerstetter’s work, which relies on three case studies: Mormons, Lakota Ghost Dance, and Branch Davidians. Leavelle aptly renders Kerstetter’s denial of religious tolerance in the West. He writes:

The U.S. government was the primary sponsor of Western settlement and development, but its experiments in the region helped create and reinforce the power of the government through the extension of federal authority and bureaucracy. As for religion in the West, a subject of considerable and unfortunate neglect, Kerstetter contends that tolerance remained a dominant feature of interreligious engagement with a few notable exceptions. A surprisingly brief review of American religious history leads him to conclude that the emergence of a Protestant-dominated "religious mainstream" in the East set limits on Western religious groups like the Mormons and American Indians. The federal government expressed these mainstream religious values in its battle against Mormon polygamy and the Ghost Dance movement in the nineteenth century. Kerstetter asserts that the destruction of the Branch Davidian compound a century later "shows that remarkably little had changed since the 1890s when it came to attitudes about religion" (p. 32). The West may not have been the region of tolerance and openness that has attracted so much support and commentary in American mythology.

And last, but not least, the clean-up hitter: Sylvester Johnson on David Howard-Pitney, The African American Jeremiad: Appeals for Justice in America.

Johnson deftly analyzes Howard-Pitney’s understanding of the function of jeremiad by African American leaders to call for racial as well as gender equality. The work also highlights contemporary usage of jeremiad by Jesse Jackson and Alan Keyes to demonstrate that this rhetorical form is still alive and well in American culture. Johnson writes:

David Howard-Pitney contributes finely to understanding the cultural history of African American protest and accommodation in his African American Jeremiad. The role of propaganda in strategies of moral suasion is plainly visible in this study of the jeremiad as performed by African Americans. The term "jeremiad," of course, derives from the laments of Jeremiah in early Judaism, urging Judeans to view their God as one who punishes sin and rewards righteousness. Sacvan Bercovitch firmly established the jeremiad as a key category in interpretations of Euro-American religious history in The American Jeremiad (1978). Wilson Moses Jeremiah, in Black Messiahs and Uncle Toms (1982), also developed a rich assessment of this phenomenon among African Americans. Both works inform Howard-Pitney's volume. Howard-Pitney includes in his study the works of Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Ida Barnett-Wells, W. E. B. Du Bois, Mary McLeod Bethune, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. This second edition of Howard-Pitney's text expands upon the first by featuring a concluding chapter that examines the rhetorical styles and representational strategies of Jesse Jackson and Alan Keyes. Keyes, particularly, has garnered considerable acclaim for his renowned conservatism on social and public policy issues, which is viewed as atypical for African Americans.