Pat Buchanan Defends Rick Santorum - And Rightly So!

The political beliefs of Barack Obama, said Rick Santorum last week, come out of "[S]ome phony theology. ... Not a theology based on the Bible, a different theology, but no less a theology."

Given the opportunity on "Face the Nation" to amend his remarks, Santorum declined the offer and plunged on: "I don't question the president's faith. I've repeatedly said that I believe the president is a Christian. He says he is a Christian. I am talking about his worldview and the way he approaches problems in this country. ... They're different than how most people do in America."

What Santorum is saying is that in the struggle for the soul of America, though Obama may profess to be (and may be) a Christian, he is leading the anti-Christian forces of what Pope Benedict XVI has called "Radical Secularism."

In Plano, Texas, last week, Santorum was even more explicit: "They (the Obamaites) are taking faith and crushing it. Why? Why? When you marginalize faith in America, when you remove the pillar of God-given rights, then what's left is the French Revolution. ... What's left in France became the guillotine."

[Santorum continued,] "Ladies and gentlemen, we're a long way from that, but if we...follow the path of President Obama and his overt hostility to faith in America, then we are headed down that road."

Santorum is saying that where Thomas Jefferson attributed our human equality and our "Right" to life and liberty to a Creator, secularism sees no authority higher than the state. But what the state gives, the state can take away.

Allow me to reiterate that, my friends, because it's at the heart of the matter:

"What the state giveth... the state can taketh away."

Santorum is wagering his political future on his assessment of where we are in 2012. He sees America dividing ever more deeply between those who hold to traditional Christian views on marriage, life and morality, and those who have abandoned such beliefs. He believes that the former remain America's silent majority, and he is offering himself as their champion against a militant secularism that has lately angered more than just the [ideological] Right.

Last week, Santorum declared that radical environmentalism is also rooted in this same anti-Biblical view of mankind's purpose here on earth, [saying,] "I think that a lot of radical environmentalists have it backwards. This idea that man is here to serve the earth as opposed to husband its resources and be good stewards of the earth. Man is here to use the resources and use them wisely, but man is not here to serve the earth."

This is straight out of Genesis...

Santorum is undeniably taking an immense gamble here. ... First, he is wagering that by emphasizing his moral, social and cultural conservatism, he can trump Mitt Romney's Bain Capital "job-creator" card. Second, he is wagering that Obama, with his latest attempt to impose secular values on Catholic institutions, can be portrayed as possessed of an "overt hostility to faith in America."

Where Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman and Jimmy Carter had declared that America is a Christian nation, Obama has declared, "We do not consider ourselves a Christian nation," but rather a nation of all faiths.