Rick Santorum Church

Rick Santorum - Church

(This is page 2 of 4 of Rick Santorum's speech at Ave Maria University. Rick Santorum begins this section by contrasting the Catholic church against the Protestant church.)

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Rick Santorum:

Once the colleges fell and those who were being educated in our institutions, the next was the church. Now you’d say, "Wait, the Catholic Church?" No. We all know that this country was founded on a Judeo-Christian ethic but the Judeo-Christian ethic was a Protestant Judeo-Christian ethic. Sure the Catholics had some influence, but this was a Protestant country and the Protestant ethic, mainstream, mainline Protestantism - and of course we look at the shape of mainline Protestantism in this country, and it is in shambles - it is gone from the world of Christianity as I see it.

So they attacked mainline Protestantism, they attacked the church, and what better way to go after smart people who also believe they’re pious to use both vanity and pride to also go after the church.

After that - you start destroying the church and you start destroying academia - the culture is where their next success was and I need not even go into the state of the popular culture today.

But whether it's sensuality or vanity of the famous in America, they are peacocks on display and they have taken their poor behavior and made it fashionable. The corruption of culture, the corruption of manners, the corruption of decency is now on display whether it’s the NBA or whether it’s a rock concert or whether it’s on a movie set.

The fourth, and this was harder. Now I know you’re going to challenge me on this one, but politics and government was (sic) the next to fall.

You say, "Well, you would think they would be the first to fall, as fallible as we are in politics," but people in political life get elected by ordinary folks from lots of places all over the country where the foundations of this country are still strong. So while we may certainly have had examples, the body politic held up fairly well up until the last couple of decades, but it is falling too.

I give the example of our presidential candidate on the Democrat side. I encourage you to get this interview that he did with the Chicago Sun Times back in 2004 when he was running for the United States Senate. It's a story by a religion reporter. Barack Obama was asked, "What is sin?" His answer [was], "Being out of alignment with my values." So now, we have the truly first post-modern presidential candidate clearly, explicitly defining his own reality. Politics was next.

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