On April 20th, Rick Santorum appeared on “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” and shared his concerns with the direction America is moving on the issue of religious liberty:
Tony Perkins: Explain to our listeners why you think religious liberty is at threat in this country today, and why we must defend it.
Santorum: Well, for the first time in the history of our country that the government is attacking people, is prosecuting people, are calling for people to be rehabilitated, is constraining in the military with our chaplaincy. We now see chaplain after chaplain being dismissed for not accepting the secular orthodoxy that this administration wants to put forward, criticizing people for holding biblical truths and counseling them in a biblically coherent way. We see businesses being prosecuted. We see all sorts of activity on the legislative front, where they’re actually pushing, and you saw in Indiana, are pushing bills that simply protect employees’ rights to be able to practice their faith consistent with an employment situation. And those things which were unanimously passed are now being fought against. We’ve seen a hostility to religion that we’ve never seen in the history of our country, and—I read an interesting article the other day: it’s actually not that free exercise of religion that’s being attacked, it’s actually a new religion that’s being established, so we have, essentially, the state establishing a new religion, a secular state religion, a secular orthodoxy that everybody is going to have to comply with.
So, while we don’t have the threat that was at the time of our founders, the Church of England, you know, imposing the English Church on America. We have now the secular church that is being imposed on this country, and anybody that defects is subject to persecution and prosecution. That is a very serious threat to liberty in America. And the film, One Generation Away, does a wonderful job of going through all these different cases from Hobby Lobby, to the cake bakers, to the wedding florists, to the chaplaincy, where in a very practical way, colleges and universities, high schools, you’ve seen it in all different aspects of life, how religious liberty is eroding in a concrete way, and hearing from the best and brightest frankly from both sides, as to what their argument is as to what religious liberty should look like going forward.
Joshua Pinho works for American Principles in Action.
