By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — The uniqueness of the United States being founded on the concept of “God-given rights” could be the reason this nation won’t follow the historical pattern of other lands that went into irreversible decline, former presidential candidate Rick Santorum told a dinner of business executives here.
“America was founded on principles that no other nation has” in its basic recognition of God, Santorum, a former Pennsylvania U.S. senator and 2012 Republican presidential candidate, told a September 10 dinner of the Phoenix chapter of Legatus, a national organization of Catholic business leaders.
He added later that history shows a “pattern of ascendancy, then dominance, then decline” that never was reversed in nations that had become world leaders. However, “No country has ever been founded on God-given rights” before, as the U.S. was.
The European Union is made up of “radically secular states,” he said. “. . . Are we going to go the way of Europe? Are we going to abandon our roots?”
The U.S. is widely seen as beginning upon its own decline, with Democrat Barack Obama doing all he can to push this country downhill faster.
But, Santorum said, changing the culture and showing political courage can make a difference.
“I got into this to try to change the culture,” Santorum, a Catholic, said. He could have been speaking of his political career — during which some clergymen made a powerful impression on him — or his newer role as an entertainment-company executive.
Winning nearly four million votes and 11 states in GOP contests in 2012, Santorum came in second to former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who won the Republican presidential nomination but fumbled the White House away to incompetent incumbent Obama.
Santorum told the dinner of 78 Arizona business leaders that he’s weighing whether to run for the GOP presidential nomination in 2016.
Last year he became CEO of Texas-based EchoLight Studios, which describes itself as “America’s fastest-growing faith and family film company” (echolight.com).
“The church is the only hope for America,” he told the dinner, adding that EchoLight will be holding movie premieres at churches.
The project is called “EchoLight Cinemas.” Christian pastors are invited online to “Imagine premiering world-class redemptive films in your church, building community within and reaching outside the four walls to engage those within your city” (echolightcinemas.com/cinemas/).
An online video shows Santorum extending the opportunity for “boldly proclaiming the beautiful truth of God’s work in our lives.” The video goes on to say that beginning in September 2014, EchoLight will issue one world-premiere movie in each quarter of the year that can be shown at churches as many times as desired within 30 days, before it goes into public release.
In politics, Santorum told the Legatus dinner, there are few leaders in Washington, D.C. Instead, “They follow,” repeatedly turning to pollsters “trying to find out where you folks are.”
But even when Americans had soundly voted for traditional marriage on state ballots from coast to coast, Republican spokesmen quickly threw in the towel when unaccountable judges purported to start discovering a new right to “same-sex marriage.”
“We haven’t even lost yet, and we’ve given up” on the marriage issue when Republicans say, “Time to move on” to something else, Santorum said.
“Leaders have convictions, and they lead. Leaders aren’t afraid to fail,” Santorum told the Legatus Catholics. “. . . We need you desperately . . . I believe the next awakening in America is going to come from the Catholic Church. It has to.”
Referring to his decision to stand up for morality in the political world, he said, “Don’t worry about being popular. . . . You’re going to be singled out and ridiculed as one of ‘those guys’ . . . thanks be to God.”
One of his daughters started to manage part of his presidential campaign for social media, he said, but “she couldn’t take it” because of the depth of “the hatred, the vitriol” directed against her father.
It wasn’t those many years ago when defending unborn babies against late-pregnancy abortion and defining marriage as between a male and a female would have been regarded as the most normal, honorable thing in the world. But such positions have been singled out for attack by social radicals dominating communications media and twisting people’s attitudes.
To watch television, Santorum said earlier in his talk, “You will be stunned – the sex, the violence, the filth, it will blow you away.”
The “average kid” watches eight hours a day of television, he said, in addition to attending a school where “the Bible can’t be mentioned.”
Santorum said the political left wing believed that if it could change America’s leaders, then “America will change. . . . They didn’t go after the working stiff” to effect the transformation, but used higher education to train such people as corporate officials and clergy.
“The left has effectively taken over the levers of power and used them to transform this country,” beginning with the universities, he said, adding that the left uses universities “to educate your children to everything you don’t believe.”
Warning against donating money to universities that are “destroying the future of this country,” Santorum exclaimed, “Stop it!”
After being elected to the U.S. House in 1990, he served two two-year terms but never spoke about abortion because, Santorum said, just speaking about it would mark one as “a zealot . . . I just didn’t want to talk about it.”
But after he won a U.S. Senate campaign in 1994, Santorum said, two clergymen had a powerful influence on him, a Catholic priest at his parish in Great Falls, Va., and a Presbyterian minister who conducted a Bible study that another senator invited him to attend.
The priest preached the Gospel as Santorum had never experienced before. “He changed my life.”
Meanwhile, “I’m getting a double barrel” of effect because of the Bible study, too. It “gave me the opportunity to be who God wanted me to be.”
Santorum said he entered the Senate debate on partial-birth abortion, which brought down the displeasure of pro-abortion media organs and produced national attention.
“My children thought my first name had changed to ‘Extreme,’” Santorum joked. “That was what I had to deal with,” but “it was worth it.”
He lost his campaign for a third consecutive Senate term in 2006, a very bad year for Republicans anyway, but the other side “dumped in tens of millions of dollars” to defeat him, to make sure such “a zealot” never could run again, Santorum said.
However, a few years later he zealously was in the run for the presidency, and Santorum shows no sign of disappearing from the cultural or political fronts.
Powered by WPtouch Mobile Suite for WordPress