Rick Santorum

“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:

“Then God said, ‘Let us make human beings in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

Santorum seems to want to steer his primary and general election campaign into a conflict that goes back deep into American history and has surfaced time and again.

An early triumph of secularism came with the Scopes trial in 1923 in Dayton, Tenn. Clarence Darrow, defending a teacher who had violated state law by introducing Darwin’s theory of evolution into the classroom, mocked the Old Testament teachings of the Evangelical Christians, to the merriment of the establishment.

From that day on, Darwinism was taught in our schools, first as theory, then as fact, then as higher truth. With the Darwinian tenet—we evolved, we were not created—established truth in the public schools, secularism set about driving its enemy, Christianity, out completely.

Under the Warren Court in the 1950s and 1960s, it succeeded.

All Christian commandments, holidays, prayers, pageants and plays were gone. 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.

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.”

Third, he is wagering that he has the rhetorical and political skills to make this case to the nation through the prism of a hostile media.

Fourth, he is betting that these issues are also the concern of a plurality of Americans in a country far different from the one he grew up in.

Finally, Santorum is betting that Americans still believe this is God’s country, that America’s laws should reflect his Law, and that they will elevate to the presidency a man who presents himself as the instrument to carry out God’s will.