Over the weekend, Rick Santorum made news when he attacked President Obama’s “phony theology.” Santorum clarified that he was talking about the president’s environmental record and not his faith, insisting that he was not claiming that Obama was not a Christian.

But back in 2008, Santorum had a slightly different view, which he related during remarks he delivered at an Oxford Center for Religion and Public Life event on “The Press & People of Faith in Politics.”

During the Q&A following his speech, Santorum was repeatedly asked about Barack Obama’s Christian faith, which he asserted was simply “an avenue for power” for Obama while claiming there was a “conscious disconnection” between Obama’s proclamations of faith and his stances on public policy issues.

In fact, said Santorum, there really is no such thing as a “liberal Christian” at all and anyone who doesn’t share his right-wing views doesn’t really have any right to claim to be a Christian:

[I]s there such thing as a sincere liberal Christian, which says that we basically take this document and re-write it ourselves? Is that really Christian? That’s a bigger question for me. And the answer is, no, it’s not. I don’t think there is such a thing. To take what is plainly written and say that I don’t agree with that, therefore, I don’t have to pay attention to it, means you’re not what you say you are. You’re a liberal something, but you’re not a Christian. That’s sort of how I look at it. When you go so far afield of that and take what is a salvation story and turn it into a liberation theology story, which is done in the Catholic world as well as in the evangelical world, you have abandoned Christendom, in my opinion. And you don’t have a right to claim it.

During the same Q&A, Santorum also complained about his treatment at the hands of the press when he was in office, claiming that he was constantly referred to as an “extremist” or “fundamentalist” or “zealot” simply because he stood in opposition to “sexual freedom”: