PORTAGE, MI -- The United States needs to move back to its core values, where people put faith, education and hard work the center of their lives and nobody makes excuses, famed neurosurgeon and potential presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson told a rapt Kalamazoo audience Thursday night.

"I think the Founding Fathers would turn over in their graves if they saw what was going on now," Carson said.

"It's disturbing that today, if you're pro-life, you're called anti-woman," he said."If you support traditional families, you're called homophobic. If you're a white person who disagrees with a progressive black, you're called racist. If you're black and disagrees with progressives, you're called crazy."

More than 1,300 people attended the event, held at Valley Family Church in Portage and hosted by the Kalamazoo Christian School Association as a fundraiser. Tickets were $50, although the audience included youths from a half-dozen community organizations who were brought in to hear Carson's message and life story.

RELATED STORY: K'zoo audience talks about Carson's political future.

A Detroit native, Carson, 63, recently retired as director of neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital and has been become a popular figure in conservative politics for his outspoken opposition to gay marriage and the ACA, as well as his support for a flat tax system.

It now appears Carson is on the verge of announcing his candidacy for the 2016 Republican nomination for president. Last weekend, an hour-long documentary produced by Carson's business manager aired as an advertisement in 37 television markets around the country, and the speculation is the documentary is laying the groundwork for Carson's campaign launch.

During an hour-long speech Thursday that was folksy and often humorous, Carson did not reference any political ambitions. But his speech -- billed as a talk on how faith and family helped him achieve success -- liberally mixed in his vision for America.

Among Carson's observations:

-- He opposes the ACA "because health care should be in your hands, not the government's hands."

-- "I'm not politically correct. I don't believe in political correctness.I think it's antithetical" to the nation's founding values of free speech.

-- American education has been "dumbed down. It's time to stop making excuse and raise expectations. But that's something we can do on a local level. We don't need the federal government telling us how to educate our children. That's where indoctrination begins."

-- "I've had many wonderful and intense conversations with Nobel scientists about creation. ... At some point, I resort to telling them, 'What you believe is based on faith. But my faith is based on God and yours is based on man."

-- "We need to reach a point in this country where we are much more interested in being Americans than being Democrats and Republicans.

-- "We're making an attempt to push God out of our nation. Obama said we are not a Judeo-Christian nation, but he doesn't get to decide that. We do."

Carson also talked his controversial 2013 speech at the National Prayer Breakfast, which launched the talk of a Carson presidential run.

He said as he was preparing his talk, he thought: "Lord, I know there's you want me to say and didn't know what it was until that morning."

Carson's talk also described about his improbable road to becoming a renowned neurosurgeon.

Key to that success, Carson said, was his mother, a woman who grew up in rural Georgia, dropped out of school after third grade and was married at 13. She and her husband moved to Detroit, where Carson was born in 1951.

When Carson was 8 and his brother was 10, the couple divorced when it was discovered that Carson's father was a bigamist with a second family.

Carson's mother typically worked two or three jobs as a domestic to support her sons, Carson said, but they still lived in dire poverty, in dilapidated housing infested by rats and cockroaches, in tough neighborhoods where Carson saw people laying in the street with bullet holes.

Yet, Carson said, "she never felt complained and she never felt sorry for herself. That's probably the most valuable thing that she did with me and my brother."

Still, Carson said he wasn't an easy son -- he was a "horrible" student in early elementary school, and also had an uncontrollable temper.

But his mother made him and his brother read two library books a week and write book reports. Resentful at first, he learned to love reading and within a year and a half went from the bottom of the class to the top.

Meanwhile, he learned to curb his temper after he attempted to stab a classmate in the abdomen, only to have the knife stopped by the boy's belt. Scared that he might have caused serious injury "over nothing," Carson -- a devout Seventh Day Adventisti -- locked himself in the bathroom for three hours and read the Bible.

"My temper was never a problem after that," he said.

Today, Carson said, he embraces the importance of being nice.

"If you're nice to other people, they'll be nice to you," he said.

He then made the audience take a pledge to "be nice to everyone for a whole week."

"Some people will stroke out" trying to fulfill that pledge, he joked.

"During that week, think about putting other people first. Think about what kind of nation we would have, what kind of world we would have, if everybody thought of others first," he said.

He also told the audience that it's their job "to be courageous and realize that freedom is not free and must be fought for.

"That's the only way we're going to be one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

Julie Mack covers K-12 education and writes a column for Kalamazoo Gazette. Email her at jmack1@mlive.com, call her at 269-350-0277 or follow her on Twitter @kzjuliemack.