Theocracy alert: Former senator and Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum calls upon an audience of pastors and Christian activists to save America by putting Bibles back in the public schools.

Santorum rallied an audience of Christian extremists by suggesting educators should defy a Supreme Court ruling against school-sponsored Bible readings while speaking at the Awakening, a conference organized by the Liberty Counsel, an anti-gay, Christian extremist organization.

Speaking at the conference on Saturday, Santorum argued that the U.S. needs to return to God, saying the U.S. is at a crossroads:

We are on a crossroads in American history, a crossroads that looks like we are heading down in a direction that, let’s be honest, no civilization has ever been able to recover from.

Santorum continued:

The left cannot be successful in a country of God-given rights. It can’t. Because they want to be the purveyor of rights, and if God is the purveyor of rights, then they lose. We have an obligation to educate, to form, within our churches to preach, within our families to educate, and to fight within our schools. Why are Bibles no longer in public schools? Don’t give me the Supreme Court. The reason Bibles are no longer in the public schools is because we let them take them out of the public schools.

The former presidential candidate concluded:

How much are you willing to sacrifice? One person got the Bibles out of the schools. We have more than one person here! But you’ve got to have the same passion in preserving our country as they do to transform it.

Let’s be honest, Bibles have always been in the public schools, and students have always been free to read the Bible. When Santorum says he wants to get Bibles back in the public schools, he is really saying he wants public schools to teach and promote Christianity.

Santorum is a confused and intellectually inept individual, promoting a dangerous agenda rooted in Christian extremism. Previously, Santorum made the absurd claim that the separation of church and state is not an American idea, but a communist idea.

Santorum and other Republican presidential hopefuls like Mike Huckabee advocate for what amounts to a Christian theocracy: a dangerous impulse that poses a real and present danger to the U.S. and the secular values upon which the nation was founded.

(H/T Right Wing Watch)