In order to promote his upcoming movie One Generation Away (about how Christianity is that close to extinction because religious rights are supposedly eroding away), Rick Santorum appeared on Bryan Fischer‘s radio show yesterday. Because nobody else cares…

It won’t shock you to hear that the men believer secular public schools are (somehow) pushing an atheist worldview onto students. In their minds, neutrality is inherently anti-Christian. But their fix might surprise you: Just call secularism a religion and the problem is solved since religion has no place in a public school!

The idea that, if you take religion out of the public square, if you take the Bible out of the classroom, that that’s neutral, well, no it’s not neutral! It’s a different worldview! I think we should start calling secularism a religion, because if we did, then we could ban that, too… They’ve hidden behind the fact that the absence of religion is not a religion of itself, which, in fact, it is because it has certain moral values and certain teachings that look like a religious, a type of moral worldview. So what we have to start doing, as Christians, is reassert ourselves and say, you know what? The freedom of religion is not the freedom from religion. We should be in the public square. We should be taught in the schools. This should be an open marketplace of ideas instead of throttling one particular perspective under the name of it being offensive to some people.

Did you catch Fischer just smiling and nodding the entire time, as if this was the most intelligent thing he’s ever heard?

Of course, in Santorum’s world, only Christianity would be taught in the schools because it’s not like he’d get behind the teaching of Islam. So much for an open marketplace of ideas…

I know I say this all the time, but no public school is teaching (nor should they) that students should stop believing in God. Removing “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance keeps things neutral, while reciting the phrase “One nation, under no God” would be advocating atheism. There’s a difference. Bald isn’t a hair color, off isn’t a TV channel, and neutrality isn’t the promotion of atheism.

(via Right Wing Watch)



