Rick Santorum: 'You Don't Have Any Baptist Ministers Going on Jihad'

The West is engaged in an "existential fight" against "radical Islam," says former Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Rick Santorum, as "you don't have any Baptist ministers going on jihad."

The 2012 GOP presidential candidate, speaking at the Values Voter Summit and then with The Daily Beast, said the conflicts in Syria, Iraq, and the rest of the Middle East are "a clash of civilizations" that has been going on for most of the past 1,300 years.

As such, he told The Daily Beast, the conflict is not only between the West and the Muslim world, but also an internal fight within Islam as it danced with this tiger of modernity."

Meanwhile, Christianity no longer expands "by the sword," but instead has discovered that "religious liberty, freedom of conscience, and that persuasion is the way to spread the faith.”

In his speech at the Values Voter Summit, this past week, Santorum criticized President Barack Obama for not realizing the threat the Islamic State (ISIS) posed, and said the president is contradicting himself where Islam is concerned by calling it a religion of peace.

Instead, he believes the president should "take on radical Islam wherever he finds it as an existential threat to our allies and to us.”

He also took a shot at Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul and libertarians, saying that while the Constitution provides for limited government, that should not be confused with "small government."

Getting away from foreign policy, Santorum also told The Daily Beast that he does not support the positions that many Republican senatorial candidates carry, but he believes it's vitally important to get a GOP majority into the Senate.

"[I am] not crazy about the positions that some of these candidates have, but, at the same time, their voting record is going to be better on other issues," he told The Daily Beast.

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