“America’s greatness lay in a good, a moral, and a virtuous people.” Liberty was a good thing, but the Founders sought “well-ordered liberty” through “moral cultivation” of citizens. In other words, Santorum has shown conservative evangelicals that they can have their liberty and legislate private morality too.

Last month, when prominent evangelical pastors and political activists emerged from their Texas powwow to announce that they had anointed Rick Santorum as their standard-bearer, the blogosphere pronounced the endorsement too little, too late, and kept all sights firmly on Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich — until this week.

Santorum’s string of victories on Tuesday took the mainstream media by surprise: he is so extreme that they have had a hard time taking him seriously. His theocratic statements seem self-caricaturing. He has asserted that the right to privacy “does not exist,” equated homosexual sex with “man on dog” relations, and compared the campaign against same-sex marriage to the war on terror.

Yet Santorum’s surge in momentum as the primary campaign moved to the evangelical heartland was a long time coming, and not because his social positions are an exercise in garden-variety bigotry. Evangelicals’ embrace of Santorum illuminates a crucial shift in American political culture: their honeymoon with the Tea Party seems to be over.

They have turned away from the cries for small government and liberty — about which they have always been ambivalent — to rekindle their love affair with theocratic Catholicism. Santorum’s statements reflect not knee-jerk prejudice, but something much more powerful: philosophically reasoned prejudice, based on centuries of Roman Catholic natural law.

One dismissive reviewer of Santorum’s 2005 book, “It Takes a Family,” wrote in The Philadelphia Inquirer that Santorum is “one of the finest minds of the thirteenth century.” (An opponent once said the same of that other provocative Catholic conservative, William F. Buckley, Jr.) This is no insult: it is the heart of Santorum’s appeal to conservative evangelicals.

Santorum attacks gay rights and abortion not by spouting biblical verses or goading his audiences’ gut feelings, but by playing the medieval scholastic theologian and reasoning from first principles. There is no need to quote St. Paul to prove that homosexual sex is an affront to the natural order and same-sex marriage a detriment to civilization: Santorum appeals to natural law, what he calls the Catholic Church’s “operating instructions for human beings.”

“Human beings have a purpose, or ‘end,’ a telos,” Santorum writes in his book.
According to the tradition of natural law, every part of our bodies has a telos too. In the case of our genitalia, that natural end is heterosexual sex for the purpose of procreation. It follows that marriage between a man and a woman “is fundamentally natural,” Santorum writes. “The promise of natural law is that we will be the happiest, and freest, when we follow the law built into our nature as men and women. For liberals, however, nature is too confining, and thus is the enemy of freedom.”

Later on, he elaborates on his jaundiced view of freedom with a quotation from Edmund Burke: “Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains on their appetites.”

How could Tea Partiers who once dressed in three-cornered hats and waved “Live Free or Die” flags now swoon to reasoning like this? The truth is that the Tea Party’s demand for “strict construction” of the Constitution and a return to the Founders’ “true intentions” is not really a cry for unfettered freedom. It is an attempt to uncover the immutable, divine will of the Founders — a homegrown version of natural law that would provide grounds for forbidding abortion, same-sex marriage and “Obamacare” in the name of American liberty.

Santorum was well ahead of the Tea Party on this. In “It Takes a Family,” he drafted John Adams and other founders into the ranks of natural lawgivers who believed

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