WASHINGTON - Sudden Republican front-runner Rick Santorum said Sunday he "accepts" that Barack Obama is Christian, a day after he appeared to challenge the U.S. president's beliefs by saying he was driven by a "phoney theology."
"I wasn't suggesting that the president's not a Christian," Santorum said with a chuckle on CBS's "Face the Nation" at the end of a week punctuated by a series of eyebrow-raising remarks on religion and birth control, in particular.
Instead, Santorum said, he was referring to the "radical environmentalists" in the Obama fold who are determined to shape policy around issues like climate change, a global phenomenon he said is "just not scientifically proven."
"When you have a world view that elevates the Earth above man and says we can't take those resources because we're going to harm the Earth .... this is all an attempt to centralize power and give more power to the government," he said.
"This is not questioning the president's beliefs in Christianity, I'm talking about the belief that man should be in charge of the Earth."
In Ohio on Saturday, however, the staunch social conservative insisted that Obama's policies are not based on the Bible and accused him of "imposing his secular values" on America.
More than any other candidate in the topsy turvy race for the Republican nomination, Santorum has been actively pushing the red-hot buttons of America's always simmering culture wars, putting social issues like birth control, alleged religious intolerance, abortion and same-sex marriage on the front burner.
Far-right stances on such issues are wildly popular among the social conservatives and Christian evangelicals of the Republican party's base.
They're equally unpopular among women of all demographics and independents, the very voters that polls suggest will flock to Obama in droves if Santorum, a devout Roman Catholic, succeeds in wresting the nomination away from Mitt Romney.
The remarks on Sunday from the former Pennsylvania senator capped an eventful few days for his campaign as it surges both nationally and in Michigan, the state where Romney was born and raised.
The Mormon businessman, whose father was once governor of Michigan and a longtime auto industry executive, now lags in second place behind Santorum in advance of the state primary on Feb. 28.
Santorum, however, spent much of the week in hot water for his recently unearthed insistence to an evangelical blog that birth control poses a threat to the United States.
As president, Santorum said in October, he'd confront the "dangers of contraception" and the religious groups who support it.
"It's not OK, because it's a licence to do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be," he said. "They're supposed to be within marriage, for purposes that are, yes, conjugal ... but also pro-creative."
His campaign dismissed the remarks as their candidate playing to his audience, adding Santorum wouldn't outlaw contraceptives as president but believes states should be free to do so if they want.
Meantime, Santorum's biggest campaign donor, billionaire Foster Freiss, was forced to apologize for a joke about contraception that prompted outrage from women's groups.
"Back in my days, they used Bayer aspirin for contraceptives," Friess said on MSNBC on Thursday, adding: "The gals put it between their knees, and it wasn't that costly."
In a statement on his website, Friess said the "joke bombed," writing that "many didn't recognize it as a joke but thought it was my prescription for today's birth control practices."
"In fact, the only positive comments I got were from folks who remembered it from 50 years back," he continued. "Birth control pills weren't yet available, so everyone laughed at the silliness on how an aspirin could become a birth control pill."
Santorum bristled late last week when asked about Friess's remarks on CBS, calling it "gotcha" journalism to even bring them up.
"So now I'm gonna have to respond to when every supporter says something?" he asked indignantly.
Robert Gibbs, the one-time White House press secretary who's now an Obama campaign strategist, maligned Santorum for his remarks in Ohio on Saturday, apparently dismissing the former senator's explanation on CBS.
He was "well over the line" for questioning Obama's Christian faith, Gibbs told ABC's "This Week."
"It's wrong, it's destructive and it makes it virtually impossible to solve the problems we face together as Americans," he said. "It's just time to get rid of this mindset in our politics that if we disagree, we have to question character and faith."
Santorum nonetheless kept hammering away at faith-based issues on Sunday, launching another attack against Obama's health-care reform legislation.
He said the federal government should never require health-care providers to fully cover the costs of pre-natal screening, saying such procedures only lead to more abortions.
Amniocentesis in particular "more often than not" results in women terminating their pregnancies, he said.
"People have a right to do it, but to have the government force people to provide it free just is a bit loaded," he said.
Obama, he added, "has a very bad record on the issue of children who are disabled and are being killed in the womb."
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