What, Santorum worry?
What, Santorum worry? Christopher Halloran / Shutterstock.com

Rick Santorum, you clever fink. You just pulled off the slimiest campaign maneuver of the election season, and you haven't even declared your candidacy. My hat is off to you, sir. I raise a toast to your cunning, in addition to my usual middle finger.

What a shame that nobody seems to have noticed the incredible scam you're about to pull off: broadcasting a stealth campaign ad to millions of churchgoers this weekend, disguised as a friendly religious message? Brilliant! And the fact that you've also found a way to make money in the deal, well, that just proves your Republican bona fides.

I'd like to take a moment and explain your slick little trick to the rest of the world. You deserve all the credit that's coming to you for this one.

Everyone please cast your minds back to April of 2012, when Rick suspended his campaign after a mere 362 days of struggle and strife. We all felt a hole in our lives for a while—a big, gaping, sloppy hole—and the rest of the election season just wasn't the same without him there to call gay soldiers "a social experiment" and accuse President Obama of following "a phony theology." (Not a normal one, like where you eat a piece of bread that turns into a man's body.)

You might've thought that he just sat back for the last three years, twiddling his thumbs, alphabetizing his sock drawer, and calling Reputation.com every few days to see if they've managed to do something about that Dan Savage person.

But no—after the dust settled from the 2012 campaign, he got to work running a film studio.

Wait, what?

Yes, it's true. Throughout 2012, he helped raise money to start a Christian film studio called Echolight. Then in 2013, he came on board as CEO, fired and sued the two cofounders, and set to work making some truly dreadful religious movies.

Among them: Hoovey, a film about a good Christian boy who was nearby killed by a brain tumor, forcing him to relearn basic motor functions while affirming his faith in the God who gave him the tumor in the first place. Also The Christmas Candle, about an English village where every 25 years an angel visits the local candlemaker to grant one miracle. And then there's Foolishness, the story of two young skaters who trade "the destructive habits of boys to serve Christ as men" through a program called "Skatebible."

I should probably clarify that all of the preceding paragraph is true, because I described some of these films to a friend and they thought I was kidding because those sound like parodies of Christian film descriptions. No, really. This is actually what Rick Santorum's been working on for the last three years. Bizarrely, Rick's output is now more suited for MST3K or The Flophouse than for MSNBC or The Situation Room.

Amongst all of these great works of art, you'll also find a film called One Generation Away. I nearly called it a "documentary," but that's not quite the right word, in the same way that Triumph of the Will isn't exactly a documentary. It's a collection of interviews, innuendo, and propaganda about how the queers and heathens are coming to take religion away by insisting that they be allowed to marry and be treated equally by the law; and of course, it's up to the persecuted American Christians to stand up to them.

The title is a reference to a Reagan quote about how American democracy is always "one generation away" from being lost, and so we all have to guard against creeping socialist ideas like Medicare, peace protests, and programs to prevent the poor from dropping dead. Rick Santorum's film company mixed up a batch of Reagan nostalgia, peppered it with interviews from Tony Perkins (president of the antigay Family Research Council), threw in a few anecdotes about school prayer and gay wedding cakes, and sculpted it into a polemic intended to frighten the gullible.

(The trailer literally features a wooden cross being pushed over, accompanied by Nazi imagery. "A little on-the-nose," a real film executive might've said, if Echolight were run by real film executives instead of a failed politician.)

Obviously, this movie is boring and dumb. So how can they to get anyone to see it? That is the question Rick Santorum must have pondered from high on Mount Crumpet while drumming his fingers.

The solution is both diabolical and irritating. Step One: Echolight has teamed up with the Family Research Council to make up a special new day when churches around the country are supposed to "Stand for Marriage." They made a trailer for the film that doesn't even look like a trailer—it just looks like a friendly little message from Tony and Rick and their friend Mike Huckabee about how important straight marriage and religion are.

Step Two: On April 28, thousands of churches (46,000, according to FRC) will pause their religious services to screen that short video message. And gee whiz, what do you know: the video features quotes from Rick Santorum, what a coincidence; and it ends with a reminder that churchgoers can purchase One Generation Away for the terribly reasonable price of $20.

I dissected all of the problems with the video message here:

But the folks in the churches won't be thinking critically about what they're seeing. They'll just hear that their faith is under attack, and somehow baking a cake for gays is part of that, and all they have to do to solve the problem is send someone $20 in exchange for a DVD. Perfecto.

This kills two doves with one stone. It guilt-nags churchgoers into shelling out some cash for a super-boring DVD, thereby making Rick's company and FRC a tidy profit; and it also puts Rick's face directly in front of the people whose support he'll need once he announces that he thinks he can be president again.

Not a bad grift.

Four years ago, Santorum struggled throughout the campaign with poor fundraising and visibility. Everyone thought he was crazy when he followed that up by taking over a film studio. Now it looks like he might've just been working on a long con this whole time.