Rick Santorum’s religion-infused politics have come under greater scrutiny after the presidential candidate said this weekend that environment-loving President Obama believes in a “phony theology” and one of his aides this week said Santorum believes the commander-in-chief holds “radical Islamic policies,” a comment she later retracted. Now some of the Republican’s past Bible-thumping comments, far more jarring, shocking and truly bizarre than anything we’ve heard this cycle thus far, are coming back to haunt him, and promise to complicate his campaign even more.

As the website Right Wing Watch pointed out last week (and as Stephen Colbert and Matt Drudge have also noted), in 2008, then-former Senator Santorum, appeared at Florida’s Catholic Ave Maria University and delivered a wild speech in which he warned that Satan was coming to wreak havoc here in the United States.

This is not a political war at all. This is not a cultural war. This is a spiritual war. And the Father of Lies has his sights on what you would think the Father of Lies would have his sights on: a good, decent, powerful, influential country – the United States of America. If you were Satan, who would you attack in this day and age. There is no one else to go after other than the United States and that has been the case now for almost two hundred years, once America’s preeminence was sown by our great Founding Fathers.

According to Santorum, the “acidic quality of time” has “eroded” our culture, making us susceptible to the prince of darkness’ wicked ways, including in the religious and academic realms — and, yes, Hollywood and the NBA as well.

“Whether its sensuality of vanity of the famous in America, they are peacocks on display and they have taken their poor behavior and made it fashionable. The corruption of culture, the corruption of manners, the corruption of decency is now on display whether it’s the NBA or whether it’s a rock concert or whether it’s on a movie set,” Santorum said at the school, founded by Domino’s Pizza founder and anti-gay activist Tom Monaghan.

Now, these comments came in 2008: Four years ago, so this Satan of which Santorum speaks is either taking his sweet time getting here, has arrived and we are somehow unaware (wouldn’t the presence of such evil be readily evident to everyone, even atheists?) or he doesn’t exist.

Either way, Santorum’s comments are on par with some of his other remarks from the past, like when he said, while discussing the official legalization of gay sex, “If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything.” That comment ended up turning Santorum into an enduring sexual neologism: “the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex.”

Will this “Satan is coming for America” become equally controversial and embarrassing for the White House hopeful? Almost definitely.

Here’s audio of Santorum’s outrageous remarks: