About Us

MISSION

EPPC's Program to Promote and Protect America's Freedom, directed by Senior Fellow Rick Santorum, works to identify, study, and heighten awareness of the threats to America and the West from a growing array of anti-Western forces including radical Islamic or otherwise anti-American sentiment, and states that increasingly cast a shadow over our future and that violate religious liberty around the world.

The program's mission also focuses on domestic threats to America's freedom and its moral foundation by addressing a variety of issues, including our long-term fiscal health and the tax burden on families and entrepreneurs, and challenges and threats to other foundational freedoms of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in a virtuous society.

Operationally, the program identifies, develops, and promotes solutions through forums, panels, lectures and by giving those with policy proposals the platform to discuss ideas that help confront these challenges and threats effectively. Emerging threats are also highlighted through weekly Gathering Storm emails.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS IN 2009

The Program to Protect America's Freedom has spent another productive year educating opinion leaders, policymakers, and the broader public about those threats both internal and external to Western civilization that seek to undermine our greatest ethical imperatives and U.S. national security. From the stealth creep of radical Islam into Western institutions and culturally accepted patterns of thought, to the geopolitical alliances strengthening between anti-American actors like Iran, Venezuela, and radical Islamist groups, to broader questions of international religious freedom and the advised future of U.S. public diplomacy, we have sought to illuminate some of the foundational undercurrents fueling those actors who increasingly cast a shadow over our future.

In cooperation with Rick Santorum's weekly commentary on Fox News channel, biweekly opinion editorial for the Philadelphia Inquirer, weekly newsletters on the geopolitical elements of the "Gathering Storm," and lectures at Stanford University, University of Nebraska, and like-minded organizations such as the Center for Security Policy and Council for National Policy, the Program to Protect America's Freedom has also hosted a variety of forums to educate journalists, scholars, and policymakers on the threats described above. We kicked off the year 2009 with a two-part symposium exploring the relationship between Shariah law and the West, before welcoming several religious leaders from abroad, including Archbishop Raphael Cheenath of India, the Latin Rite Archbishop of Baghdad, His Excellency Jean Benjamin Sleiman, each of whom discussed the various implications of the political curtailing of religious freedom in their respective countries. Most recently, EPPC hosted a high-level roundtable evaluating President Obama's approach in "engaging" the Muslim-Arab world, with a particular emphasis on his Cairo speech from June.

Rick Santorumalso has a vested interested in using filmto help communicatehis messagethe public. MPower Pictures' The Stoning of Soraya M, a film he helped to promote, is based on a French journalist's account of life and death in a small town in post revolutionary Iran, and is set to be released inthe spring of 2009. EPPC has also partnered with Coldwater Media to produce In the Red Chair: Tawfik Hamid, a powerful documentary featuring the story of a former jihadist who was once indoctrinated in the radicalized teachings of Islam, only to escape to the other side with a tale of reform, hope, and redemption.

This fall we are looking forward to evaluating oppositional movements to radical leftist regimes in Latin America, as well as the eschatological motivations underlying much of the rhetoric and potential foreign policy of Iran's top leadership. Most immediately, we are thrilled to host Anglican Bishop Michael James Nazir-Ali this October for his lecture on "Aggressive Secularism, Multiculturalism, and the Islamist Threat to Western Culture and Society." Bishop Nazir-Ali is the Pakistani-born Anglican Bishop of Rochester, and has become a prominent spokesman for an engagement between Christianity and Islam.

In years past wehave usedEPPC's platform to conveneexperts such as Senator Jon Kyl, historian Mary Habeck, Iranian scholar Mehdi Khalaji,Professor Bernard Lewis, George Weigel and Philip Jenkins, Andrew Saperstein and Patrick Soohkdeo, Dr. Thomas Farr, Bing West, and Professor Roger Scruton. Complete transcripts of all events are available on this site.