Politician Rick Santorum To Make Faith-Based Movies, Presumably Not For Black People

Former Pennsylvania senator and failed presidential candidate Rick Santorum has a new career ahead of him, and it involves making faith-based movies as CEO of EchoLight Studios. Santorum, who ran a shockingly unsuccessful campaign based on not making black people's lives better...er, excuse me, "blah people's" lives, will use the Dallas-based production company "to produce, finance, market and distribute faith-based,family films across all releasing platforms.”

Santorum joined fellow religious huckster Mike Huckabee's television show to make the announcement...

“This is the right place and right time, and I’ve jumped in with both feet,” he said. “I often say that culture is upstream from politics, and I know entertainment also can be strength and light for people who want to be uplifted and reinforced in their values. Dallas can become the Hollywood of the faith-and-family movie market. And the keys are great content and economic success … using money from all over to build out the industry and distribute an authentic product truthful to the faith in people’s lives.”

Santorum comes aboard EchoLight just as they are preparing their first theatrical feature, The Redemption of Henry Myers, a Western drama about an outlaw who is spiritually and physically saved by a kindly woman who takes him in. The studio has a $20M war chest in place to begin developing other Christian-themed, family oriented films. Also on the way is a non-musical Biblical retelling of the story of Joseph, and Soul Surfer director Sean McNamara is directing Hoovey, a biopic on high school basketball player Eric Elliott, who had to relearn how to walk and talk after suffering a brain tumor.

Santorum singled out the faith-based Soul Surfer as a film that, while good, still wasn't quite religious enough....

"[That] was a good film, but it didn't accurately portray faith in that young lady's life and how she overcame what she had to overcome," Santorum said. "I don't want to preach to anybody, I just want to portray faith as it really is, and we're going to be telling a lot of true-life stories, and we're going to make them comfortable even for people who are not of faith, because they are honest. That's the challenge for us, and it's what Hollywood tends to shy away from."

Santorum's political  platform has always equated Christianity with being against marriage equality, against aiding the poor, and being pro-war, so if those ideals make their way into EchoLight's future projects it's doubtful they're going to find much of an audience outside of the state of Texas.