Won’t be long before we hear someone on MSNBC ranting and raving about Perry being a “religious fanatic” and “Christian Taliban.”

(Ballot Box) — Republican presidential candidate and Texas Gov. Rick Perry used his speech to a packed audience at the conservative evangelical Liberty University to discuss his own faith – and to call for more Christian influence on America.

The governor, whose speech at the university was scheduled long before his presidential announcement, is looking to burnish his already-strong evangelical credentials ahead of early primaries in Iowa and South Carolina, two states with heavy numbers of evangelical voters.

“It is important that [pastors] stand in the pulpit every day and defend those values, those Christian values. America is going to be guided by some set of values — the question is going go to be — whose values?” said Perry. “I believe that . . . it’s the Christian values that this country was based upon.”

After discussing his own time at Texas A&M University and in the Air Force afterwards, Perry said that he felt lost when he returned home to Texas at age 27. “My faith journey is not the story of someone who turned to God because I wanted to. It was because I had nowhere else to turn,” he said. “I was lost spiritually and emotionally.”

“Don’t muzzle your voice because you’re young,” he said. “You have the right, like every American, to speak your right. You have the right to insist on change, to tell the people in power that you will not have your inheritance spent or your future mortgaged. This country is your country as well. Don’t leave it to a bunch of Washington politicians to tell you how to live your life. This is your future that we are debating today. Don’t be silent.”