Ben Carson Encourages Liberty Univ. Students to Stand Up For Religious Beliefs

2016 presidential hopeful Ben Carson said during a recent speech at Liberty University that Christian values are essential for America's survival.

Carson, a retired neurosurgeon, made his recent comments last week while speaking at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia.

"We have so many people trying to push God out of our lives," Carson told those students in attendance during his speech last Wednesday. "They take the Word of God and negate it and say if you believe in it, 'you are some kind of idiot,'" he added. 

"Let me tell you, our nation's survival as the pinnacle nation in the world, I believe, is rooted in our value system," Carson added.

The presidential hopeful went on to encourage the Christian students at the university to stand up for their faith, despite encouragement from popular culture to do otherwise.

"The secular progressives don't care whether you agree with them or not, as long as you sit down and keep your mouth shut, and I think that the secret to the prosperity in this nation is we must be willing to stand up for what we believe in," Carson said.

Carson has been unafraid to profess his Christian faith in the past, telling Bill O'Reilly on "The O"Reilly Factor" that Americans must fight to protect their religious freedom and freedom of speech.

"We need to be in a place where people feel free to express themselves and not to be intimidated by political correctness It's destroying our nation," Carson said on the conservative political show, "and there is a reason that our founders, one of the very first amendment freedom of speech, freedom of expression."

"We can never allow that to leave us. Freedom is not free," Carson said. "We have to fight for it every day."