LEWISTON — Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum addressed a largely unsympathetic audience on the subject of Islamic fundamentalism at Bates College on Monday night.

Santorum, a potential Republican Party presidential candidate in 2012, spoke at the invitation of the Bates College Republicans and the Young America’s Foundation. He discussed what he called fundamental differences between Islam in the Middle East and the Christian underpinnings of the West for approximately half an hour before answering questions from an audience composed mainly of liberal Bates students.

Islam faces difficulty modernizing, Santorum said, because its main religious text, the Koran, is considered a direct dictation from God and its passages, including those on jihad and violent opposition to non-Muslims, must be read literally.

Because of the Koran’s content, Muslims are predisposed to fundamentalism, argued the former senator, who served two terms starting in 1995 and failed to win re-election in 2006.

“In the case of Islam, most people would say it’s somewhat stuck in the seventh century, because of the interpretation of the Koran,” he said. “The problem is that people who have tried to (modernize Islam) get killed.”

Conflicts between the Middle East and the West are purely ideological and not heavily influenced by more secular factors like American military and foreign policy in Islamic regions, he said. “They hate us because of who we are, not because of what we do,” Santorum said.

Santorum also criticized liberals’ unwillingness to characterize Islam as inherently fundamentalist, saying that political correctness has “run amuck” in America. “People need to know more” before hesitating to criticize Islam, he said, while also admitting that he is “not a Koranic scholar.”

The student-heavy crowd responded to Santorum in large part with antagonism. One student asked him if “we should be worried about Utah” because the Book of Mormon is also considered to be direct from the mouth of God. Another questioned whether America should be aligned with strictly Islamic states like Saudi Arabia, to which Santorum responded that the nation’s relationship with the Saudi government is “a marriage of convenience.”

Some self-described conservative students did not agree with Santorum’s positions. “There was fault in his reasoning and inconsistencies in his arguments,” said Timothy Forester, a Bates junior majoring in institutional politics, who considers himself a libertarian.

The negative response was expected, since other conservatives who have spoken on the campus have received similar reactions, Bates College Republicans President Matt Cocciardi, a senior, said. Cocciardi was not disappointed with the outing, however, saying, “I thought it went very well. He really knows his stuff when it comes to American foreign policy. We’ve seen that he’s a straight shooter, and that he doesn’t back down from questions.”

Cocciardi, who said he would support Santorum if he runs for president next year, noticed several Democrats he knows nodding their heads during the speech, indicating that the former senator was doing “a great job,” he said.