DECATUR — On Thursday, former Auburn head football coach Tommy Tuberville took to the shores of the Tennessee River to promote his campaign for the United States Senate in 2020.

At a small gathering, Tuberville laid out his team’s vision for the campaign before fielding questions from attendees. The questions ranged from residency status (and being asked to offer a photo ID to prove he was resident of Alabama) to broader topics about the youth vote and the culture.

One of the themes Tuberville touched on, and has spoken about throughout the early stages of his senatorial bid, was society’s reliance on government.

He pointed to the education system as the root cause of the dependency on government.

“I’ve seen it in college,” he said. “They’re teaching them to depend on the government. This country was not built on depending on the government.”

“That’s kind of the direction we’re heading,” he added. “Just look at the educational system and the health care system. As I said, this country was built on God, family and education, and all three of them have absolutely been downgraded by people in the educational system. And it’s not just in college. It’s in some of the high schools.”

In a follow-up interview with Yellowhammer News, the football coach-turned-politician lamented the loss of God in America.

“We’ve lost a lot of God in this country,” he said to Yellowhammer News. “In all my speeches, I talk about this. It’s all about God, family and education and so many times we forget about why we’re here and who can really help us. We all talk about it, but the power of prayer is huge. I think that if we just go back in that direction and think about it more, and understand that ‘In God We Trust,’ our motto, is something that we’ve got to lean on. And if we don’t lean on that and try to lean on all our human nature effects on how to solve a problem, it is going to be tough.”

Tuberville said even those elected as decisionmakers still need to rely upon prayer to guide them.

“You know we’ve a got a lot of good people that try to make good decisions,” Tuberville said. “President Trump is making decisions, but we’ve got to pray about it and pray that the decision works, and is it the right decision? Right now, we’re so divided in this country about what direction to take on a lot of issues. Again, we just got to start leaning on prayer more to get us out of this direction that sometimes is not working.”

He also cited the Bible, which he said offered “a gameplan” and argued for the need to “get back” to Christianity.

“Everybody has got their opinion, but we have got a lot of things that we can go by, and we’ve got a gameplan, which is called the Bible and if we make all these laws – we’ve already got laws, and they’re all in the Bible. It’s hard for people to put the human effect aside and go more with the religious effect. And this country was built on faith, on Christianity and we’ve got to get back to that. And we’ve got to push it. We’ve got to talk about it. And we’ve got to pray about it.”

@Jeff_Poor is a graduate of Auburn University, the editor of Breitbart TV and host of “The Jeff Poor Show” from 2-5 p.m. on WVNN in Huntsville.