A lesson from history, if you're watching with mounting horror the rise of evangelical forces in the American Republican party. (There's a good state-of-play survey at FaithWorld.)

Thomas Kidd, Baylor University historian and scholar of religion, observes that in the election of 1800, Federalists took out weekly newspaper advertisements asking whether Americans would prefer a 'God and religion' leader like John Adams to Thomas Jefferson and 'no God.'

In spite of the smears, Jefferson won.