No doubt, Senator Elizabeth Dole's attack on Democrat and Sunday school teacher Kay Hagan as "godless" was one of the low points of the 2008 campaign. Dole's subsequent smiting by the voters of North Carolina was fitting electoral, if not divine, retribution. But as it turned out, Dole's slander against atheist Americans was hardly an isolated case of religious bigotry on the part of the Republican Party. From John McCain and Mitt Romney on down, the GOP waged a war against religious freedom and the very definition of the American community. And as many Republicans made clear, Jews, atheists and above all Muslims need not apply.
As with a fish, the rot started at the top. John McCain's journey to "crazy base world" to appease Christian conservatives he once deemed "agents of intolerance" quickly placed him among their ranks.
That became evident in September 2007. Addressing questions as to whether the one-time Episcopalian was now a Baptist, the notoriously reticent McCain without hesitation proclaimed:

"I was raised in the Episcopal Church and attended high school at a high school called the Episcopal High School. I have attended North Phoenix Baptist Church for many years. And the most important thing is that I am a Christian. And I don't have anything else to say about the issue."

As it turns out, McCain did have more to say just weeks later. In an interview with Beliefnet, McCain proclaimed:

"I would probably have to say yes, that the Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation."

While that earned him the kudos of at least one Christian Coalition blogger, the Anti-Defamation League's Abraham Foxman was less than tickled. Within hours, McCain was in full faith-based retreat, admitting "yes, I believe a Muslim could be president."
During the 2008 campaign, McCain might have shared that conclusion with his supporters. On October 11, 2008, Pastor Arnold Conrad opened a McCain campaign event in Iowa with an invocation that was a rhetorical call to arms against non-Christians:

"I would also add, Lord, that your reputation is involved in all that happens between now and November, because there are millions of people around this world praying to their god - whether it's Hindu, Buddha, Allah - that his opponent wins, for a variety of reasons. And Lord, I pray that you will guard your own reputation, because they're going to think that their god is bigger than you, if that happens. So I pray that you will step forward and honor your own name with all that happens between now and election day."

Just the day before, McCain was booed by his own supporters at a town hall meeting for disagreeing with a woman who announced "I can't trust Obama" because "he's an Arab." But even in defense of Obama, McCain seemed to suggest that positive personal attributes were incompatible with Islamic faith and Arab ethnicity;

"No, ma'am. He's a decent family man [and] citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues and that's what this campaign's all about. He's not [an Arab]."

(In his endorsement of Barack Obama, Colin Powell addressed this exact point. "But the really right answer is, what if he is?" Powell asked, "Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country?")
Disturbing as they are, McCain's fumbling assaults on religious diversity in the United States pale in comparison to his former Republican rival, Mitt Romney. In remarks and speeches throughout his Republican primary campaign, Romney made it quite plain that Muslims and atheists should be excluded from the American table.
In November 2007, the former Massachusetts governor nonchalantly declared the Muslim Americans would have no place in a Romney cabinet. As Mansoor Ijaz recounted:

I asked Mr. Romney whether he would consider including qualified Americans of the Islamic faith in his cabinet as advisers on national security matters, given his position that "jihadism" is the principal foreign policy threat facing America today. He answered, "...based on the numbers of American Muslims [as a percentage] in our population, I cannot see that a cabinet position would be justified. But of course, I would imagine that Muslims could serve at lower levels of my administration."

Mitt Romney wasn't content to create his own religious test for office. As his statements revealed, agnostics and atheists too were not merely unfit to lead the United States; they were in essence un-American.
That meaning was unambiguous in Romney's 2006 declaration to Fox News that "People in this country want a person of faith to lead them as their president." The former Massachusetts Governor made the point even more broadly during his law-dropping December 6, 2007 speech on "Faith in America." In his cynical attempt to deflect attention from his own Mormon faith, Romney proclaimed:

"Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom."

(As Atrios noted, how fitting that Romney was introduced in Houston that day by President George H.W. Bush, who famously stated, "No, I don't know that atheists should be regarded as citizens, nor should they be regarded as patriotic. This is one nation under God.")
Of course, these are hardly unique events for the Republican Party in this year's election. In Virginia, Congressman Virgil Goode, who previously hurled anti-Muslim slurs at his Minnesota colleague Keith Ellison, aired ads depicting his lily-white Democratic opponent as dark-skinned and bearded. Meanwhile, Fort Hill, South Carolina mayor Danny Funderburk forwarded an email proclaiming Barack Obama the anti-Christ because he was "just curious" if it was true. And to be sure, the Republican smear machine was in full swing, branding Barack Obama as disloyal, a socialist, a communist - and worse. With supporters chanting "John McCain, Not Hussein," it's no surprise that 54% of Republicans in Kentucky and a quarter of Texans wrongly believe Barack Obama to be a Muslim.
A frustrated General Powell could only shake his head:

"Yet, I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion, 'He's a Muslim and he might be associated terrorists.' This is not the way we should be doing it in America."

As John McCain and Liddy Dole learned the hard way, Americans voters mercifully agreed with Powell on this point. While a February 2008 Pew Research study found that 16% of Americans are unaffiliated with any religious faith, a much larger share view themselves as "secular" in the traditional, truly American meaning of the term. As historian Wilfred McClay argues elsewhere on the Pew web site, secularism has a distinctly political sense in the United States:

"That is, secularism as recognizing politics as an autonomous sphere, one that's not subject to ecclesiastical governance, to the governance of a church or religion or the church's expression of that religion. A secular political order may be one in which religious practice or religious exercise, as we say, can flourish."

A quick glance at the 2008 electoral map shows that the Republican Party lost this battle in its crusade against religious freedom and diversity in the United States. Sadly, the war is far from over.
UPDATE: As a reader reminded me, former Arkansas Governor and minister Mike Huckabee was at the forefront of the GOP's crusade against religious diversity in America. In January, Huckabee infamously told a Michigan audiece "what we need to do is amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than trying to change God's standards so it lines up with some contemporary view of how we treat each other and how we treat the family."