Slush Pile! Godless Heathen Edition

Mitt, I miss him already. Having a Mormon presidential candidate kept us in touch with the great American weirdness about religion. We can't get enough of the stuff--just look at Dubya. We're inventing new religions all the time. Some suburban churches are bigger than football stadiums. And as we know from past political polling, Americans will vote for a woman, an African American, a Jew...but an athiest? Forget about it.

Campaign years are usually full of political bios, but God can also be found on the hustings. Hillary has to prove she goes to church. McCain has to cozy up to the Bible-thumpers. And Obama will have to fend off those rumors that he was trained as a secret Al Qaeda agent in an Indonesian madras as a child. (Huckabee has his theological bases covered, of course.)

In the meantime, since the success of The God Delusion and God Is Not Great, publishers have been quick to pounce on a trend. (Or spiritual void, depending on your perspective.) Christopher Hitchens himself has edited The Portable Athiest (Da Capo, $17.50), with samplings from Marx, Darwin, Orwell, Mencken, and Salman Rushdie. (Didn't he learn anything last time?)

Combining the damning qualities of being both godless and French, Andr� Comte-Sponville gives us The Litle Book of Athiest Spirituality (Viking, $19.95). Just because you're an athiest, he says, doesn't mean you have to castrate your soul. (Somehow I can't see that on a yard sign this fall.)

Taking a critical view of the GOP (God oriented party?) is God's Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Moral Values (PoliPointPress, $19.95). Author Sarah Posner starts with past church scandals (Swaggart, Bakker, Haggard et. al.) and reaches to the prosperity gospel and its dubious fundraising ties to the Republican party. (That means you, Tom DeLay.) Unless Rick Warren or Huckabee are caught with a Boy Scout, however, don't expect the book to get much traction.

Disappointingly, The Gospel & the Zodiac (Overlook, $26.95) has nothing to do with the movie by David Fincher. Though if they can make a sequel to The Da Vinci Code, anything is possible. Which raises the subject of Philip Pullman and The Golden Compass: God-hating Seattle parents can page through Exploring Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials (St. Martin's Griffin, $9.95) to help answer those tricky questions from their kids. Like (from the back cover), "What are the origins of ghosts and shapeshifters?"

Darling, you'll have to ask Karl Rove about that. Now go to sleep.