Help Me, Jeebus!

In the wake of The New Republic's cover story on the electoral problems posed by Howard Dean's secularism, the candidate has announced his intention to begin spreading the gospel… in the South. This strikes me as bizarre. It'd be one thing to have just done it. But it seems potentially counterproductive for someone who's already on record as saying he doesn't go to church much and doesn't let his religion influence his politics to, in essence, announce that he's made a strategic decision to pull out the God-talk for the rubes below the Mason-Dixon (while, presumably, abstaining up North). If his secularism is offputting to religious voters, isn't this kind of calculated, condescending pandering likely to be even more so?