Some evangelical pastors said voting for Romney amounted to endorsing a cult. GOP rival Mike Huckabee, a populist Baptist, wondered whether Mormons believe Jesus and the devil were brothers. Romney was asked about polygamy and sacred Mormon undergarments.

Eventually, Romney delivered a major speech in which he declared that as president he would "serve no one religion, no one group, no one cause," and said calls for him to explain and justify his religious beliefs go against the wishes of the nation's founders.

"Personal opinion: historians will look back on 2008 with disbelief," Michael Otterson, head of public affairs for the LDS Church, wrote this month on a Newsweek-Washington Post blog.

"The media, political pundits and many of the public have gorged themselves on religious issues of almost complete irrelevance while the country, deeply divided by everything from the Iraq war to how to control the price of gasoline, has spiraled toward economic meltdown."

Yet candidates' religious beliefs did get some serious treatment. At an event called the Compassion Forum at Messiah College in Pennsylvania, Obama and Hillary Clinton answered questions about global warming, Darfur and their favorite Bible versus. McCain declined to attend, citing a scheduling conflict.

Then in August, McCain and Obama fielded questions from mega-pastor Rick Warren at the Saddleback Civil Forum. McCain's crisp answers about the definition of marriage and "at what point is a baby entitled to human rights?" — conception, McCain replied — helped rehabilitate his reputation with the Christian right.

The '08 race also has featured a richer debate about how religious voters weigh their political choices. A growing chorus of evangelicals pressed for a broader issues agenda and a bolder Catholic left challenged U.S. bishops who identify abortion as a paramount voting issue.

How these developments play out will be known in less than a week, when exit polls provide a glimpse into what role religious voters played in electing the next president.

But Martin Marty, one of the nation's pre-eminent religion scholars, already has reached one conclusion: the rancorous campaign has been bad for religion.

The retired University of Chicago professor wrote in a commentary this week that the exploitation and exhibition of religion in the race is "bad for the name of religion itself, for religious institutions, for a fair reading of sacred texts, for sundered religious communities, for swaggering religious communities which are too sure of themselves, for the pursuit of virtue, for extending the reach of religion too far."

In other words, the loser in this election is religion.