If you want to have a friendly conversation, avoid politics and religion.

So goes an old social admonition, and there’s a very good reason for it. Start talking about the nature of God, for example, and you can get into a real nasty argument.

Of course, this year being a presidential election year, you can’t avoid talking about politics or religion. We’ve been up to our hips in Republicans who thought they should be the president, and there have been religious implications surrounding most of them. At least two of them, Rick Perry and Herman Cain, said God told them to run. Both of have since dropped out, indicating they either misunderstood God, who was really telling to them run for president of the local Chamber of Commerce, or they were listening to someone else they mistook for God. Rick Santorum is running — without a lot of success since Iowa — to make this country moral again, and Newt Gingrich is a Baptist turned Catholic who has had some particular difficulty with one of the Ten Commandments in the past, making him a poster child for what Mr. Santorum thinks is wrong with the country.

Mitt Romney, of course, is a Mormon, a religion that has a few beliefs that aren’t quite in sync with most other Christian denominations, so much so that there are those who insist Mormons aren’t Christian at all.

Then there’s Ron Paul, who doesn’t talk a lot about religion, but apparently developed some of his ideas from reading Ayn Rand, an atheist whose philosophy holds that “Man’s first duty is to himself,” a statement somewhat the opposite of the “I am third” (after Jesus and everybody else) philosophy I learned in Sunday School.

The reality of the race, though, is that the real issue in the race for most people is not religion, but the economy, especially job creation. Every one of those candidates, with the possible exception of Mr. Santorum, is running because he thinks he knows how to create jobs, get the economy running again, and save the country from the evils of European Socialism.

What it boils down to is that, if evangelical Christians think Mr. Romney can improve the economy, they’ll put aside his religion and vote for him. And they’ll overlook Mr. Gingrich’s Seventh Commandment issues if they think he can do it, exactly as they did in South Carolina last week. And if, by chance, the economy starts recovering, Mr. Obama will get the votes despite the fears of those who think he’s a Muslim.