Perhaps they thought a religious angle would fair better since religion gets a pretty wide blanket of protection these days as we are all forced to tread lightl

Perhaps they thought a religious angle would fair better since religion gets a pretty wide blanket of protection these days as we are all forced to tread lightly when talking about other people's religious freedoms. But the risk in that is people seeing them as nut-jobs. The "mark of the beast" argument was really, really stretching things so it makes sense that they lost. Privacy might have been a issue, but even that is pretty weak.