This is an opinion column.

I didn’t think I was naive.

Hell, I’ve seen Democrats run their state party to the ground with corruption and greed. We all have. We’ve seen Alabama Republicans take control on the promise of honesty and ethics, and forget those concepts before the oath of office fades.

We’ve seen Democrats become Republicans, and then treat their former colleagues like ex-smokers treat the guy smoking on the sidewalk. We’ve seen candidates spend more time demonizing the other guys than offering a clue as to what they’d actually do. I thought I’d seen it all.

I shouldn’t be surprised. Nobody should be surprised. But I am.

It was Rep. Bradley Byrne that got to me.

It is worse, I think, because I used to think Byrne was a reasonable man. Because he made his name as a reasonable man, a chamber-of-commerce Republican whose defeat of Dean Young in his 2013 House race was reported nationally as a defeat for the Tea Party, a win for those “who hope to edge the party away from some of the more extreme positions on economic and cultural issues that have turned off many voters.”

Sheesh. I am reminded now that 2013 was a million years ago.

Because reason is not the thing that comes to mind from Byrne’s ads in his campaign in the Republican primary for the U.S. Senate seat held by Sen. Doug Jones. Reason is not the focus of his comments at campaign rallies. Reason is not a workable strategy. Not when there is fear to be exploited, cracks to lever into chasms.

I was most struck by Byrne’s words from Grand Bay last week – reported by Yellowhammer News – arguing that Democrats do not believe in God and would instead trade away God for government. It was pep rally stuff, maybe, words that inflame way more than they inspire. And it hit home.

“They don’t believe what you and I believe…’’ he is quoted as saying. “They don’t believe in God. That is at the root of the founding of the United States of America. They want to take God out of our life.”

They are coming for you. And your little dog, too.

I’m used to campaign ad stuff, to insults and lies and attacks from candidates of all stripes. I’m used to demagoguery and fear-mongering and using religion as the sanctified axle grease of a campaign. Been there.

But I’m not used to the broad stroke like Byrne’s, judging those who hold a different political belief as ungodly, declaring even the notion of a different religious belief – the real root of the founding of the U.S. – as unAmerican.

I asked the Byrne campaign if the quotes were accurate, and if he stood by them.

Because I know he has long attended St. James Episcopal Church in Fairhope, a parish of about 1,600 godly souls that feeds the hungry and helps to house the homeless, that includes good will and outreach and worship and prison ministries and – that’s right -- a number of Democrats. Some of them take Byrne’s words quite personally.

I asked Byrne’s campaign about that, too. He did not get back to me before deadline.

I hope he thought about it, though. Because words are not held in a vacuum. Politics that makes foes of friends is dangerous, and speeches that exploit fear make us all weaker. I know politics that dehumanizes the opposition is part of the game. I am not that naïve. I can’t help but believe, though, that it is a bigger part of the shame.

John Archibald, a Pulitzer Prize winner, is a columnist for Reckon by AL.com. His column appears in The Birmingham News, the Huntsville Times, the Mobile Register and AL.com. Write him at jarchibald@al.com.