Tennessee has had its new license plates available for a full year, and one thing is clear: God is kicking some butt.

Which is to say, tags featuring “In God We Trust” are far and away the favorite of Tennessee motorists. God tags: 3,197,413. Godless tags: 2,226,408.

If it were an election – and in a sense, it was – God would have won Tennessee by 18 percentage points, 58.9% to 41%. Almost as popular as Donald Trump!

Unless my eyes and calculator skills deceive me, only six counties out of 95 favored the Godless tags: Anderson, Davidson, Madison, Shelby, Washington and – surprise! – Williamson, home of Marsha Blackburn and the right-wing book censors Moms for Liberty.

Am I suggesting a correlation between God tags and MAGA-red politics?

It’s not that simple. For example, a friend of mine, both pro-God and progressive, said he chose a God tag because he refuses to cede the Almighty to the right wing.

But Democrats, by and large, do tend to prefer that God occupy nongovernment territory. Blue-voting Davidson County was the most secular in tag selection: 79% opted to keep God’s imprint off their rolling stock. Blue-voting Shelby was next: 69.3% Godless.

In sharp contradistinction, as my literary hero P.G. Wodehouse might say, red-voting Benton County went for God tags at a 96.9% clip. For some, a car tag profession of faith is easier than actually attending church, I guess.

Before getting those figures from the Department of Revenue, I’d been doing my own personal survey of the prevalence of God tags. (Among the things I noticed: A fair number of expired tags were still on the road. One I saw hadn’t been updated since June 2021. Apparently not a law enforcement priority.)

The “In God We Trust” inscription is pretty small and might go unnoticed by the casual observer. But a distinction makes the tags easily identifiable: God tags start with three numbers, followed by four letters. Godless tags are the opposite: three letters, followed by four numbers.

State Sen. Heidi Campbell, a Nashville Democrat, wants to change that.

She’s introduced a bill that would require the letters and numbers to be randomly selected “without regard to whether an owner or lessee of a motor vehicle is issued a registration plate that displays the language ‘In God We Trust.’”

In an email, she described her reasoning.

“I’ve heard from so many Tennesseans who are upset that this serves as a sort of ‘label’ indicating their preference about a highly personal topic,” she said. “Devoutly religious people, as well as folks who are primarily concerned with separation of church and state, both say that they don’t want to be identified by their license plate sequence. There’s a concern that police officers might show bias for or against those with ‘In God We Trust’ and the number/letter sequence would be a fast way to identify people.”

Campbell also passed along the explanation for the tag distinction she got from the Department of Revenue, which stated that it is for administrative purposes.

“In order to maintain an adequate inventory of both plates in each county clerk office location, we have to track the standard plate and the In God We Trust plate as two separate types of plate,” read the explanation provided to Campbell. “Because they are two separate plates, we had to create a way to make sure the same combination/sequence of letters and numbers isn’t duplicated. … The best way to do that was to have one plate start with numbers and one plate start with letters.”

Best way? Easiest way, I suspect, but one with an unfortunate consequence.

In somewhat related news, State Sen. Rusty Crowe, a Republican of Johnson City, has introduced a bill asking for the governor to “submit a new design of the great seal of the state of Tennessee to the secretary of state that incorporates the language ‘In God We Trust.’”

Zero surprise there. My home state, Mississippi, did just that with its seal in 2014. And two years ago, when legislators found it politically expedient to replace the state flag – which had a Confederate battle emblem on it – they eased their pain by attaching “In God We Trust” to the new version.

I suspect that, if some Republican lawmakers had their druthers, we’d all be tattooed with it at birth.

Joe Rogers is a former writer for The Tennessean and editor for The New York Times. He is retired and living in Nashville.