No, your prediction does not in any way follow from the Southern Strategy explanation. The Dems had control of the south because Lincoln was a Republican, as were his strongest political allies. The Dems did not need to market themselves to Southerners in 1912. They had them in their pocket.
In 1912 the Republican nominee was William Howard Taft who was a Unitarian. Politicians didn't mention God or faith because those were taken for granted in those days. Religion was a non-issue at the national level. That's because religion was not under attack.
Wow. You know nothing about US culture in the last century. Religion has always been a major political issue in the US, it just hasn't always been something that divided the two major political parties. The political rhetoric of the rural south during the early 1900s was identical to what you hear today from the most extremist right-wing Christian groups. Racism, anti-secularism, anti-modernism, and pro Christian "values" were referred to constantly and within the same speeches and writings. The KKK rose to power in the 1920s precisely because it was an integration of all these religious and racist sentiments that shared a violent fear of change. Read the transcripts and the popular press surrounding the Scopes trial of 1925 and it is rife with manifestations of the growing culture war between rural white religionists and the multi-cultural, secular, modernist, urbanites. Most of the rhetoric during that time came from cultural leaders, pastors, and organizations like the KKK rather than from national political office holders, because there was no clear party divide over religion, despite their being a strong cultural divide about it and many southerners and those in rural areas ringing alarm bells about the evils of secularism and modernism.
