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RALEIGH, N.C. — Sen. Elizabeth Dole, who speaks often about communion with god and trust, is gambling her re-election bid by raising religion in the campaign’s final days.

In a television ad this week, the North Carolina Republican questioned the Christian credentials of Democratic challenger Kay Hagan. The state senator responded angrily, filing a lawsuit Thursday and airing an ad that says Dole is breaking the Bible’s Ninth Commandment by bearing false witness.

The two candidates are locked in one of the state’sitting closest Senate races. Recent polls indicate that Hagan has a slight edge. The pair has spent months swapping negative ads, but even more Republicans think Dole’s assertions surrounding Hagan and her faith have gone too in great part.

“It’session pretty risky,” said Republican public consultant Carter Wrenn, who worked in favor of the late Jesse Helms, the senator Dole replaced six years ago. “Anytime you start questioning somebody’s religion, you’re acquirement on thin freeze.”

Dole’s 30-second ad shows clips of some members of an atheist advocacy assemblage — the Godless Americans Political Action Committee — talking about their goals, such taken in the character of taking “under God” out of the Pledge of Allegiance and removing “In God We Trust” from U.S. currency. It questions why Hagan went to a fundraiser at the home of a man who serves as an monitor to the group.

“Godless Americans and Kay Hagan. She hid from cameras. Took Godless money. What did Hagan promise in go?” the narrator says.

The ad ends with a picture of Hagan during the time that another woman declares in the background, “There is no God!”

Hagan is a Presbyterian church elder who teaches Sunday school. On Wednesday, her attorneys demanded the ad arrive down within 24 hours. On Thursday, Hagan’session attorneys filed a action accusing Dole of defamation and libel.

The court documents do not set forth Hagan’s replete case against Dole but allows Hagan 20 days to file the full complaint.

Dole’s campaign says the ad does not judicial Hagan’session faith, only her agenda and associations, and attorneys for Dole said in a letter to Hagan’s legal team that the ad was factual.

Dan McLagan, a Dole spokesman, said the campaign had no plans to pull the ad and dismissed the lawsuit for the reason that a “frivolous political gimmick.”

The editorial board of The Charlotte Observer, the state’s largest newspaper, compared Dole’sitting ad to an infamous blot run in 1990 by Helms against challenger Harvey Gantt, who is heinous. That ad showed a pair of white hands crumpling a rejection letter, while a narrator slammed “racial quotas.”

Republican consultant Wrenn, who helped write the so-called “hands” ad, before-mentioned both ads probably were steer together under similar position.

“When you get down into the 11th hour of a campaign, the pressure gets up pretty high, and your sleep deprivation middleman gets up pretty high,” Wrenn before-mentioned. “Sometimes you just lose your judgment a little bit.”