Many of Hartley's Spire comics were based on his "regular" Archie stories. Before he started the Spire line, he was trying to bring Christian content into the mainstream comics, and said in the early '70s that he was trying to make sure that a certain percentage of his stories had Christian messages. (Sort of like not all the Spire stories are religious/moral, some are comedy stories.) When the Archie editors asked him to cut down on the religious stuff, he took the characters to Spire. But before that, he had all kinds of non-secular moments. This is not from Spire, this is from an actual Archie newsstand comic:

I had those digests too - in fact, those late '70s and early '80s digests are where I did most of my early Archie reading (and they are still my favorite digests for the huge range of material they reprinted). When I found out about the Spires it seemed like deja vu because I'd seen similar Hartley stuff already, but with better inking.

One thing that I found really weird was when Hartley would prosletyze in Sabrina stories. And he did a lot of Sabrina's story, including a couple of "Sabrina's Christmas Magic" issues. But you have to have chutzpah to use a Satanic witch to preach Christian messages.

You'll note that the evil witch is rubbing Santa's knee in that last panel...trying to tempt the Christmas icon to the dark side?

Or maybe it's just drawn poorly.