Troublesome Deities

What to do with White Box gods?
Games like T&T and The Fantasy Trip leave gods and religion aside. You can add them as "flavor" and evil priests and cultists make good bad guys, but there is no encouragement to create a pantheon and no character class devoted to divine agency. White Box gives us the Cleric class and in doing so sets the stage for religion to be a central part of the game milieu. In staying true to its spirit of do-it-yourself, there are no specific deities mentioned in White Box (at least until Supplement IV is added in). So one of the questions each referee must answer when planning a campaign is what to do about the gods?
It appears the earliest campaigns, Blackmoor and Greyhawk, had a quasi-Christian religious assumption - note the item list in Vol. I: Men & Magic includes "wooden cross" and "silver cross" and the class titles include traditional Christian offices. A Cleric presenting the cross could conceivably turn a vampire (or other undead monsters) by divine power. I don't want to carry this argument too far because many early campaigns certainly included fantastic pantheons of gods borrowed from mythology, literature or entirely made-up.
In my own campaigns I have always avoided handing the players a list of deities preferring to allow each player to invent their own religion and share as much about their deity as they care to. As a result many gods and godlings, demons and spirits are worshiped in my "homeworld" and new ones are invented almost daily. Some will catch-on and be referred to by the referee (me) and other players, sometimes for years, others are quickly forgotten. When a player introduces a Cleric character as referee I ask, "Do you worship a deity? Tell me about them." Sometimes I ask players of other character classes if they worship or follow the teachingsof some religion? As referee I try to personalize the milieu based on input from the players so I may add in some history about their religion or invent a spell for a Cleric based on something they tell me about their deity. I see religion and the deities as a natural outflow of human existence, so I include it in my campaign, just not as an absolute truth. My players frequently encounter worshipers of various deities, some heard of, some unheard of. I leave the true nature of religious truth "up in the air". It seems to work for the players and I like it.