I’m sure it’s temporary, or a figment of my media-soaked imagination. But there’s something about America right now that reminds me of a Saturday night in Glasgow after a particularly vicious Celtic-Rangers match.

Everyone was so certain their side would win. The losers were devastated. The referee was blind, the linesman was corrupt and the captain was off his game. People roared, gloated and mourned. Friendships fell into doubt. Families were divided. There were threats. It felt, well, tribal. If there were pubs on every corner, there would have been blood on the streets.

Breaking down the results of the presidential election, it is impossible not to see divisions. 51 per cent of women backed John Kerry, while 48 per cent backed President Bush – the exact reverse of the outcome. 55 per cent of men voted Republican, and 44 per cent, Democrat, confirming the gender gap had not been erased, as many of us predicted.

Blacks voted 88 per cent for Mr Kerry. By a margin of 67 to 32 percentage points, Protestants voted for the president, while Catholics backed Mr Bush by a margin of five points. The Jewish vote broke down 74 to 25 for Mr Kerry. Married people voted by 57 to 42 percent for the president, while 58 percent of the unmarried backed Mr Kerry, a margin over Mr Bush of 18 points.

Garry Wills, one of America’s leading political historians, writing in The New York Times, called it "The Day the Enlightenment Went Out." Conservative Christians rejoiced in the hope that federal support for abortion rights might fall in a second Bush term.

Eleven states approved bans on gay marriage. Opponents of same-sex civil unions boasted that "counterfeits" – a horrible word, that - had also been struck down in most of those states. Hits on the Canadian government’s main immigration website leapt as the losers looked abroad for safe haven.

A friend from the Rocky Mountains recounted telling her mother how her whole office was dumbstruck. Well, that just proves how out of touch "the elites" are with the rest of America, her mother replied. "Mom," my friend found herself responding in a remark that ought to go down in a history book somewhere, "elites are people too."

I keep searching for a sentence to describe how I feel about the outcome. People always assume they know how I would vote. I have as much fun as the next person laughing at Mr Bush murdering the English language. He pokes fun at himself on that subject, so that hardly qualifies as radical. I grew up leaning left despite my parents’ stubborn refusal to tell me how they voted. But I’ve lived in such democracy-deprived countries – Belarus and Ukraine, for example – that mainstream politics seem peculiarly undifferentiated to me now.

I don’t really think it would have made much difference to the rest of the world if John Kerry had won. Of course I know how I would have voted, had I had the privilege. But, having witnessed this election, I am more convinced than ever that a vote is not to be trifled with, so I will keep my imaginary one to myself.

I came here five years ago, not long after the Kosovo war. I had acquired, to my astonishment, after a Scottish childhood filled with knee-jerk anti-Americanism, a certain infatuation with a country that was willing to bomb a major European city (and me, almost) to bits in order to protect a Muslim minority from possible genocide. But like many people, I was torn about Mr Bush’s decision to go to war in Iraq. It didn’t quite feel right.

Saddam Hussein was a bloodthirsty tyrant, but there were plenty worse who deserved a silver bullet. I don’t really believe that anything is solved in violence. But what if the neoconservatives were right? What if the Middle East would be so inspired by the birth of a new democracy in its midst, albeit an excruciating one without a whiff of an epidural, that the silenced majorities would start fighting for themselves?

Then I am reminded of a sweaty, crowded, hate-filled room at the University of Glasgow in the 1980s. I had gone to hear a debate over abortion. As you can imagine, in a city evenly divided between Catholics and Protestants, and ferociously split between the pro-choice and the "pro-lifers" as they were called on campus, the discussion was not pretty. Friendships ended that day.

I saw someone I had gone to school with. He looked like I felt. He wasn’t sure if we should laugh or draw swords. Someone spat at me. His face was redder than beetroot and as livid as a beating heart. No one won, certainly not the women in the room who might have faced the terrible decision of whether to continue a pregnancy, and certainly not either side in the argument, both of which returned home as convinced they were right as they had when they got up that morning. Perhaps the winners were the uncertain ones who went home with food for thought.

I suppose the thing that makes me suspicious of Mr Bush is the same thing that bothered me about the pro-lifers that day. They were so utterly convinced they were right, and so angry in their righteousness, angry enough, I remember thinking, to commit violence in God’s name. I feel a shiver down my spine when I hear the leader of the sole superpower say, as he did at a Hispanic prayer breakfast eight months after the September 11 attacks, that "the hand of God is guiding the affairs of this nation," and that this had never been truer than it had been since the bloodshed in New York.

To imagine that Mr Bush has a monopoly on invoking religion as an American president would be to ignore history. I am sure my reaction is driven by my own prejudices. Why shouldn’t the American president be a religious man, and why shouldn’t he talk about it?

But with the "pro-lifers", I was convinced of their authenticity. With a man who came from extreme privilege, went to Harvard and Yale and talks like a Texan tele-evangelist, God only knows.

Elaine Monaghan is a Washington-based correspondent for The Times