COME OUT, readers, from under your bedclothes. Stop cowering behind the sofa. Quit exchanging looks of fearful incomprehension with strangers in the street.

The world did not end on Tuesday. A great darkness did not descend across civilisation. America is not about to embark on a biblically-mandated jihad against the enemies of evangelical Christianity around the world. American soldiers will not be enforcing Washington’s imperium on your towns and villages any time soon.

You will not be required to swap your compulsory licence fee from the BBC to Fox News. Gays will not be bundled back into the closet by sex police from Alabama and Mississippi. Women will not be dragged screaming from abortion clinics.

It is true that for some people the world did more or less end on Tuesday. John Kerry kept telling everybody this was the most important election of our lifetime. Well, he was at least right about that, was he not? It was the most important election of his lifetime.

John Edwards, I suspect, will have been revealed by this election to be what some of us suspected all along —– an empty suit with fantastic hair. If the Democrats’ problems really are that they didn’t appeal to the vast mass of middle America, I can predict that Hillary Rodham Clinton’s vaunting ambitions will not be the answer to their prayers in 2008.

Some Hollywood stars will have to make good on their threat to move to Europe. (I’d watch that one closely, though. They may prefer the mineral water and the conversation, but after a while they are going to find those income tax rates a little lifestyle-crimping.) But for the rest of us, Mr Bush’s re-election does not portend, as seems to be the general impression in Britain and the rest of Europe, the beginning of a new dark age of American imperialism abroad and the triumph of faith over fact at home.

The world’s grumpy reaction to Mr Bush’s historic win on Tuesday seems to be: we could take the past four years because we were convinced all along that Mr Bush was not a legitimate president. He had lost the popular vote and then cheated his way into office thanks to his brother in Florida and his friends on the Supreme Court. He didn’t represent America.

This “Hail to the Thief” line won’t work now that he is back with the largest number of votes ever cast for a presidential candidate. So the critics have to find something else to explain away the Bush phenomenon.

They have come up with this: Mr Bush did not win because he convinced the majority of mainstream, sensible Americans that his policies were the right ones and that his values were their values. He won because his campaign orchestrated a massive turnout by evangelical Christians (read: fundamentalist bigots) who were motivated by their myopic moral outlook, especially opposition to gay marriage, to return one of their own to the White House. Mr Bush’s election, therefore, is discredited, not because of its reliance on the Supreme Court, but because of its dependence on religious freaks.

There are several problems with this explanation. First, the objection to a high turnout is ironic. The word before the election was that the only way Mr Bush could win would be if the turnout was as low as possible; if large numbers of voters went to the polls they would have to be voting for Senator Kerry. Republicans were accused of actively suppressing voter turnout, especially in Democrat-voting black areas in Ohio and Florida.

In the event, everyone who wanted to got to vote. Black turnout was at record levels — but was eclipsed because virtually all groups turned out in larger numbers Second, the idea that Jesus won it for Bush is an appealing one but is not really supported by the facts.

It is true that evangelical Christian turnout was up substantially on last time — their failure to vote in large numbers in 2000 was a significant disappointment to the Bush campaign. But still they represented only 20 per cent of the electorate, in rough proportion to their strength in the population as a whole and about a third of Mr Bush’s overall vote.

It would be a stretch to say their efforts alone elected Mr Bush and pushed America into some kind of unenlightened moral absolutism.

There is broad support among Americans for many of the positions associated, in suspicious outsiders’ minds, with the evangelicals. Take gay marriage. Ballot initiatives to define marriage as a relationship between a man and a woman triumphed in all the 11 states where they were voted on; in most cases by margins of two or three to one. In Michigan, a state won by Senator Kerry, a state with a Democratic governor, a state that, by the way, has banned capital punishment since 1848, the marriage initiative was supported by 60 per cent of the voters.

Intriguingly, we learnt yesterday that Bill Clinton strongly advised Mr Kerry during the latter stages of the campaign to more forcefully support the anti-gay marriage initiatives.

There is a broad consensus against gay marriage that goes well beyond the religious Right just as there is a broad agreement in favour of making abortions scarcer (for a country run by religious nuts, America has surprisingly liberal laws on abortion), or for lifting some of the world’s tightest restrictions on the role of religion in public life (the British particularly should remember that, especially, as they drop their children off at state-funded church schools.) Mr Bush’s re-election was no narrow victory for religious zealots. It confirms that America is a decidedly conservative country, but not an alien one.

And its implications for the rest of the world are not baleful. All the world has to fear now is four more years of an America doing its damnedest to export the value that is at the heart of all of its people’s beliefs: that people should be as free to choose their own direction as the American people so joyously were this week.

gerard.baker@thetimes.co.uk

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