Exit polls in America have now been discredited as election predictors. But they were never intended to be that. They were meant to reveal attitudes, not votes — the reasons and motives animating the voters. In this respect the polls were accurate. And if we had been reading them correctly, for what they told us, not what we wanted to hear, we would not have been so ill-prepared for the actual electoral results.

The issue that ranked first in importance, according to those polls, was not the war or security or the economy but “moral values”. (Of the 22% who placed it first in importance, 79% voted for George W Bush.) To most Europeans, including the British, that fact is bizarre, even frightening. The very term “moral values” is an embarrassment, not so much irrelevant as primitive and retrograde.

To Americans, however, the “values” issue is so familiar as to require no explication or justification. We may not have expected it to rank quite so high in the polls, at a time of mounting casualties in Iraq, fears of terrorism at home, the loss of jobs and other pressing concerns. But its importance in the larger scheme of things has never been in doubt.

That other countries — the French and Germans, perhaps — should have been disconcerted, even dismayed, by the American response is not surprising. But that the British should have been so is surprising. It was not so long ago, after all, that Margaret Thatcher had made it a theme of her administration — “Victorian values”, as critics derided it.

Long before that — well before the Victorian age — under the aegis of Britain’s most celebrated thinkers (Adam Smith, David Hume, Edmund Burke, and scores of others), and under different labels (“moral sense” or “moral sentiments”), that idea had become the defining characteristic of the British Enlightenment and, one might go so far as to say, the moral foundation of British society.

One of the intriguing aspects of recent history is the fact that the Americans have apparently inherited that British tradition, while the British have abandoned it to the extent that they are unable to recognise what was once theirs — they cannot see their own past in the American present.

Americans have not been very helpful in explaining themselves. “Moral values” have been so narrowly construed as to deprive them not only of all historical connotation but of contemporary context as well.

Most American commentators on the recent election have presented moral values as a euphemism for same-sex marriage and abortion (and, often, stem cell research as well). These have been important issues in this election but they do not begin to encompass the idea of moral values. The fact is that “moral values” appeared on the exit polls in at least two previous elections, 1996 and 2000, topping the list in both cases. And this was before the emergence of gay marriage, partial-birth abortions, or stem cell research as subjects of controversy.

Nor can “moral values” be simply equated with religion in general or evangelicalism in particular. Again, it is true that religion plays an important part in the American disposition to take moral values seriously. Evangelicalism (the “Fourth Great Awakening”, as it has been dubbed) rose as a political force in America in the 1960s largely as a moral and social reaction to the counterculture.

But the evangelicals have always been more diverse, politically and socially, than is commonly supposed; they are largely Republican, but by no means uniformly so. Nor have they always been as focused on moral or social issues as might be supposed; on the contrary, in recent years some of their leaders have retreated into religiosity, being more concerned with personal salvation than public policy. Republican activists had to make a special effort this year to get evangelicals to the polls.

Nor are evangelicals as uniformly or rigorously “fundamentalist” as is thought. In Europe religion has been identified with evangelicalism, evangelicalism with fundamentalism, and Christian fundamentalism with an intolerance, bigotry, superstition, and potential for violence that make it a first cousin to Islamic fundamentalism.

In fact, evangelicalism in America is a catch-all phrase for a large variety of beliefs. This is not to minimise the most conspicuous and enduring fact that America is far more religious than any other western country. The number of Americans who testify to a personal belief in God and heaven (more than 90% in some surveys) and who attend church weekly or more than weekly (more than 40%) continues to astound analysts and pollsters. (In good American fashion, only 60% to 70% believe in the devil and hell.) These religious facts have political consequences. Again, according to the exit polls, of the 40% who attend church at least weekly, 60% voted for Bush; and of the 15% who never attend church, almost 65% voted for Kerry. But this leaves the not insignificant figures of 40% of weekly churchgoers who voted for Kerry, and the 35% of those who never attend church who voted for Bush. Even the category of “churchgoing” is more amorphous than it might seem. There is much mobility among churchgoers, who move with surprising ease not only from one neighbourhood church to another, but from one Protestant denomination to another.

A corollary of America’s religious exceptionalism is its propensity to be “moralistic”. It is at this point that the issue of moral values tends to be identified, or confused with, religion. Yet the two are quite distinct. They may overlap for some people but not for a great many others.