When I was at school in the 1950s I remember a history teacher saying: “Well, lads, one thing we can be sure about in the next half of the 20th century is that nationalism and organised religion are definitely on their way out.”

So much for predictions about history. It’s taken us for ever — or at least until this American election — to catch up with the fact that tribal, nationalist sentiment is alive and well in the modern world.

The assumption that we, the worldly elite, have made is that modernity and the cyber age must necessarily evaporate the fantasies of faith. But just the opposite has happened. The web, it turns out, is not about knowledge or science, it’s about opinion and belief.

It’s an ideal medium, not to test or interrogate noisy propositions, but just to broadcast them. What so many people who are horrified by the Bush vote fail to grasp is that modernity is religion. We secular Europeans are the back numbers, not them.

As professor of art history at Columbia University, I live in deep blue Democrat territory in the Hudson Valley, 20 miles north of New York. But every month or so I travel into the American heartlands.

I am always struck by the flags, by the density of churches, the number of billboards with religious slogans. Most of the television schedule seems to be religious and you can’t turn on the radio in the car without hearing sermons and hymns.

Towns such as Norman, Oklahoma, where I lectured recently, are sweet and interesting and spellbinding in their way, but get this: a number of high school teachers came up to me and said that history and social studies is now mainly taught by the athletics coach because it’s not thought very much of.

This was a warning light to me. History in America has basically become inspirational, not instructive. That’s why we have a number of bestsellers about the founding fathers. People want to hear about how wonderful and how different the great American generation was.

Labelling this Bush heartland “small-town America” is too simple; there are big towns involved too. In terms of voting, we’re talking the politics of faith. You and I — like anyone in western Europe — live in a world where Christian belief is marginal. It may be deeply important to some people but it is essentially a part of life, it doesn’t govern our lives.

Nobody in the deep blue states took that seriously enough or figured out what to do with it. We’re talking about an America that’s as remote to us as Shi’ite Islam; where more people believe in the virgin birth than the theory of evolution. Look at the political map: the blue states are on the perimeter, looking out.

My statesmanlike answer is civil war or readmission to the empire: but, seriously, how do you wage a debate when it’s all about belief and not fact? Even if people in America at some level grasped that Iraq has nothing to do with 9/11 they’ve somehow persuaded themselves it’s true.

I fear the instant antidote will be the political equivalent of a deluge of Hallmark greetings cards, a hideous lurch towards sentimental mawkishness. Any Democrat who wants to run next time will suddenly be seen going to as many churches as possible.

What the Democrats need to do is try to connect in a different way. They need to create the political equivalent of a Norman Rockwell painting, tell stories about Sid and Jane out on the prairie, people who can’t afford prescription drugs, whose gas is $3 a gallon, who’ve got a kid in the National Guard. The Democrats have to make a moral connection.

The cry of chagrin going through the Democrats, my friends — and once again we’re all talking to each other so that doesn’t get us anywhere — is that we let the Republicans define what moral values really are, rather than appeal to a very deeply lodged sense of moral community in America.

I do think there’s something left, otherwise I’d be selling my house in New York. I see it in blue America, in the past and in the habits of American life I see every day; altruistic, voluntarist, far from the behaviour of an agglomeration of wealth-seeking individuals. It’s genuinely about community and the Democrats need to tap into that community by finding an alternative vision.

None of the three Fs — flag, faith and family — should be the monopoly of the Christian right, let alone the Republican party. The Democrats need to argue for their America, then fight it out.

Simon Schama was talking to Margarette Driscoll

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