America: Four more years. The Republican chant still echoes since January of this year when arguably the most religious president in history was returned for a second term to the White House. And that's how long American liberals have to stew in their resentment or get over it, writes Bill McSweeney.
The Democratic Party has seldom been in such disarray. The word "liberal" - always suspect in this land of the free - has been scornfully redefined in the popular lexicon as wimp, girlie, un-American, snob, French. In Orwellian irony, liberals have been reclassified as "socialists" and conservatives as "progressives". John F Kennedy might have been willing to pay any price and bear any burden to carry the flag of liberalism with the pride of his forebears, but the militants who followed him rewrote the language and reshuffled the symbols with astonishing success.
Foremost among the revolutionaries were the Christian Right - the band of brothers united today under a fundamentalist banner - which marches to the tune of a radical, political conservatism culled from the forgotten annals of the Old Testament. For half a century, these "evangelicals", as they call themselves, lived and prayed in isolation from the mainstream of politics, and watched in disgust as a liberal US under Roosevelt, Kennedy and Johnson legislated for a new deal and a secular republic. They were rescued from political impotence by the skill and energy of televangelists Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, who transformed the scattered pockets of God-fearing evangelicals into the political machine that anointed Ronald Reagan, impeached Bill Clinton, and now stands triumphant at the gates of the White House waiting for the payback.
In the surge of post-mortem recrimination, liberals in the Democratic party can only watch and hope that the magic that won the election for George W Bush will somehow rub off on one of theirs. Some hope. Many of them - including Hillary Clinton and Ted Kennedy - see the solution in moving to the centre politically and to God rhetorically. They have learned the lesson, they feel. It's the Bible, stupid.
They would do well to move to the poor black neighbourhood of north-east Washington and learn the lessons proposed in this new book by Jim Wallis, the director of the Christian action group Sojourners. For him it's the Bible alright, but not as the Democratic flounderers understand it.
Wallis is an evangelical and a liberal. Our double-take at this information is a measure of how the profile of American religion has been redrawn since the 1960s. He belongs to the 19th century, as he acknowledges - to an evangelicalism that goes back even before that to the social gospel inspired by John Wesley and his brand of Methodism. "How did the faith of Jesus come to be known as pro-rich, pro-war, and pro-American?" he asks.
These icons of conservative evangelicalism - the Jesus of Wall Street and the Jesus of the Pentagon - are analysed at length in the two central sections of the book.
"God is not a Republican or a Democrat," he writes. "When either party tries to politicise God, or co-opt religious communities for their political agendas, they make a terrible mistake."
That may be. But when they're successful, the cynic might add, they make it to the White House - twice.
Wallis does not easily fit the stereotype of left or right. He is as strong in his defence of conservative private morality as he is passionate in his advocacy of an option for the poor. While tolerant towards the rights and preferences of gays, he resists the redefining of marriage to accommodate the aspirations of some. While accepting that abortion may at times be necessary, he feels it is not a right to be demanded at will. And opposition to abortion-on-demand makes no moral sense if Americans are not equally pro-life in respect of war and the death penalty.
For Wallis, this is the spirit of traditional evangelicalism. It was this liberal evangelical tradition that led the way to the abolition of slavery, child labour laws, and women's suffrage.
"Before the movement was humiliated as a result of the famous Scopes trial in 1925, fundamentalism was often socially allied with the left," he writes, referring to the so-called Monkey Trial, which was depicted (and distorted) in the film Inherit the Wind.
The message Wallis offers to distraught Democrats is summed up in a phrase borrowed from the speech of the new kid on the Democratic block: "We have an awesome God in the blue states." (It says much about the oddness of US politics that such a sentiment by the young Senator Barack Obama can rouse the constituents to wild enthusiasm, while in the rest of the western world it would have him sectioned.)
This awesome god has work to do if he is to inspire the defeated Democrats to address the values of liberalism with the clarity and conviction of Jim Wallis. Obama is young, he's black, he's handsome, and he may just have what it takes to colour the red states blue, recover the meaning of "liberalism" and some respect for the liberals who practice it.
Bill McSweeney teaches international politics at the Irish School of Ecumenics, Trinity College Dublin
God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It. By Jim Wallis, Harper, 384pp. NPG