Browsing in the children's book section of the Family Christian Store, she elaborated: "I guess I'm just more conservative, and I'm just scared of what Kerry would do to our country. . . . Things like gay marriage. I'm just afraid of what he would let fly by."

Carol Smith, 60, of Mission Hills, Kan., a Presbyterian minister who voted for Kerry, said of the election: "It's like a death, except that it's the death of a country."

Smith, an advocate for homosexuals whose son is gay, slept for days at her office away from her husband, who was happy Bush won, to "work through my grief." She wrote a poem that concluded: "I still think God hears a Liberal's prayers. It's as if the towers have come down again, but this time we have nobody else to blame. Who do we bomb now?"

No matter what side Americans are on, each "arrogantly assumes that they're smart and they're right and they're logical — and the people on the other side are just irrational and mean," says Michael Horton, author of "Beyond Culture Wars: Is America A Mission Field or a Battlefield?"

"Both sides," he says, "treat each other not just as if their ideas are unfounded or wrong, but as if they're evil people."

Horton is an evangelical Christian who is surprised so many Americans are surprised at the widespread importance placed on "moral values." As one Kerry voter put it: "I just didn't think there were so many conservative Republicans in this country."

"The message I'm getting across the board is: How did this possibly happen? That evangelical Christianity is sort of a weird, fringe, cultlike, right-wing phenomenon, and they couldn't possibly represent mainstream America," says Horton, a Bush supporter.

He calls that a caricature that leads to alienation. "The 'cultural elite' become one bloc and those 'right-wingers' become another bloc, and at that point we don't talk. We demonize."

Bridging the gap

Undoubtedly this election was more "passion-producing," says sociologist John Evans at the University of California, San Diego. But the country, he argues, is no more divided than it was four years ago or four years before that.

Americans' differences simply rose to the surface with a vengeance this year — fueled by acrimony over the outcome of the 2000 presidential race, concerns over war and terror and the very vocal debate over the new social issue of the day: gay marriage.

The candidates' own dissimilarities further stoked dissension.

On the one hand was Bush, a conservative Republican from Texas who speaks openly of morality and of having "recommitted my life to Jesus Christ." On the other was Kerry, a left-leaning Democrat from Massachusetts, a Roman Catholic whose social views are contrary to some of the church's.