c. 2004 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) The great explainers are now busy telling Americans why they voted as they did. While they point to votes and strategies and hint at dark motivations on the part of the victors, none of them has yet discussed the unseen and difficult-to-measure factors, part psychological and part spiritual, that played such a major rule in the election.

Maybe that is because explainers _ as we know from explaining ourselves on various occasions, such as why we did not do as well as we should have on an exam or why our headache could not possibly be due to drinking too much last night _ tend to exonerate themselves and blame somebody or something else for their woes: “The teacher told the other class but he didn’t tell us that this would be on the exam,” “They must have put something in my lemonade” and so forth.

America would be better off, of course, if it could follow the example of the late Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago who, when asked why a candidate lost, would reply, “Because the other fellow got more votes than he did.”

Such simplicity is political purity of heart, a characteristic that is not listed on the resumes of most advisers of the James Carville generation. Even those who agreed with his defending President Clinton against the investigation of special counsel Kenneth Starr several years ago may have been startled by his battle cry, “Make war on Starr,” which included ridiculing him and demeaning him for his fundamentalist religious commitments, as if these were, in themselves, proof that he viewed the world through the hopelessly outdated nose glasses of William Jennings Bryan.

That smelly fish of self-justification by accusing the other of religious prejudice has been served up without even a garnish of tartar sauce in this week’s massive effort to blame Sen. John Kerry’s defeat on people irredeemably tainted with the poison of religious beliefs that make them prejudiced and mistrustful.

This defining of believers as necessarily socially twisted and the villains of election night is supported by no proof and a complete disowning of the fact that the leadership in perhaps the greatest moral crusade in American history _ the fight against slavery and the generations of racial prejudice that followed _ was born in and sustained by America’s religious congregations.

This accusation is superficial, slick and ignorant of the studies that show that deep, well-integrated faith challenges _ because it cannot co-exist with any variety of prejudice. Such faith, of course, is, even by scriptural definition, an unseen quality.

Perhaps that is why Wednesday morning quarterbacks have not been able to see the psychological and spiritual determinants that were at play beneath the roaring everyday of the long campaigns. These have to do with the kind of relationship that developed, whether one likes it or not, between the president, as father figure of the country, and the family of America after Sept. 11.

The president _ as Kerry, whose gallantry in defeat was also deeply spiritual, acknowledged _ led the country calmly and wisely in that dark time when we were under attack and anything might happen. At that time, as the president embraced the firemen at Ground Zero and led the nation in prayer, America formed a relationship that transcended and trumped party affiliation with a man on whom, in that crisis, they depended.

That bond, unseen and as hard to measure as any spiritual and psychological reality, is called transference for, through it, people transfer the positive feelings they have toward earlier figures in their lives to one who now takes over a central role in their lives. This phenomenon is unconscious in nature and abides, as family relationships do, beneath the din, distractions and differences of the years.

The real engagement of the campaign was on this level far beneath the control of those on either side of the campaign. Some pundits may not like it but, at the deepest level, invisible factors that people felt in relationship to the president because of the bonding that occurred in the dark night of the nation’s soul on Sept. 11 decided the outcome of this election.

(Eugene Cullen Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author of “Cardinal Bernardin’s Stations of the Cross,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)

MO/PH END KENNEDY