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Good morning. When I was in America in 2008, I remember watching a soap opera that had an entire episode dedicated to voting. The corny joke was that no character would admit how they were going to vote – they just kept telling each other it was important that they should. That apple pie American innocence seems a long way off now. Turnout in today’s presidential election is predicted to be historic – yet the result is likely to be contested because the process is no longer a point of bipartisan unity. It is rife with suspicion. Republicans accuse the Democrats of inflating their votes with fraud; Democrats accuse the Republicans of trying to suppress their votes with legal chicanery. Let’s not be naïve: the American democratic process has always been fought over. Women and African-Americans had to struggle for the right to take part in it. But the vote has long been an essential component of what is sometimes referred to as the “American civil religion”, a sort of quasi-religious take on the country’s history and system of government. America’s founding fathers are its prophets; the constitution is its Bible. And voting is almost a sacrament. When Christians like me talk of something being sacramental, they mean that it is divinely ordained and has a transformative effect upon the person involved. When we baptize a child, that child is transformed into the part of the body of Christ – the church. Likewise, when a person casts a vote, they are transformed into part of the body of a democracy. When people make a decision to sit out an election – and I’ve done it a few times myself – they’re often told “people died for your right to vote.” I take this to mean that voting is touched by the spirit of sacrifice, not unlike Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross. The power of voting was one of the things that made the newly independent America so different from Europe, because while we were still horribly divided by class, the vote transformed the poorest American into a citizen, and every citizen was a king. To this day, it casts an egalitarian spell. Yes, US politics is big money; yes, inequality is greater than ever. But in the moment that the vote is being cast, each citizen has the same worth as the other, and by implication every opinion of is equal weight. This is why American politics is so folksy: this is a religion in which the laity calls the shots.