Throughout this election cycle, one group that was perhaps the most complicit in electing George W. Bush has been remarkably silent.

The Religious Right was instrumental in electing Bush in 2000, and re-electing him in 2004. In fact, we know now that voter turnout in 2004 was one of the strongest in history thanks in large part to the Religious Right, even though the flaws of the Bush Administration were abundantly clear.

The influence and power of the Religious Right was, by almost any measure, formidable, and its ability to see its candidate to victory was a crowning achievement.

For the first time in recent memory, Evangelical Christians reached out to Roman Catholics and Jews to create a power block not seen in American politics.

America the free became America the religious. God was everywhere and everyone felt God's will. Or so it seemed.

But today, the silence is deafening.

It was deafening as we launched an unnecessary war against Iraq. It was deafening when we learned of the use of torture against suspected terrorists. And it was deafening in the hours after Katrina blew through the Gulf Coast, leaving the region's poorest trapped in hospital beds and languishing on rooftops.

A presidency in exchange for what? Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade and restore in the minds of some a patriarchal and puritanical vision for America?

The dirty deed of "compassionate conservatism" was to use wedge issues to further divide America.

What is the penance for making so many people feel deviant, unworthy, and unwanted?

What do you tell God when you knowingly collaborated with such incompetence? That you could have stopped it, but you didn't lift a hand.

We're left to suppose it was a means to an end - an end that went very wrong.

If America has learned anything from the last eight years, it's that there's a thin line between moral values and self-righteousness.

God doesn't just help those who help themselves.

God helps those who can't help themselves.

For a transcript of City Newspaper's real-time election blog, check out http://www.rochestercitynewspaper.com/news/articles/2008/11/ELECTION-NIGHT-TRANSCRIPT/