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It’s an effect of the crazy religiosity that Europe shipped over before the country was even founded. So much nutty Protestant fervor has rippled through American society since then. It infected secular institutions over time.
Which makes it even more crazy to me.
I live in a very Protestant area in Europe. In fact, many of the Protestants who got driven out of France around 1700 have settled around here, so roughly a similar timeframe to the ones in America. And we turned out entirely different. Here, Protestants are considered the "technically Christian on paper but probably hasn't seen a church from the inside in a decade" kind of person while (some) Catholics are the conservative hardliners who want bibles and crosses in classrooms.
Might have something to do with the fact that, in Europe, they had to live alongside other people. In America they had their little bubbles where the crazy could echo and become stronger. Combine that with the amount of opportunistic grifters that came to and were bred in America. The “land of opportunity” inspired an individualistic greed that was more than happy to use religion to feed itself. The Mormons are the classic example.
Catholics in America were a minority and there was bigotry directed at them. They were more inclined to keep separate—not so much now. In my town, the catholic school kids would have Catholic slurs shouted at them by the public school kids. These days the conservative Catholics are more or less allied with the evangelical Protestants.