Whereas in Europe, religious practice and fervor were often, even habitually, seen as a threat to freedom, in America they were seen as its underpinning. In Europe religion was presented, at any rate by the majority of its intellectuals, as an obstacle to ‘progress;’ in America, as one of its dynamics.

From the 1960s, this huge and important difference between Europe and America was becoming blurred, perhaps in the process of disappearing altogether. It was one way in which America was losing its uniqueness and ceasing to be the City on the Hill. For the first time in American history there was a widespread tendency, especially among intellectuals, to present religious people as enemies of freedom and democratic choice. There was a further tendency among the same people to present religious beliefs of any kind which were held with certitude, and religious practice of any kind which was conducted with zeal, as ‘fundamentalist,’ a term of universal abuse. There was a kind of adjectival ratchet-effect at work in this process. The usual, normal, habitual, and customary moral beliefs of Christians and Jews were first verbally isolated as ‘traditionalist,’ then as ‘orthodox, ‘ next as ‘ultra-orthodox,’ and finally as ‘fundamentalist’ (with ‘obscurantist’ added for full measure), though they remained the same beliefs all the time. It was not the beliefs which had altered but the way I which they were regarded by non-believers or anti-believers, not so much by those who did not share them as by those who objected to them. This hostile adjectival inflation marked the changed perspective of many Americans, the new conviction that religious beliefs as such, especially insofar as they underpinned moral certitudes, constituted a threat to freedom. Its appearance was reflected in the extreme secularization of the judiciary, and the academy, and the attempt to drive any form of religious activity, however nominal or merely symbolic, right outside the public sector.

Paul Johnson, A History of the American People, p. 968.