...Also, unlike in Europe, in the American mind atheism never quite lost the aura of criminality that it had had in Europe in the 18th century. This is weird considering that the founding leaders of the US were mostly a bunch of Deistic and Unitarian freethinkers whose civic God was a not-very-Biblical, rationally comprehensible entity; but it's not so weird when you realize that they were a rich, educated elite, and many the rest of the colonists were descended from people who left the old country to practice their particular brands of hardcore religious fanaticism out in the American wilderness.