Europeans are from Mars, American are from Venus (yeah, in that order)

Why is that?

Because Europe doesn't have a robust fundamentalist subculture like America has had since the early parts of the 20th century. American religion has been characterized by an entrepreneurial spirit. In Europe, many of the great religious traditions wasted away because they were supported by government. They didn't need to be popular and have lots of people coming to worship on Sunday to continue. So they atrophied and people lost interest.

In America, without that kind of governmental support, religious leaders had to be entrepreneurial. So a charismatic evangelist can come up with a brand-new approach to faith and touch some chord contemporary with people's needs. It's why we see people like Rick Warren, a very popular guy who is revolutionizing the way a lot of evangelicals think about their faith. He's obviously tapped into an anti-evolutionary fundamentalism and biblical literalism that people find important and like.

Biblical literalism is very simple. You read the Bible in English and you say to yourself that these are the things God wrote down through a secretary a long time ago, and all I need to do is read this in English and that's all the work I have to do to understand it. Who wouldn't want that to be the case? If you try to tell these people that they need some egghead scholar from Harvard, who can read Hebrew, to come in and help them with it, that seems offensive and alienating, and people aren't attracted to that. So I think the ability of American religion to invent itself and to appeal to common denominators, sometimes the lowest denominator, has allowed these evangelical movements to flourish with their own agendas.

Salon.