Heck the American political leadership themselves spend their careers telling you one thing while doing another. Even a percentage of the clergy/preachers/pastors/etc professes to be followers of Jesus while refusing to accept everyone's "imperfections" and differences. A few of these are starting to see the light I think.
All that said - we'd have a great country if we could off-load these people to another planet. Maybe Mars? ;)
It's our Puritan heritage. The original Puritans weren't satisfied with simply living the kind of spiritual life that suited them: they felt entitled to try to impose their beliefs on others by using politics, social pressure, and anything else they could think of. Overall they were an obnoxious lot, and they made themselves so odious in England that eventually they weren't welcome. That, and their desire to create a religious autarchy by carving it out of some other land, eventually inspired many of them to move to Holland.
In the 17th and 18th century, the Netherlands had the most liberal immigration policy and the most religious freedom of any country in Europe. Basically, if you had a trade skill of some kind and were not a criminal or wanted for a crime in another country, the door was open to you and you could immigrate, bring your family, and set up shop. This provided a skilled labor pool. Factor in access to year-round seaports, independent municipal governments that were not necessarily part of the feudal system, and a functional commercial fleet that dated back to the Hanseatic League, and the Netherlands turned into an economic powerhouse almost overnight without having to rely excessively on overseas colonies (although they had a few). The booming economy and the demand for skilled labor wasn't the only thing the Netherlands had going for it: there was no established religious sect, and people were allowed complete freedom of religious practice provided they did not interfere with anybody else. It was the kind of laissez-faire, live-and-let-live society that libertarians fantasize about because although the society definitely had problems, the "I got mine, so fuck you" mentality hadn't set in yet.
Then came the Puritans. These folks didn't actually invent "I got mine, so fuck you", but they practiced it more intensively than any other tribe of people before or since.
The Puritan immigrants to the Netherlands definitely wanted to take advantage of the religious freedom there, but they had a problem with the fact that everyone else around them was just as free as they were. These other free people were making religious and lifestyle choices that differed from the ones the Puritans wanted them to make. The Puritans also asserted that spreading their belief and proselytizing or even trying to force or manipulate other people into following their religious dictates was a critical aspect of their faith. Unless they were given an entitlement to harass, lecture, and even legislate against other people whose habits of worship, dress, eating, or living didn't mesh with theirs, they truly believed they weren't practicing their religion. Indeed, the fact that other people didn't treat them with the reverence they believed they deserved by listening obediently or catering to their sensibilities was, in the Puritan mentality, a grave oppression roughly on par with being imprisoned or beaten up for their faith. Since many of the Puritans got off on the idea of being martyrs for their religion, the predictable reaction to their obnoxious behavior could have created an exceptional alignment of interests, had they only been willing to save their belligerence for people who actually wanted a confrontation.
Hypocrisy and rationalization were central to the Puritan practice, but they never recognized it as such, because they believed in the somewhat antinomian notion that, although they struggled for control over the law (and, by extension, other people), they were personally exempt from human law due to their moral superiority, if that human law happened to differ from whatever they wanted to do at the time.
Central to the Puritan mentality was the belief that Puritans were superior beings because they alone, of all the humans on the planet, possessed not just rectitude but a special capability for strong emotions regarding religion. These religious feelings, apparently, were more important than any other kind of feelings, and more important than any other person's cultural, social, or other sensitivities. Until they had the kind of political and economic control that allowed them to either exclude or punish people who weren't sufficiently considerate of their special feelings, they just weren't satisfied. They also weren't shy about showing just how much contempt they had for the country and people that had welcomed them. They never did integrate with Dutch society: they refused to get down with the live-and-let-live mentality, and their arrogance was such that they generally didn't even bother to learn the language. Inevitably, they made themselves just as unwelcome in the Netherlands as they'd done in England. So off they went to the "new" territories in the Americas to set up their own colonies based on the rules of the corporations they set up. The role of religion, and churches, was radically different from what had historically existed in Europe, since Puritan style churches emphasized worship and little or nothing else. The resulting lack of emphasis on public education, health care, elder care, and other services historically provided by religious institutions is a feature of American society to this day.
