+landowner

Ironically, people fleeing persecution of the Anglican religion in England and wanting to worship God in their own way (still Puritan though) was basically the number one thing that gave America its start, and therefore formed the strongest core of its identity. You hear more about the “go west young man” type of independence loving peoples, bc it is more recent and there are TV shows depicting it made with less time intervening between its end and their construction - i.e. cowboy westerns. Shows that depict the former are much more rare though, e.g. Salem.

Until recently, the vast majority of Americans considered themselves Christian, at least in theory - like, even if they almost never went to church. And the stories we tell are full of Judeo-Christian themes of fairness and virtue and living “rightly”, like King Arthurian myths (as opposed to e.g. cunning and craftiness uplifted in other parts of the world, e.g. Aladdin or most Russian tales).

But the key is: who stands between you and God? Nobody? (=freedom) Or some old, rich, landowning white man? “Nobody” implies a terrible burden of personal responsibility, somewhat akin to running your own Linux server and even having installed Arch btw (at least once sometime, for the experience if not a daily driver), whereas “big daddy corpo-king takes care of you” seems to be the philosophy that rules the current day:-(.

Translation: we gave up our freedom for the sake of convenience. And now we are all too weak pushovers to be able to stand up to what’s coming next. Oh well, Rome fell too - it’s not like we were going to exist forever.