That is largely the result of the Modernist/Fundamentalist controversy within Protestant Christianity in the late 19th-early 20th century. (Wikipedia will tell you it started in the 1920s, but it really does date back further than that). The sticking point was really critical biblical studies, and the theological questions that were raised by treating the Bible as if it were any other ancient document.

If you had to pick a single starting point of this divergence in Protestant belief in America, I would say it should be the Briggs controversy in 1891. Charles Briggs was a professor of theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, Old Testament scholar, and Presbyterian elder/minister who claimed to have conclusively proven that Moses did not write the first five books of the Bible, as had been traditionally believed by Christians. He questioned proclaimed the falsity of the authorship of nearly every Old Testament text: Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, Isaiah, etc. He was eventually tried for heresy by the main Presbyterian body in the U.S. and found not guilty. (There were actually two trials....it's complicated. He was found guilty and defrocked at the second one, but there's this whole question of whether the people who tried him then actually had the authority to do that...it's a whole thing). Briggs also questioned the authorship of numerous biblical texts that explicitly stated their authors (unlike the Pentateuch, which does not). This controversy, and the backlash in the Presbyterian church that it provoked, is what ultimately what led to rather heated debates among American Christians regarding what exactly their attitude towards the Bible should be.

Here is the source of the controversy: sola scriptura. If the Bible and only the Bible is the ultimate authority on your religion, and the Bible is wrong, then your religion is also wrong. So do you believe that your religion is a source of truth or not?

Modernists (the faction to which Briggs belonged) usually answered this by saying things like "the Bible is a source of moral and spiritual truth, not historical truth." They were open to the idea that the Bible was wrong when discussing historical events, or that these events were allegory to convey some broader truth. They were generally accepting of scientific theories (e.g. evolution, the age of the Earth) that questioned traditional Christian beliefs, and were willing to change their theology based on conclusions in fields like source criticism or archeology. For example, one common view was that Jesus was not actually born of a vigin (despite the fact that two different Gospels say that he was), as conception in the absence of both sperm and egg isn't scientifically possible. If you want to read a famous text expressing a Modernist view, I recommend the sermon "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?" by Harry Emerson Fosdick.

The Fundamentalists represented the views that most Christians had traditionally held prior to that point. Their contention was that reducing the Bible to allegory and metaphor was not only arrogant, but led to Christian theology making no sense at all. For example, why is Man drawn towards sin? Many Christians would have said that it was because of Adam's and Eve's defiance of God in the Garden of Eden. But if there was no Garden, no Adam or Eve, now you still have to answer the question. And the problem is, any answer you come up with isn't going to be based on the Bible. It's going to be based on "Well it can't possibly be that because science says so, so it must be...[insert speculation here]." Notice that this requires one to defer to science before concluding anything about the Bible.

Fundamentalists argued that this amounts to humans taking their views as equally or more authoritative than the Bible. If Jesus wasn't born of a virgin, then who was his father? And if he has a father, then how can he be God's only begotten son? And if he's not God's son, then why was his death on the Cross different from anyone else's? And if he didn't die on the Cross, then how are you supposed to atone for your sins, if not through his suffering? And how can any answer you give to those questions be based on the Bible alone? The argument was that the Modernist view basically made absolute nonsense of Christian theology, and so had to be rejected by any believing Christian.

The term "fundamentalist" comes from the publication of the Five Fundamentals that were passed by the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States America (PCUSA) in 1910. They declared the following absolutely necessary to be considered a Christian:

• Biblical inerrancy (the Bible is not "wrong" about anything, as it was divinely inspired)

• the Virgin Birth of Jesus

• that Jesus died to atone for sin

• that Jesus was bodily resurrected from the dead (I.e. not just "spiritually resurrected" or that he came back as a ghost or something)

• that Jesus performed actual miracles (as opposed to these being an embellishment of the historical record, or magic tricks of some kind)

By the early 20th century, many different Protestant denominations were infighting over this, and in particular, fighting each other for tenured positions at major seminaries. Princeton and Union became pretty solidly modernist (although the fight at Princeton was particularly nasty). Dallas Theological Seminary remained fundamentalist, and Westminster Theological Seminary (which is still around) was formed by disgruntled fundamentalist faculty at Princeton You can also see the remnants of the dispute today: most of the major Protestant denominations either split over this issue or self-segregated into fundamentalist and modernist versions of the same denomination.

E.g. Presbyterians largely self-segregated into the Presbyterian Church USA (modernist) and the Presbyterian Church in America (fundamentalist). Seminary students and faculty formed Seminex (modernist), a split from the Evangelical Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod (fundamentalist), and merged to form the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (modernist). I could keep going, but you get the point.

The Christians you're referring to in your question are largely the theological descendants of the Fundamentalists. However, that label is somewhat dated now, because some would insist on different fundamentals or not view some of the Five Fundamentals as essential, or would even disagree with some of them. But there there is definitely a religious/intellectual tradition that both Fundamentalists and these Christians you refer to in your question have in common. I'm just going to call them both "fundamentalists" for the sake of simplicity. In short, they have the following belief in common: the Bible is the ultimate source of truth and authority. Reinterpretations of it are broadly massaged to fit with modern beliefs, and modern views are perversions of its message.

So why is fundamentalism largely restricted to the U.S.? It isn't. Europe has a negligible percentage of fundamentalists, but Europe is the exception, not the rule. Fundamentalism is a relatively popular belief among Protestants in South America, Southern Africa, and East Asia (e.g. the Philippines and South Korea). Maybe not a majority, but Fundamentalists aren't a majority in America either. Europe is the weird one here.

So why is Europe the exception? The following is a disputed historical theory, but it's one I'm sympathetic to. It shouldn't be taken as historical fact: In Europe, Protestant churches were mostly state churches (e.g. in England, Germany, Denmark, etc), and the theology was often...uhhh...massaged for political expediency. If you want just one example, the predecessor to the EKD (the main Protestant body in Germany today) was formed by a state-imposed merger of a Lutheran body and a Calvinist body (two denominations with incompatible theologies) because Fredrick Wilhelm III decided it would be beneficial for national unity. The institutionalization of Protestant denominations led to them to be subject to political pressure in a way that nonstate churches are not. Massaging traditional views to comport with modern developments was very normal among European Protestants for centuries before the controversy.

I should also say that the fact that the Catholic Church was not terribly affected by this controversy largely has to do with the fact that the Catholic view of the Bible is not what it claims as its source of its authority. That authority comes from from the institution of the church itself. If you believe that salvation is through faith in the proper view of Christianity alone, and that the Bible is the sole source of correct faith, then this institutional view is not possible (since, on the Protestant view [arguably excluding Anglicans] church bodies only have authority to the extent that their doctrine is true). The Catholic Church since the Council of Trent has viewed both the Bible and Sacred Tradition as equally authoritative, and draws on apostilic succession rather than the Bible as the source of its own authority. As a result, Catholic belief on such subjects has been less defined than (for instance) its insistence on the primary of the Pope. Because faith isn't the only thing that makes one a Catholic, Catholic self-id tends to be much stronger among people who don't believe church teaching than it is among Protestants.

Americans have a history of using religion to justify positions that would otherwise seem inhumane, such as slavery. The point is not to use religion to deepen your spirit while learning deep scientific truths, it’s to get what you want while maintaining a moral high ground. When you look at it that way it makes more sense!

/u/The_Alaskan covers this in extreme detail below.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5lpzo7/what_are_the_roots_of_antiintellectualism_in_the/

/u/WBTheorist also covers this more in depth in regards to slavery.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2q59fp/religion_and_early_justifications_for_american/

To piggy-back off of an earlier comment: it's not just that biblical inerrancy required that, for example, Moses' authorship of the Pentateuch remain a stable part of the tradition. Really, questioning the authorship of the Pentateuch (often called JEDP theory or the documentary hypothesis) was just one example of a larger, systemic issue arising during that time in religious, philosophical, historical, and scientific fields.

Scientifically, we don't have to look too much further back than Galileo's "eppur si muove", or "and yet it moves", in reference to the earth revolving around the sun. (The actual historicity of whether Galileo said this is unsubstantiated, but it is historically true that it's been attributed to him). Let's just say that the Catholic church didn't treat Galileo too well because of his confirmation of the Copernican theory that the earth revolves around the sun. Why? The Catholic church was resistant to new scientific theories because they undermined the established theological claims about the way God created the world. Structurally, this is no different than, say, the historical claim that God created the earth in seven days based on a literal reading of the Genesis account. If a theory such as evolution undermines the historical interpretation of the Genesis account, established historical Protestant orthodoxy comes into question. Now what was 7 days is now 7 million years (or whatever). So, you're not only questioning the "facts" of the Bible, but more importantly, whether you can find historical or scientific facts, in our "modern" sense of the terms, at all. Put differently, the entire hermeneutic, or how people read a text, and whether their reading is legitimate, came into question.

Historically, this is where you get Rudolf Bultman and co. scouring the Bible in a demythologizing project aimed at extrapolating only those parts of Bible that might actually, historically be corroborated. JEDP theory was just one example of this, not, in my opinion, the catalyst. The catalyst came much earlier with the advent of modern historical consciousness. Outside of r/history and academic scholars, it's not often realized that how we today think about history is relatively new. Herodotus certainly wasn't doing history in our sense and even Gibbon, I'm told, wasn't all the way there. Much less so do we find history as an active part of the Christian hermeneutic in Biblical interpretation. Medieval biblical interpretation, for example, centered around what we now call the "allegorical method", which sought to infuse x,y, and z elements into scripture that wouldn't be found on a literal reading. In some ways, you could find whatever you wanted in scripture so long as it was a) moral and b) in keeping with tradition. The spirit of the text was such that 20 people might read 20 different things from the same body of work. That body of work was "alive", activated by the Holy Spirit. It did not mean one thing. A historical reading of the Genesis account, or even of Christ's actual resurrection, were not inscribed into Christian dogma on day one. The latter became dogma a few centuries after Christ, and the former didn't become a question of dogma until Bultman, at least in this side of the pond. History, as our history, should be understood as growing gradually into the consciousness of humans over time. That Christianity has a unique, evolving relationship with it shouldn't be surprising.

Philosophically, the Enlightenment dealt a heavy blow to traditional Christian thought. If a thing couldn't be corroborated using scientific evidence or rigorous argument, it shouldn't be believed. Tradition was a prison for the mind. Christian tradition was superstition. A litany of different responses occurred over the next few centuries: rationalist thought crept into theological circles, evidentialism became, at first, an attack on religion which religion later used to attack their attackers, and, perhaps most importantly, religious experience came to the forefront.

Religiously, the response to the rationalist and evidentialists, in the late 20th century, resulted in two major schools: from Schleiermacher, the religious experience camp, and from Charles and Archibald Hodge, the Biblical inerrancy camp. If tradition couldn't give you the truth, either your direct experience with God or the Bible's 100% accuracy is where you can begin to ground your faith. In truth, these two camps were in conflict with each other. The former camp grew into the perennialist and reductionistic schools of thought, where your intense religious encounters with "God", or the numinous, was either truly attached to the numinous or you had sociological, economic, and historical causes to your numinous experiences. In other words, it was actually real or it was just externally caused. The latter school is currently the most dominant school in academic circles. (There's a reason that Buddhists experienced Nirvana and Protestants experience God, and not vice versa.) As for the biblical inherency group, that is actually the dominant school in most lay person Evangelical and Protestant churches in the US.

Because they were attached to a newly developed historically conscious hermeneutic they began to make claims that the Bible is probably not inherently built to answer. If we return to the Genesis account, it's pretty obvious to any scholar that these are just poems, written by authors whose historical consciousness did not exist in our sense. Moreover, written by authors who even pre-dated the allegorical interpretation of scripture coming from the medieval era. They were about as dedicated to the historicity of the claims in Jewish history as Herodotus was dedicated to his claims about Greek history. It wasn't the exactly point of the text.

So, when Christians in America are looking for historical and scientific facts in a book that does not present its content with the intent of solidifying those types of facts, you'll find that when science does its work, in trying to produce "facts" (strictly speaking science doesn't produce facts either; it produces high probabilities), that those facts are in conflict with the "facts" of the Good book itself.

The world wasn't really created in 7 days. That was a poem, not a historical claim. Moses didn't really write the Pentateuch. That was said to ensure those books' authority. Mary didn't really carry a child as a virgin. That's impossible. We could go on and on looking at the Bible and comparing it to scientific claims.

The hermeneutic of the vast majority of American Christians is part of a heritage hermeneutic that itself is derivative of the enlightenment and a response to the enlightenment. It is borne out of historical and scientific consciousness. And that historical and scientific consciousness is not inherently built into the Bible. So you get conflict.