> I'd bet money that the average American cannot even describe the difference between Protestantism and Catholicism besides something facile like "they have a pope." There aren't even any Protestants sitting on the Supreme Court.
The modern American culture simply descends from Calvinist culture, by no means it is the same. Just like you wouldn’t expect a fish to explain its ancestry to you, you wouldn’t expect an American to do the same.
Some people seem to believe that if you remove a belief in God, a sudden discontinuous cultural gap appears. But there is no reason to assert such thing. An absence of belief in God doesn’t make Americans culturally more similar to Buddhists than to their ancestors, they still inherit similar values and social practices. The American culture experienced an abrupt shift from the British culture due to the founder effect, but from that point it pretty much developed continuously. (Well, of course like all cultures, it experienced outside influence but it wasn’t as impactful.)
> In a historical sense, it's very geographically dependent. Before states got rid of established churches, Virginia, for instance, established the Episcopal church, while Massachusetts established the Congregational church.
There is a book called The Faiths of the Founding Fathers by David L. Holmes, it covers explanation of the sheer influence Calvinism had in the US.
By the way, is it surprising that
(1) Harvard originally had a Calvinist church.
(2) Harvard is located in New England, the land of radical Protestants aka Puritans.
(3) Harvard is the most prestigious university.
My point is simply that American “average people” are in no way simply average people if such thing even exists.