Where I grew up it was the opposite. Movies like The Terminator were heavily censored but you could see a man fully nude on daytime tv.
What a waste of government resources over nothing. Could have focused on that missed child or unsolved murder.
Many of the vaunted Founding Fathers were deists, which is just this side of agnostic. They were probably also puritans but none were Puritans.
As far as I can tell we reinvented religion during various Revivals, and what we came up with has only the faintest connection to the version of Christianity that people came here with. They claim connection to that one particular sect, but without either genealogical, intellectual, or theological descent.
I don't fully understand the actual history. But much of what we claim about it is a myth.
The gist that is taught is that they were one of the first and took a big chance is really all it is. There's not much depth to it as far as adoration of the Pilgrims in the US.
I had to read / find some good documentaries later in life before I really learned about them:
If you watch a lot of TV from both countries you will see a very obvious difference in verbal communication. Americans (of which I am one) are so much less articulate when it comes English.
The difference is striking on The Graham Norton Show: almost every American guest stands out as less articulate. This is just one example. Another are interviews with regular people. That’s where it really became obvious.
If there is a difference in communication skills, I don't think religious history explains it.
The pilgrims lived in Holland for years in exile before deciding to go to the new world. It would seem to take an extreme group of people to do that, but articulate isn't one of the traits I would assign to them.
Forced out? Or wanted their particular version of religion to be 'the only one', (oh, as well as being 'persecuted')?
America was founded by religious groups that couldn’t integrate in Europe. Then western expansion required rugged living and violent displacement of natives, and lawless expanses of frontier.
So we have had puritanical and deeply conservative cultures that are heavily armed for hundreds of years.
America was largely isolated from that. We had plenty of wars but the biggest was just against ourselves, and we turned it into a story of great heroism (rather than admit that the losers fought a bad war for bad reasons). We came to be proud of our violent adventures as we colonized westward.
If this (absurd) chain of reasoning holds, we still love the excitement of violence while Europeans are largely over it.
And this (dubious) theory also explains the fear of nudity. European wars were often nominally religious. (In fact religion was mostly just an excuse for the same old wars of greed, but it makes a better cover story.) Being proudly religious is kind of embarrassing now.
Americans didn't keep killing each other over minor doctrinal differences, at least not on a mass scale. Instead we showed off just how devoted we were, topping each other to be more and more against what everyone else was against. Literally, holier than thou.
Not everyone is into that, but for a variety of history reasons the ones who are have outsized power, and they hammer anyone who crosses them. Most people wouldn't care, but the ones who care, care a lot.
This is, as I've made clear, just a barely-informed guess. But I do think it has some elements of truth to it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protector_(1985_film)#Hong...
Also, I'm pretty sure that Europeans would be upset if there were a bunch of naked women sitting at a table packaging enormous amounts of cocaine at a school board meeting, especially if the tv decided to show this by itself.
Although I might be wrong, seeing as Denmark had legal distribution of child pornography for a decade, with people arguing in Parliament that the sacrifice of those few children possibly saved many others from being molested.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Climax_Corporation#Child...
A good* documentary on that is "Candy Film - Da børneporno var lovlig" (2016)
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[*] for certain values of good that include tears and nausea.