What happened in the 17th century that made all the difference is religious war and Newton's Principia.

guaranteed to evoke a violent reaction from police is to challenge their right to "define the situation." --- David Graeber citing Marc Cooper

That is only a myth permeated presently in Protestant-majority, especially 'Anglo-Saxon' countries today. Luther was not an opponent of theocracy, nor of burning heretics and witches, nor of anti-semitism. Calvin established a kind of mini-Taleban in his city. The founders of settlements in what became the USA weren't persecuted who were hunted away but persecuters, sects who took religious judgement in their own hand, hunted away. But even bloody Cromwell was a religious fanatic.

Protestantism ended up as a(n involuntary) facilitator of the Enlightement only as a consequence of the Thirty Years War, and the Counter-Reformation in the areas given to Catholic rulers then.

BTW, not many know, Newton himself was a fundamentalist - one who rejected Athanasian Christianity (e.g. everything from the Nicean Creed), and who thought that his greates life achievement was not the theory of mechanics, not the theory of gravity, not his work on differential mathematics, but an almost forgotten book in which he attempted to reconcile the chronology of the Old Testament with that of then known ancient Middle Eastern royal lists (e.g. Egyptian, Assyrian, etc.).

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}