Yes, the nutty missionaries has been showing up from time to time.

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And here at home there's a lot of fundy Asians. My only close up and personal experience with evangelicals came on a ski trip I took in college (a token sum for travel, housing and food - but you've got to politely endure a little bit of god-talk after dinner - ok - though the speaking in tongues scared the hell out of me - don't we normally associate people screaming gibberish that they claim comes from the ether with severe schizophrenia?). It was also my first time as a racial minority. Go around any area with large numbers of Koreans or Chinese in the US and you'll see countless evangelical churches. Same goes increasingly for Latinos.

Sorry, you don't know your US history.

The first settlers to the US were religiuos zealots who had left England to emigrate to the Netherlands. There they lived in the area of Leiden, where they were allowed to freely profess their creed and to become prosperous citizens within the larger community.

After twenty years, however, the elders of the Puritans became aware that their kids were getting exposed too much to the influence of Dutch liberal culture, and thus to ideological corruption of their dogmatic beliefs.

They began to fear for the survival of their flock, and specially for the souls of their children, in this too benign political and religious environment. Therefore they decided to petition Queen Elizabeth for a patent to emigrate to the newly found territories in the western hemisphere. This request was granted and the English Puritans packed their tools in the Netherlands and went to Plymouth and embarked on the Mayflower to sail towards the new territories.

Facit: The early US immigrants were not religiously persecuted people who had left Europe because they were looking for freedom to profess their cult, but instead, religious zealots and social misfits who were afraid and incapable to live amidst other Christians in a tolerant society.

In the Americas they founded a theocracy in the new colonies and were only stopped by the English colonial authorities to perform the worst rituals of their collective crazyness. But even the English troops could not hinder the Puritans to perform mass slaughter of the next wave of religious zealots who followed them - the Quakers, whose only difference consisted in the fact that they wore hats and (for economical reasons) clothes made of crude, thick cow hides at all times and addressed each other with 'Thou' and referred to things as 'thine'.

A small difference but different enough to get hanged by our 'good' Puritans.

Quakers getting whipped by the Boston Taliban:

Quakers getting hanged by the Christian Taliban:

Two Quakers were executed on October 27th, in Boston, after reentering the colony, despite having been expelled. One year later, a third person, a women named Mary Dyer, was also hanged, after returning to the colony. She had initially been spared execution.

More Quakers accused by Puritans and hanged

Jefferson wrote about the Quaker laws:

"The USA appears destined by fate to plague America with misery in the name of liberty." Simon Bolivar, Caracas, 1819