“There was an almost irrational fear of the Christian right. There was a need for scary people to form a barrier. “
I have run into this firsthand a number of times, and remain perplexed by it as a perceived main threat in today’s world. I do wonder whether its origin is earlier american christians or more from the (quite very bad) experiences Jews had in europe over a number of centuries with christians.
It does seem like a cultural anachronistic viewpoint from a time when, in fact, Jews had a great deal to fear from devout and/or fundamentalist christians. Now whether this was the 14th century or the 19th (worth noting that many jewish families didn’t come over until the late 19th or early 20th centuries) or somewhere in between, I don’t know.
The worst depredations were carried out in the Pogroms of the old Russian Empire. Those folks were Russian Orthodox Christians, not "evangelicals," or "fundamentalists," as we know them. Devout? Had little to do with it.