What happened in America?

"Nevertheless, British evangelicals manifest a greater flexibility in their approach to inerrancy...While American formulations vary in their insistence upon scientific and historical inerrancy, they generally reflect a greater anxiety over factual accuracy than has ever been present in the British evangelical heritage." (Harriet A. Harris, Fundamentalism and Evangelicals. [New York: Oxford University Press, 1998], 87.) Why this specifically American evangelical anxiety? Is it because American evangelical theology became democratically decided and every person can see for themselves that the Bible is obviously and indeed the perfect word of God?