The short answer is: because no one is afraid of Lutherans and Episcopalians.
People ARE afraid of Catholics and "fundamentalist" and "evangelical" Protestants, and thus you will see the regular bashing of such Christians in books and film. With very rare exceptions, only Christians who conform to liberal political dogma and teach religious universalism come off clean. Nine times out of 10, if a Christian fundamentalist or evangelical is portrayed in a book or movie, he will be portrayed negatively.
Ned Flanders is actually the most flattering portrait of a television evangelical I can think of. That is a nuanced mockery that is almost...well, almost affectionate. It's one an evangelical such as myself can laugh at. The TV show
Lost also has more nuanced portrayals of religious people than most shows; Eko is a devout Catholic and has not yet--at least--been made a total nutcase. Time will tell on that one.
But most of the time--9 times out of 10--religious Christians will be portrayed as bigots, serial killers, women oppressors, wife beaters, lunatics, secret hypocritical homosexuals, or the like. They will be villains through and through--except and unless they are suddenly enlightened and realize that Christ was, in fact, a liberal Democrat who went about 1st century Palestine preaching against global warming and in favor of diversity training.
It would be hard to write a conspiracy novel with a Protestant denomination at its core. Part of that is, as I said, no one is afraid of the mainline hierarchical churches--the Lutherans, the Methodists, the Episcopalians. The generally more conservative Protestant denominations--of which they are afraid--tend to have limited hierarchy and fairly independent congregations. Even those with hierarchy rarely take their hierarchy seriously or even know half the time what doctrines and "position statements" the out-of-touch bishops and councils and conventions are churning out. As
denominations, they don't have enough of a top-down structure for a conspiracy to work itself out. Any conspiracy would have to be a conspiracy of a handful of elders or deacons. Not much excitement there.
Another impediment is the lack of history. Protestantism is too fractured, too new, to really (legitimately) trace its roots back for two thousand years the way the Catholic church can. Granted, I know there was always a small, faithful band of Baptists dating back to the 1st century AD, carrying on the one true religion....
One more impediment--the lack of sacraments. Yeah, some Protestants have them (communion and baptism), but most don't adopt a sacramental theology the way the Catholics do--there is very little mystery, very little "magic" for lack of a better word. And this makes for very dull conspiracies.
The reason
Footloose is an example of Protestant bashing is because it is the only way Hollywood can seem to conceive of portraying a devout Protestant. No, all devout (even all fundamentalists) Protestants aren't against dancing...but when Hollywood thinks of devout Protestants, that's the kind of character they think of--a rigid, unloving, legalistic type. The mind goes no deeper. The stereotype is inflexible and deep-seeded. And so that's the kind of devout Protestant we get--again and again and again and again.
I just thought of a great TV exception, though--kudos to
X-files for that awesome episode where the good, liberal, open-minded pastor turns out to be the devil, and the snake handling nutcase conservative Christian is actually
right! And someone (Mulder I think) says, "Maybe the devil is just a nice guy who tells us what we want to hear." As I was watching that episode, I was getting rankled, thinking: these are typical Hollywood portrayals, where only liberal Christians are acceptable and capable of goodness, and all conservative Christians are evil and crazy. As I was watching, I said to myself--the only thing that could redeem this is if they reversed the roles, but what screenwriter would ever do that...and bam, they did. Beautiful.
