While the politicization of every aspect of human life is more advanced in the United States than in many other countries, the increasing expansion of politics well beyond the narrow sphere that it occupied in the Christian centuries has been one of the primary marks of the modern world since the early Renaissance. From the French Revolution through the Russian Revolution through Nazism, the attempt to replace religion — and especially Catholicism — with politics, or at least to subjugate religion to politics, has been unrelenting.
Here in the United States, this revolutionary elevation of politics over religion has been more subtle, but in many ways that has made it more effective.