As a D&D playing teenager in the 1980s, I would ask people ranting about it what they thought of non-fantasy games like Top Secret, The Morrow Project, and Traveller. Responses were often negative – the games didn’t include “real” religion or did include powers of the mind and fictional religions. Since the relevant strain of Protestantism didn’t survive the Clinton administration as a political force, I think that they were very much afraid of their own imaginations in an ears-covered-la-la-la-can’t-hear-you way because they knew their movement was about over.
Rather fits some of the stranger middle-class behavior that's popular right now, too.
Rhydlyd