Galileo was never subject to the Spanish Inquisition, but to the Roman Inquisition. He lived in Italy and got crosswise with the Pope over church doctrine on the structure of the universe. His espousal of heliocentric theory was correct---but unprovable at the time, because it resulted in the same description of the heavens as the geocentric theory. (It was later that we were able to make stellar parallax measurements to make the determination.) Galileo did not help his cause by being rude and abrasive to the Pope.

But the Catholic church would not enable the masses to even read the Bible. All that the church goers got was church dogma, not the Word of Scripture. Hand copies of the Bible were rare and expensive and kept away. That was the great liberation of the Gutenberg revolution in mass printing of Bibles.

Burnings at the stake were bi-partisan. Witchcraft burnings were committed by Protestants as well. A very ugly example of the pitfalls of "Everybody knows..."

We had an entire thing called the Protestant Reformation that took us away from the unbiblical practices and traditions of the Catholic church and back to what scripture actually teaches.

Also the majority of the founding fathers were Protestants and England even called the American revolution the Protestant rebellion.

Without Christianity you wouldn't have America and you certainly wouldn't have the Bill of Rights and the Constitution or which were drawn out of the general equity of God's law