Fortunately for me my parents were basically atheist/agnostic and so I never had to feel what you felt personally with your mother. Nevertheless, I was vaguely aware of this moral hysteria going on in the background, and had the same innate sense of ridiculousness of it all at age 6 or 7. Later when I was in high school I was introduced to Frank Zappa and read his 1985 statement to congress (http://downlode.org/Etext/zappa.html) and it gave me a deep sense of pride that there were still grownups standing up for true freedom in the way that it had always been preached to us in Civics and American History, and not the fear-based politicization of every non-issue that seemed to pass for national politics in those days. I suppose politics are no less ridiculous today, but I think with the crumbling of the Soviet Union there was a real vacuum for common fears and the political machine was a bit out of practice to raise a credibly amorphous spectre such as "terrorism".