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Hi-Tech Nativity Security
To combat vandalism and theft of their holiday displays, many churches and cities are turning to a technological answer. After one of their cows was stolen, St. Marks Episcopal Church in Glen Ellyn, Ill. installed GPS devices in the figurines of its nativity scene. This year the village of Wellington, Fla. added security cameras to protect their display. From the article: "BrickHouse Security in New York City offered churches and synagogues free GPS and cameras to protect their displays this season. Seventy have signed up so far. About 24 of them are also installing security cameras. In Merrick, N.Y., the Chabad Center for Jewish Life is putting GPS in its 8-foot menorah on display in a park."
Here's the answer no one else will tell you: it's the third world mentality seeping into everything. And, no, it's not racial: it's cultural. There's too many cultures here now that don't respect property or education or anything our country (or any modern nation) was built upon. So there you have it in a politically incorrect nutshell. We'll throw money at it, try to legislate around it, but until people, en masse, are willing to stand up and stand together to say"No more of this fucking bullshit" it will continue and get worse.
OK, time for the mods to hit me with -5 The Truth Hurts
Since I wasn't around in the 'old days' (for any reasonable definition of the term, anyway), I can't comment first-hand, but I'd theorise that the changes are based on urbanisation and corporatisation destroying the small community groups that people used to inhabit. If your action has a negative consequence to you personally, or someone you know, that obviously serves as a disincentive - basically, a person only has a direct incentive to be considerate if their actions are likely to affect someone within their 'monkeysphere'. It used to be the case that most of the people you regularly interacted with had some level of connection to you personally, so no problem there. In general, people don't immediately default to 'asshat' as soon as they think nobody they know is watching (although there are exceptions), but there's a secondary driving factor: this level of disaffection doesn't just appear spontaneously, it's engendered by the fact that those who shape the society we do live in do so in a largely impersonal manner - when the organisations we deal with every day don't care about whether they're screwing us over, it tends to rub off. People are left with no disincentive against bad behaviour, and little incentive for good behaviour. I'm not saying this excuses the people being asshats, of course, but it does provide some reasonable explanation of "what the hell happened to us" (which was quite possible meant to be rhetorical, but anyway...).
It's not all bad, though. The flipside is that the socially-enforced conformism of small communities is much more conducive to discrimination, repression of the 'out group', and ostracism of those who fail to follow the (often unwritten and/or illogical) 'rules'. Small communities protect the status quo, for better or worse. Whether it's a worthwhile trade off is a matter of personal opinion.
"Humorless"
I left out that most Atheist Fundamentalists are humorless and take themselves and their religion ver-r-r-r-ry seriously.
I don't know, that's easy to say when you pick out one relatively short timespan as 'what this country was built on'. The dismantling of other cultures seems more accurate. So many the nativity vandals are keeping it old-school and true.