Why do the Protestants ignorantly read the Bible and take it all literally?

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Bible literalism is part of a modern trend towards fundamentalism that isn’t old at all, it’s very very new. Martin Luther’s 95 Theses, composed in 1517, fifteen hundred years after the death of Christ and the beginning of the Protestant Reformation itself, does not advocate for literalism, indeed he engages in brilliant metaphorical wordplay himself to describe the treasures of the gospel as nets to catch wealthy people, whereas the treasures of indulgences are nets to catch the wealth of men. Luther recognized inaccuracies in the Bible and deemed them insignificant.

In fact, during the Enlightenment period in the 1700s that followed the Reformation, earlier Biblical stories were increasingly being seen as more legendary than historical.

No, fundamentalism as we know it today began the the 19th century, as an eventual reaction to the Enlightenment questioning of the foundation of Christian theology, the Bible. One major contributor was the Princeton Theological Seminary, founded in the 1840s, deciding their curriculum and institutional beliefs would be serious, studious academic inquiry into, well, the Bible. This codified into a doctrine of biblical inerrancy.

Inerrancy was different from the commonly held doctrine of biblical infallibility. Infallibility holds that the Bible is always right, this is quite a different thing from saying it’s never wrong. This is important for a series of writings from very different genres intended to be read in many different ways. Always being right preserves it’s utility as a source of religious and spiritual wisdom, never being wrong perverts that into, essentially, the idea that whatever we believe about it must be 100% right because we can twist the words to mean that.

Rightly, no one throughout history ever considered that, it goes 100% against the grain of what Jesus was all about, but well, modernity had serious enough enemies that those enemies were willing to dust off all of the strategies and tactics of those Jesus railed against, the Pharisees, and adopt them as their own.

Even though the doctrine was formulated in the 1840s, it would be another 70 years until, in 1910, The Fundamentals was published, railing against modernism and insisting on, not just inerrancy, but Biblical literalism, meaning that whatever the letter of the book said, that was 100% totally historically accurate, God wrote it, higher criticism of the Bible, what we’d call today just wanting to know more about it, is against the will of God, coming full circle on Pharisaic apologism. This publication, spanning 90 essays over 12 volumes over five years, is what gives fundamentalism its name. Yes, when people deride Islamic fundamentalism, they’re using a word that Christians came up with to describe themselves.

By the 1970s biblical literalism had become entrenched as Protestant orthodoxy. Theirs was the dominant position, anybody else has to work hard to challenge it.