Thanks for the info. One thing stood out: The continental side had (has?) their own deity (God)? That would be a deal breaker for me, to say the least!
Masons were essentially deists, rejected Christ, and believed in the “Divine Architect.” US Masons for some reason were able to reconcile this with US Protestantism (although European Protestants, to my knowledge, cannot reconcile Masonry with Protestantism).
I think it was probably because Protestantism in the US didn’t have any particular standard of orthodoxy, and people such as the founder of Christian Science could receive “private revelations” and start another church and still consider themselves Protestants. Therefore, Protestants really didn’t examine Masonry very closely, and since Masons in the US came from the Protestant population, this meant that they could reach a working agreement where their beliefs didn’t interfere with each other.