I would answer this in two different ways. One has to do with a bit of historical discontinuity where dead people are concerned, particularly dead saints. And, well, the absence of Catholic sainthood must have something to do with it as well. At any rate- stories of mystical miraculous things happening to corpses are a reasonably big part of Catholic history, albeit less so in the past few centuries and much less in America than in Europe. Protestants don’t really have any of that within their own history, especially those who are rooted more firmly in America and don’t consider the entire history of Christianity in England or Germany to be a part of their heritage. Because that sort of thing is absent, I’d say it affects the way we come at dead people. Along with that, from what little I understand, there seems to be a bit of a tradition mainly dating back to when people lived their whole lives and eventually died within five miles of their birthplace. (I may not be super accurate with this, so bear with me please). Evidently, during this time frame when a certain location basically represented anything and everything that you ever knew or experienced ever in your life, there was more of an emphasis on the mysterious presence of a really really good dead person (especially a saint) lingering in that area and watching over it in some way that was probably driven more by colloquial belief and little t tradition than it was by dogmatic force. This too is largely absent from almost all Protestant tradition, and as a result there is less of a tendency to think of the deceased as looking over us in that sort of way- we hardly have anything within our collective memory that involves living and dying in such a way, so we can’t even relate to the baseline that the idea comes from.
There is another way that I look at it, too. Protestants (with a few exceptions, I’ll mention the Book of Common Prayer) emphasize a totally personal responsibility for whatever prayer comes out of your mouth with a near-total emphasis on extemporaneous prayer that is made up on the spot. Some exceptions aside, there is much less in the way of recitation, even for Protestants at a very young age. Catholics at a young age are trained more in the way of how to properly recite a prayer that’s given to them and then a bit later they can work on coming up with their own thing, and of course there’s different ways you can choose to go through that development and there’s a wider variety of endpoints where prayer life is concerned. Protestants at a young age are told what prayer is (talking to God) and then they are left with some general ideas of what you can say to God, but in the end the goal is to put it in your own words. These differences in religious formation are very important, I think; young Protestants are given prayer assignments (of sorts) and those assignments go through little to no change throughout the lifespan, at least in basic principle. Young Catholics look forward to more of a development to their prayer identity that is not set in stone as much. To me, as someone who was raised Protestant (and still is thank you), the very idea of changing anything truly foundational about prayer is unthinkable. Well, why can’t I just do this thing differently…please, you have to understand, this is a change to something that has been set in stone with dogmatic force* from the time that I was forming my first permanent memories as a human. Young Catholics come up differently where there is more change over time; not so for the young Protestant, I assure you. Again, with a nod to the exceptions among the Mainline Protestants.
*[Dogmatic force…we don’t have dogma, but we sure do have dogmatic force.]
