The temptation would be to see this as yet another syncretism between American civil religion and Protestantism, but I don't think that's right: this violates too many American civil religious precepts.

I wonder (and no more than wonder) if we're seeing some kind of romantic nationalism acculturated in an American context that requires it to take on the idiom and practices of evangelical Protestantism. That, to me, seems like the nearest description of what we're seeing.