A Racial Project?

Although I am not very familiar with the history of the Spanish-American war, most of the times I’ve come across it in academic literature, race has been an important part of the discussion.  In this telling, the Spanish-American war was America’s first step towards an imperial venture, an outlet for its anxieties over Frederick Jackson Turner’s closing of the frontier, and an opportunity to forge a new kind of white masculinity.  With this interpretation in mind, I am wondering what role the civil religion that McCullough talks about plays in this construction of race.  In Chapter 4, McCullough discusses how ideas of Anglo-Saxonism framed how Americans shaped this struggle.  However, people like Theodore Roosevelt, for example, saw the war as an opportunity to forge a new American race—a hybrid of the best of the European groups that would ultimately reinvigorate America, just as the frontier had done.   Thus, not only did ideas about race frame how Americans saw the war with Spain, they also saw the fighting of the war as a sort of racial project, from which something new and stronger could emerge.  Did civil religion have a function here?  Could it be the “glue” that would hold the new American race together?