I’m not sure what the causitive factors are (I’m sure there are some); But there definitely is a correlation between American Exceptionalism Policy and Fundamentalist Christianity.
Then there is a group of businessmen, the “neocons”, who’ve attached themselves to American Exceptionalism as well, and they use the political Christians as pawns in their games. Karl Rove even called them “useful idiots”, according to David Kuo (ex-Fundamentalist Neoconservative Christian, author of Tempting Faith.)
One of the connecting factors is Desire to Dominate. Traditionalist Christians and rightwing Jews often feel that their faith, culture, or nation is under attack by competing social groups, and many of them feel they must attack first before being attacked themselves. This translated into Bush’s “pre-emptive warfare” policies, which were a violent and radical extenuation of existing American policies.
These are the same people who, on a more local level, use their fears to create bāsēz for more domination and more control. They were behind the temperance laws of the 1920’s. They were behind the imprisonment of Comedian Lenny Bruce; the jailing of Tommy Chong; The Blue Laws, The Drug Wars, bans on cabarets, and more.
The Fear-Based Authoritarian Belief System thinks that the whole world is so untrustworthy, that control grids need to be in place for everything there is (except pollution and guns, which are the two things they don’t like to control, at least in America.)
Basically, its the people who fear chaos the most, that create it the most.