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I don't see it as anything sinister, or a plot to do away with cash.  With the value of the dollar having been so eroded, and with inflation over time, the penny has become more a bookkeeping item than anything else, similar to the mill (one-tenth of a cent).  Prime example, gasoline is usually priced in dollars, cents, and mills, hence the nine-tenths at the end of the price.  Yet as a practical matter, gasoline prices are rounded up (not down) to the next full cent.

The lowest practical coin is the five-cent piece (nickel), and arguably it, too, is largely valueless.  In all honesty, the only coins we really need are the dime and the quarter, and a case could be made for supplementing these with one- and two-dollar pieces, similar to Canada, with the five-dollar bill being the lowest paper denomination.  Again, inflation is the culprit here.  

My opinion only, and I really don't think the issue,all by itself, has a moral or religious coloration.  

I likewise don't see anything sinister about eliminating the penny.  It likely affects us in sales tax states like Washington more.  Stores are already putting up signs for cash customers who don't have exact change (i.e. pennies) saying at the amount due will be rounded up to the nearest nickel.  I remember the $2.00 Jefferson bill and the $1.00 Susan B. Anthony coin, these are sill in circulation, just not very common.  Shops complained that their cash registers didn't have a slot for the $2.00 bill nor a compartment for the $1.00 coin.  The latter was nearly the size of a quarter, which caused confusion.
 
I wonder why they don't replace the Kennedy 50 cent piece (still in circulation, just not commonly encountered) with a dollar coin that size, and the $1.00 Washington bill with the $2.00 Jefferson bill.  Current cash registers would have compartments for those.  Churches and other charity collections where people put in a dollar bill may see their collections nearly double.

In time to come, I'd say that as a practical matter, all prices will be rounded up to the nearest five cents, as trying to figure up whether to round up or down, time and time again, is probably asking a bit much of cashiers.  Probably in actual practice, all prices would end in either .05 or .00 (but what, then, of the .99 and similar prices so beloved by retailers?), and the only rounding that would take place, would be on the total line of a receipt (and even that would be the result of sales taxes that presumably wouldn't be rounded, e.g., tax on a 50-cent item at 8% would be four cents).

The Washington one-dollar bill is so iconic that Americans would probably have a very, very difficult time turning loose of it, in favor of a coin.  Even when silver dollars existed, they were not common, probably about like 50-cent pieces today, they existed, but weren't used all that much.  (Ditto two-dollar bills.  Once I had a two-dollar bill and tried to spend it at a store, and the cashier wouldn't take it.  She didn't know such a thing existed and thought it was fake.)

They make the two-dollar coin (the "toonie") work in Canada, but that said, I have to wonder if a populace, already weighted down with dollar coins, would appreciate being saddled with another fairly heavy coin on top of that.  So a two-dollar bill might be the way to go.