I think Thomas Friedman’s “Two Nations Under God,” from this morning’s NYT, stops a bit short.

If an alien anthropologist from a planet that knew nothing about Earth landed and started interviewing us, he would be initially confused by the fact that (at least) two separate groups of people used the same terms – God, Jesus – to refer to entities and religions that clearly had nothing to do with one another. The anthropologist might wind up concluding that “God” and “Jesus” were oddly generic terms that he would only be able to sort out once his linguist buddy from the University of Saturn arrived to do some research, but he would NEVER conclude that the fundamentalism of George Bush’s backers and the Christianity of a John Kerry were actually about the same diety.

Start trying to get your head around this idea now: Christianity is not monotheistic. At this point in time, American Christians worship at least two distinctly different gods.