Okay, so I saw this picture the other day on Facebook, and it made me angry.

Why does it make me angry, you ask? Because it’s wrong.

That’s right, you read that correctly. That statement is wrong.

First of all, God and Allah are the same entity. They are just a different names. It’s like if you called me Court, or if I called Suzanne Suzie. Still the same person, just a different name. So, basically, “One nation under God” is the EXACT same as “One nation under Allah.” Christians and Muslims worship the same God. We just worship differently.

Second of all, and perhaps more importantly, there is a very important thing called the First Amendment. Yeah, most of us have a general idea of what it’s about: freedoms of speech, religion, press, assembly, and petition. Here is the exact quote from the First Amendment regarding our freedom of religion: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”

You know what that means? It means the government cannot get involved in the people’s beliefs. It cannot favor any one religion over another, nor can it deny the establishment or practice of another. That definition, in and of itself, means America CANNOT be a Christian nation, because the government can’t favor it. It cannot establish a national religion.

Yeah, the most practiced religion in the country is Christianity. That’s totally fine. But that does not negate the fact that there are also people who are Hindu, or Buddhist or Celtic, or Native American, or atheist or Muslim. The fact that most Americans are Christian does not mean no one cares about people from other faiths. And does it really matter that we are not all Christian? It does not make us blasphemous, or heathens, or Hell-bound if we do not all follow Christianity.

You know what it does make us, though? Free. We are free to make our own choices in this country. We can choose whether or not we want to speak our opinions, or keep them to ourselves. We can decide who we want to marry, and spend the rest of our lives with. We can pick where we want to live. We can decide who and how we want to worship. No one, not the government, not the people, can take that away from us.

With that freedom comes great responsibility. The responsibility to respect each other. We have the freedom to choose, so we must respect that not everyone is going to choose what we will and get over the idea that we must shove the private aspects of our lives—like who or what we want to believe in—down the throats of people who think differently than we do.

We are not a Muslim nation. We are not an Islamic nation. And we are not a Christian nation. But we are a free nation. One with choices and respect. So let’s act like it.