In his Inaugural Address our new president described the United States as “a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus and non-believers.” As a graduate of Harvard Law School and a former editor of the Harvard Law Review, President Obama, knows the significance of words and the order in which they appear. Given his superb legal training, he knew exactly what he was doing. In a subtle but effective way, he has rejected the idea of America as a Judeo-Christian civilization and replaced it with the idea of America as a Christian-Muslim civilization, while providing himself with the necessary deniability should this newly formulated coincidentia oppositorum (union of opposites) yield too much outrage. The mainstream Jewish organizations cannot be counted on to protest, especially in this time of new-president euphoria. Hopefully, when the euphoria cools, Evangelical Christians will do so. Unfortunately, all too many liberal Christians and liberal Jews ignore or are ignorant of the fact that for Islam religion is a zero-sum game. There is no middle way. Our new president has tried to unite incompatible opposites that have a 1400 year history of irreconcilable conflict. By his deliberately chosen choice of words, he has given a place at the table to some Muslim organizations that do not assign a very high priority to America's national interests and have Islamists sympathies. This is a pity because Barack Obama is the only president we've got and he should have left this issue for another day. He can get away with it now, but, nota bene, it should be remembered. In the history of religion, even small shifts of a letter or an accent can result in long-term consequences, as was evident long ago in the debate at the Council of Nicea (325 C.E.) over whether Christ was homoousias ("of the same essence with the Father") or homoiousias ("of like essence with the Father".)