My problem isn't with the exercise of etymology, it's the way he's doing it; he's being "clever" about it, and it's annoying, and IMHO, reads like a bad college newspaper op-ed piece.
The Greeks didn't have Christianity, they had any number of Gods who were said to interact with humans on the reg. Very different background to religion today in America. When you take into account that most of the 73 million spoken of in the article are Christians, it complicates things even more. Christians believe God is good and all powerful, &c, and belief in "him" will save you. Greeks were afraid that any god might rape, seduce, steal, take your eyesight; the Greeks thought gods should mostly be avoided whenever possible.
73 million people aren't idiots in the Greek sense. If they were, they'd want universal healthcare, a UBI, &c, because those things should be in anyone's self-interest, because they preserve one's life. But they don't. Why not? Because they believe in this thing called America; they have been sold on the idea that "freedom" (whatever that means) is more important, and they also believe that freedom means amassing money, and/or vice versa. You can say that's idiotic (I would) but it's not idiotic in the Greek sense. It doesn't work because they aren't actually for "freedom" (most probably couldn't even describe what it means, right or left, and probably would not agree on its definition either), they are for an idea they can't define, which would make them idiots in the Latin sense (the one we use today), not the Greek sense.