Politics & Power Quote by Sally Quinn

A statistic can be a cudgel or a confession, and Quinn’s offhand framing tells you she knows it. “This morning in the Washington Post” is a credential drop: not just an appeal to authority, but a signal of proximity to the capital’s gatekeeping machinery. It’s the voice of someone fluent in the language of elite legitimacy, where facts arrive pre-certified by a masthead and a breakfast routine.

The number itself, “85%,” does double duty. On paper it’s descriptive; in subtext it’s normative, a quiet reminder of who counts as “America” in the default setting. Quinn doesn’t say “a lot of Americans are Christians.” She reaches for a clean, commanding percentage, the kind that turns a messy social landscape into something like a mandate. That’s the move: converting demographic observation into cultural gravity. Once you accept the figure, the implied next step is to treat Christian identity as the baseline from which politics, public rituals, and moral expectations should flow.

Context matters because Washington is where religion is often used less as private faith than as civic credentialing. Quinn’s diction suggests a world where religiosity is measured like voter turnout: a fact to be cited in arguments about legitimacy, representation, and whose sensibilities deserve deference. Even the temporal marker, “this morning,” gives it newsroom urgency, as if public life should recalibrate in real time to the latest tally.

The line’s real intent isn’t to inform; it’s to position the speaker inside an institution that adjudicates reality, while positioning Christianity as the quiet majority backdrop against which everyone else becomes a special case.