Faith & Spirit Quote by Theodore C. Sorensen

A billion is a prosecutor’s number: too big to ignore, too blunt to argue with. Sorensen, a lawyer who spent his life translating power into public language, isn’t pleading for sympathy as much as establishing standing. He frames America’s problem not as terrorism or “clash of civilizations” rhetoric, but as a reputational injury of our own making: we have convinced them. The verb does the real work. It shifts agency from “they misunderstand us” to “we produced this belief,” a quiet indictment disguised as diagnosis.

The line’s intent is strategic, not sentimental. It widens the moral circle while also widening the strategic map: if over one billion people believe the United States is hostile to Islam, the consequences are geopolitical, generational, and self-reinforcing. Sorensen compresses an entire post-9/11 feedback loop into a single sentence: domestic prejudice bleeds into foreign policy; foreign policy reads like cultural domination; that perception hardens into resistance, which then gets cited as proof we were right to fear them. “Suppress their culture and invade their governments” pairs soft power and hard power in one breath, suggesting that the offense is both symbolic and kinetic.

Subtext: he’s warning against the easy, politically profitable move of treating Islam itself as the adversary. The real danger is narrative capture - if America becomes legible abroad as anti-Muslim, every military action, surveillance policy, travel restriction, and pundit’s sneer starts to look like part of one coherent campaign. Sorensen’s rhetoric aims to cut that fuse by naming it plainly: the war for legitimacy is being lost on perception, and perception is policy’s shadow.