Daily Inspiration Quote by James F. Cooper

Cooper is doing something slyly surgical here: he treats prejudice not as an eternal American flaw but as a historical import with a paper trail. By pinning “most of its social prejudices” on “exaggerated religious opinions,” he reframes bigotry as an institutional habit, baked in early by communities that came to the New World chasing purity and wound up legislating it. The word “owes” stings. It’s an accounting term, implying America carries a moral debt incurred at founding, not a random lapse in character.

The sentence also carries a novelist’s eye for messy causality. Cooper doesn’t indict “religion” in the abstract; he targets sects and their exaggerations: the way theological certainty hardens into social categories, and social categories harden into exclusion. “Different sects” sounds pluralist on the surface, but the subtext is that competition among them can amplify zeal rather than temper it, turning doctrine into a kind of cultural arms race.

Context matters: Cooper is writing as the early Republic is busy inventing its own self-mythology. Against the patriotic idea that colonies were born purely from liberty-seeking ideals, he hints at a darker origin story: settlement as moral sorting mechanism. The line reads like a warning to a nation congratulating itself on freedom while quietly maintaining systems of intolerance. In Cooper’s hands, prejudice isn’t a glitch in the American project; it’s one of its founding materials, sanctified early, then normalized.