In the gospel according to MSNBC host Joy Reid, Christianity and hate are inextricably linked.

After a head-nod to the debunked 1619 project that claimed all American history from that date forward was designed to protect and extend slavery, Reid said in a taped show broadcast Thursday that a book from her next guest shows that “the roots of white supremacy in America extend even deeper, to a little-known 15th century Catholic Church doctrine.”

Her guest was Public Religion Research Institute founder and president Robert Jones, who wrote the book “The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy: and the Path to a Shared American Future.”

“Well, I should say that this is something actually fairly new to me. I have a Ph.D. in religion, I studied a lot of American religious history, and this idea of the Doctrine of Discovery was fairly new,” Jones said.

“So what it is, it’s a set of 15th-century Christian doctrines that were designed to answer the problem of what do we do with all these people we just encountered in these lands that we didn’t know about, right, in the 1400s. And so who do the Christian princes and queens and kings appeal to but the head of the Christian church?” he said.

Jones said that according to his view of his research, all of Western Europe embraced the idea, thus he calls it a Christian doctrine.

“And this, I should say it is a Catholic doctrine, but this is before the Catholic-Protestant split, so it is a Christian doctrine for all of Western Europe here.”

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He said that a doctrine from the Pope says that “the defining characteristic is whether or not these people are Christian or not.”

“If they are not Christian and if they are not already subjugated by a Christian power, then they essentially have no human rights. And it goes on to explicitly spell out that they have the right to occupy, conquer, kill, steal their goods, and then this phrase like is like literally in the document, something that still rings in my head, and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery,” he said.

Reid then interjected to support the idea.

“And so this is what gives license in their minds to European colonizers to try to enslave indigenous people, to wipe them out if they resist in any way, and to enslave Africans. That’s how they do it and still in their minds advance the interests of Christianity,” she said.

Jones agreed, claiming that the doctrine motivates racist efforts in America today.

“It’s worth remembering this is the version of Christianity that lands on these shores and in fact, motivates the landing on these shores, and I think one of the things I’ve become convinced of and one of the reasons why — at the heart of this new book is that this idea that this country is intended by God to be a promise land for European Christians is very much still with us,” Jones said.

In an interview with the Guardian, Jones claimed many Americans are trying to restore the past he insisted was brought ashore by those adhering to the Catholic doctrine.

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“Go back and understand they really do believe that this country was divinely ordained to be a promised land for European Christians,” he added.

“That idea is so old and so deep it explains in many ways the visceral reactivity. Why are we fighting today about AP African-American history? Arkansas banned it, Florida’s been fighting it, and it’s because it tells this alternative story about the country that’s not just settlers, pioneers — a naive mythology of innocence,” he said.

Jones said former President Donald Trump has capitalized on that sentiment.

“I’ve always thought that, in Trump’s MAGA slogan, the most powerful word is not about America being great; it’s the ‘again’ part. It’s this nostalgia tinged with loss. What have we lost and who’s the ‘we’ that have lost something? If you just ask those questions, it’s pretty clear. It’s the formerly dominant white Christians who were culturally dominant, demographically dominant, politically dominant and are no longer,” Jones concluded.

This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.