ABSTRACT
This book is about church and state relations in the United States with an account from European history. This has happened for two reasons. First, this little history lesson dramatizes how much the Western world was dominated in the fifteenth century by religion and Roman Catholicism and how much the world was to change over the next few centuries with the colonization of North America and the founding of the United States. Second, understanding the earlier, dominant historical and cultural situation illustrates how the trailing shadows of history are seldom if ever completely erased. The framework of the Doctrine of Discovery, though disavowed in theory by the founders of the United States, would resurface in American domestic policy and constitutional law in the nineteenth century. The Doctrine of Discovery also has implications for the question of whether the United States was started as a Christian nation.
