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- [Narrator] In the dawning days of the American Republic,

a band of remarkable characters came

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to a revolutionary conclusion.

- It was an extraordinary collection of ingenious people.

They truly were the best and brightest.

They were very gifted individuals.

- Jefferson was accused of being unchristian.

Well, he said to himself and his friends,

what does it matter whether my neighbor believes

in 20 gods or no God?

What does it hurt me?

- George Washington was the most cautious man

that, I think, I have ever read about.

- Benjamin Franklin, he believed in

the practicality of religion,

that religion was a useful tool to organize society

and keep people loving their neighbor themselves.

- James Madison, well, he liked the idea

of freedom of conscience, that each individual

makes up their own belief about God.

- The first real life test for religious freedom

took place in the election of 1800

between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.

- [Brian] These men and others,

fathers of the American revolution,

saw to it that religion and religious thought

would be removed completely from the rule of state

and that instead it was the state itself

that should be ruled by the people.

(singing in foreign language)

This first separation of church and state

would change world history forever.

- Freedom of religion is, in many ways, the first freedom.

This established our nation

as a nation where people could honor

their own conscientious convictions

and worship God in the way that they believed,

in conscience, God wished to be worshiped.

(dramatic music)

- [Man] First Freedom is made possible

by the generous financial support of the GFC Foundation,

The Annenberg Foundation,

the Larry H. Miller and Gail Miller Family Foundation,

The Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, dedicated to

strengthening America's future through education,

The One Foundation,

Garfield and Margo Cook,

The Sorenson Legacy Foundation,

the Brent and Bonnie Jean Beesley Foundation,

Bill and Roceil Low,

the Alan and Jeanne Hall Foundation,

Bud and Dixie Stoddard, through the Stoddard Foundation,

the George S. And Delores Dore Eccles Foundation,

Jeanne and Wayne Quinton,

Glenn and Mary Potter,

and the Legacy Films Foundation.

- [Brian] For many early English colonists,

the very idea of America rested on religious freedom.

The puritans hoped to create utopia

in the New England wilderness,

a place where they could follow their faith in peace.

Their religion would create a community.

- We must be knit together in this work, as one man.

We must entertain each other in brotherly affection.

We must delight in each other,

make others' conditions our own.

- [Brian] John Winthrop, in 1630, led a group

of puritans sailing from England to Massachusetts.

A brilliant man and a natural leader,

Winthrop had already been elected as governor

of the new Massachusetts bay colony,

and he would be reelected no less than 12 times.

- For we must consider that we shall be

as a city upon a hill.

The eyes of all people are upon us.

- [Brian] As they were leaving,

Winthrop gave a departure sermon,

telling his fellow puritans that their colony

would be a different kind of society.

It would be a model of righteousness.

- There were some who have called it

the greatest sermon of the last thousand years.

That's quite a statement,

but it's something that stands at the beginning

of our political civic consciousness.

- Winthrop was very purposefully self-conscious,

and he wanted his new colony to be self-conscious,

to be aware that God was watching this colony

and that other peoples around the world

were going to be watching it as well.

- [Gordon] The founders were all believers in God.

They all had a confidence that in some sense

God was looking after the Republic.

- A lot of nations, probably all of them,

think that they're God's special favorite,

but America has a special sense of responsibility

regarding itself as a model,

not a nation that seeks to conquer so much

as one that wants to be copied.

- [Brian] Governor Winthrop was often reasonable

and charitable, but he could also be obstinate,

domineering, and autocratic.

"A democracy," he said, "is accounted the meanest

"and worst of all forms of government."

Winthrop's colony would not abide dissent.

- They didn't come to establish religious liberty.

They came to practice their own form of Christianity

without interference from anybody else.

- [Brian] In 1637, an unlikely opponent emerged

in Boston, Anne Hutchinson, a 46-year-old woman

then in the midst of her 15th pregnancy.

Women in the colony were forbidden from preaching,

but the brave and strong-willed Hutchinson

began conducting popular Bible groups.

- We see not that any hath authority

to set up any other exercises

besides what authority hath already set up.

- [Brian] By 1637, the puritan powers had had enough.

Anne Hutchinson was brought to civil trial for sedition

with John Winthrop presiding.

She defended herself skillfully,

but there would be no escape from judgment.

- We are your judges and not you ours.

Mistress Hutchinson, the sentence of the court you hear

is that you are to be banished from out of our jurisdiction

as being a woman not fit for our society.

- I desire to know wherefore I am banished?

- Say no more.

The court knows wherefore and is satisfied.

- [Brian] The trial had to do with the role of women,

but at its core, it was about religious liberty,

and religious liberty lost.

- John Winthrop was devoted to making

the Massachusetts Bay Colony work,

and he felt religion was the heart drive

of the whole operation, but for that very reason,

he could not let religion disrupt the bay colony,

and Anne Hutchinson seemed like a very dangerous person,

and he felt obligated to quiet her

or drive her from the colony.

- [Brian] The rampant prejudice

behind Anne Hutchinson's trial

lasted throughout the 17th century in Massachusetts.

More than a half century later in 1692,

over 150 people were arrested in the infamous witch trials.

One woman was accused of wearing pieces of lace.

Another was convicted after testimony from her daughter,

who was 4 years old.

It was primitive, barbaric, and sad.

In the end, 20 people were put to death.

The puritans established stable

and quite Democratic communities in an untamed wilderness.

The flaw in the puritan experiment

was the inability to allow serious dissent,

but democracy in the 1600s seldom extended to faith.

It would take another century to carve out

the great American achievement of religious freedom.

It would take a revolution.

Some 80 years after the puritans came to Massachusetts,

the American dream began to change shape.

The new world was now a more secular beacon.

It was the place to look for a better life.

Religion for many new arrivals was secondary.

The church became the stepchild of government,

not the master, and clergymen themselves

came under popular fire.

Some seemed to be in it for the money.

Many had run dry of inspiration.

- The services were not all that interesting to people.

In many cases they were long,

they were oriented towards doctrine,

often read from manuscript.

Whitefield changed all that.

He only had about eight sermons, I think,

and he went up and down the seaboard,

but he was charismatic.

- He was a phenomenon.

He was sort of the first great celebrity, you might say.

- [Brian] One day in 1740, a fevered crowd

of tens of thousands gathered before the steps

of the Philadelphia courthouse.

They'd come not in rebellion but in ecstasy

to hear the passionate, energetic,

and theatrical George Whitefield.

The son of an innkeeper, Whitefield had worked

his way through Oxford as a servant.

By 1740, he was already the most famous

religious figure of the day.

He toured America, preaching nearly every day

to huge crowds.

- He preached out in the open,

he didn't have to be inside a church.

He preached in the fields.

He preached in Philadelphia

in the center of the street apparently.

- Whitefield was a radical in certain ways

in denouncing conventional faith.

- His message was that God cared

even for the poor, for the Indians,

for the blacks, as well as for the wealthy.

- [Brian] At the end of his sermons,

Whitefield would boom out his universal invitation,

"Come poor, lost, undone sinner,

"come just as you are to Christ."

- If religion didn't cut deeply,

if it didn't move people powerfully,

then it was no good,

and so he would thumb his nose at the clergy,

say they were too conventional,

they were too dry, they were dead.

- [Brian] In the Philadelphia crowd that day

was Benjamin Franklin, already a well-known printer,

the author of the hugely successful,

Poor Richard's Almanack.

Ben Franklin was a compendium

of American intellectual interests,

an autodidact who would go on to chart

the Gulf Stream and invent the lightning rod,

bifocals, and the Franklin stove.

He was a deeply unconventional man.

He believed in God but rejected organized religion.

- [Man] I never was without some religious principles.

I never doubted, for instance, the existence of the deity,

that he made the world and governed it by his Providence

and that the most acceptable service of God

was the doing good to man.

Benjamin Franklin.

- He believed in the practicality of religion,

that religion was a useful tool to organize society

and keep people loving their neighbor themselves.

- [Man] Brethren and fathers and all ye whom I am

about to preach the kingdom of God,

I suppose you need not be.

- [Brian] Franklin didn't proselytize.

He didn't discuss his religious beliefs at all

unless he was pressed.

He gave donations to a wide variety of churches,

yet he'd decided beforehand that he would be

impervious to Whitefield's message.

- [Man] I silently resolved he should get nothing from me.

I had in my pocket a handful of copper money,

three or four silver dollars, and five pistoles in gold.

As he proceeded, I began to soften

and concluded to give the coppers.

Another stroke of his oratory made me ashamed of that,

and determined me to give the silver,

and he finished so admirably that I emptied

my pockets wholly into the collection plate, gold and all.

- [Brian] In the end, Franklin would publish

many of Whitefield's tracts.

The preacher's eloquence kick-started

what was known as the great awakening,

a wave of Evangelical fervor that lasted a decade.

The awakening went beyond the spiritual.

It instilled the vital idea that these 13 separate

and very different colonies were connected,

that their people could share not only language but beliefs.

- Suddenly, these colonists saw themselves as large actors

upon the biggest stage of all.

- Americans began to realize that they were one people.

- They were founding a new world,

there was a great deal of imagery,

a great deal of conversation about America

being the new Israel, the new promised land.

There was an intense religious feeling shaping

the generation that became the revolutionary generation.

- [Brian] When the great awakening ebbed in the 1750s,

it left more churches but not more church-goers.

- So somewhat surprisingly in America

in the mid-18th century, somewhere around 20 to 30%

at the most, of European American colonists

had any kind of significant relationship

with a Christian congregation.

- [Brian] It was in this era,

a time when evangelism had ripped through America,

uniting it but then departing,

that a very different kind of passion began

to take hold of the colonies.

This time the fervor was political.

It would lead, in the end, to revolution,

and that revolution, in turn, would lead

to an unprecedented freedom of religious faith.

The founding fathers would try to unite 13 colonies

into a country, yet unity was, in a sense, unnatural.

Religion mattered, and in terms of religion,

America was strikingly diverse.

- On the Eve of the revolution,

no single denomination held a majority.

In fact, the numbers were very tiny.

Congregationalists were the largest single denomination.

They comprised only 22%

of all religiously affiliated colonists.

Next were the Presbyterians, less than that.

Next was the Church of England.

- There were Baptists, there were Quakers,

there were Christians of every kind of denomination,

there were hugely patriotic Jewish Americans.

You also have a number of slave religions

that have disappeared.

- Lutherans, German reform, the Dutch reform.

- That makes us really unique.

It certainly made us unique in the 18th century,

where peoplehood was the result of having

a common ethnic bond or tribal bond or national bond

or something along those lines.

- No European society looked like this at all.

In every European society, there was a dominant group

that, by law, could claim the membership

of virtually everyone, and then there were some

very small minorities.

America turned that topsy-turvy.

- [Brian] But diversity was not a recipe for tranquility.

Religious clashes among the sects were common

and occasionally violent.

The prosperous and powerful colony of Virginia

was in a sense typical.

Before the revolution, the preeminent political voice

was the radical Patrick Henry.

Henry pushed a series of anti-British resolves

through the House of Burgesses with inflammatory rhetoric,

but Henry's own wife was not given a Christian burial

because her mental illness was thought to be

the work of the devil.

True toleration and religious freedom

were not even up for debate.

- The Church of England sought,

through local authorities, to ban the activities

of both Presbyterians and Baptists.

(gavel banging)

- [Brian] Edmund Pendleton, a respected Virginia judge,

was just one of the Virginia judges

who sentenced Baptist preachers to jail

for what an observer called, the heinous charge

of worshiping God according to the dictates

of their own consciences.

A local sheriff brutally horsewhipped one baptist clergyman.

A gang of well-dressed men nearly drowned two other baptists

by holding their heads underwater in a nearby river.

Persecution was public practice in Orange, Virginia,

the hometown of a small, frail,

and sickly 17 year-old named James Madison,

a shy boy whose father was a prosperous tobacco planter.

One day in 1768, the two were out walking

and happened by the local jail.

- A Baptist minister named Elijah Craig

was arrested in Virginia for being a Baptist minister.

He began to preach a sermon through the window of his cell,

and a crowd gathered, awed by what was happening.

- [Brian] The moment made a lasting impression

on the sensitive young Madison.

His response was a lifelong pursuit of religious freedom

by the man who would was perhaps

the most influential founder of all.

"That diabolical, hell-conceived principle

of persecution rages here in Virginia," Madison wrote.

"There are five or six well-meaning men

"in close jail for publishing their religious sentiments,

"so I must beg you to pray for liberty

"of conscience for all."

Liberty of conscience was no fact of life

in the American colonies in the decade

before the revolution.

If Virginia persecuted its Baptists, the Northern colonies

had their own heretics, Roman Catholics.

In overwhelmingly Protestant New York City,

Catholics practiced their religion in secret.

- There were no Catholic churches

in New York or in Massachusetts.

You couldn't enter New York as a Catholic.

It was against the law.

They weren't even seen by some as Christians.

They were called heathens, but then,

the Catholics called the Protestants heathens.

This is the way they spoke to each other.

- Opposition to Catholicism had actually been

a uniting force within England itself.

England defined itself as a Protestant nation

over against Catholic France,

and America inherited that anti-Catholicism

from their English parents.

- The Spanish and the French empires

as far as they stretched were,

on the whole, intolerant of Protestants.

They put them to death as heretics.

Protestants were afraid that if they gave equal treatment

to Roman Catholics and they grew and multiplied

that they would again be under Roman Catholic authority.

- [Brian] Yet Britain had a problem called Canada.

By winning the French and Indian war,

Britain had taken over what is now Quebec in 1763.

Its denizens were still French and still Catholic.

To mollify their new citizens, the British Parliament

passed the Quebec act in 1774.

It granted Canadian Catholics complete freedom of worship.

Anti-Catholic Americans were furious.

Engraver Paul Revere drew a cartoon

showing Roman Catholic bishops dancing in glee.

Some of the loudest protests came from

an unsuccessful businessman and tax collector

in Boston named Samuel Adams.

Adams was 51, an established and vocal leader

of popular resistance to the Crown.

He was volatile, bellicose, God-fearing,

and deeply prejudiced.

- He came from Massachusetts and the Puritan background

that was known for its ferocity in favor

of its own particular religious beliefs.

There were suspicions that Catholics owed allegiance

to a foreign prince, that being of course the Pope.

- [Man] Much more is to be dreaded

from the growth of popery in America

than from stamp acts or any other acts destructive

of men's civil rights.

Samuel Adams.

♪ If gallic papists have a right ♪

♪ To worship their own way ♪

- [Brian] In Philadelphia, the outrage was put into verse.

♪ Of poor Americans ♪

- There were just enough examples of raw friction

and even violence to give the founding generation

first-hand knowledge of the power of religion

and how it could shatter a society or unite it.

- [Brian] One of the greatest members

of the founding generation was born

in Quincy near Boston in 1735.

John Adams, cousin of Sam,

was part of the fifth generation of Adamses

in Puritan Massachusetts.

John studied for the ministry but gave it up in disgust.

He found the local clergymen were dogmatic and back-biting.

- [Man] The study of theology and the pursuit of it

as a profession would involve me in endless altercations

and make my life miserable.

John Adams.

- [Brian] Adams switched to the law but proudly boasted

that when healthy he never once missed Sunday services

during his entire life.

- [Man] Ask me not, then, whether I am a Catholic

or a Protestant, Calvinist or Armenian.

As far as they are Christians,

I wish to be a fellow disciple with them all.

John Adams.

- [Brian] Yet John Adams would never be loved by all.

He was a prominent, skillful,

and deeply knowledgeable lawyer.

His ideas on government would help shape the nation,

but John Adams was simply too contentious to be loved.

- He wore his heart on his sleeve,

a very passionate man, full of ideas,

honest to the core, politically incorrect.

- In Lewis Carroll terms, Adams is the red queen,

everything was, off with their heads.

He was a great fulminator,

tremendously energetic, always angry.

- [Brian] By the 1770s, Adams was always angry

about British assaults on American liberty.

He would soon form an alliance

with another like-minded lawyer,

Thomas Jefferson of Virginia.

The young Jefferson was brilliant

in everything from archeology to zoology,

with architecture, music, and paleontology in between,

but was less good at making and handling money.

He was romantic and idealistic.

Among his ideals were an abiding belief

in individual rights,

a dislike for centralized government,

and a faith in the need for religious freedom.

- Adams would have been very doubtful

about the virtue of the people, and Jefferson,

who had a very magnanimous view of human nature,

believed that people were essentially virtuous,

and that's what separates one founder from another,

their view of human nature.

- [Brian] Yet Jefferson and John Adams became close friends.

"Adams is so amiable," Jefferson told a friend,

"that I pronounce you will love him

"if you ever become acquainted with him."

The two were an odd couple.

Adams was short, stout, Northern, blunt,

and much attached to tradition;

Jefferson, tall, elegant, Southern, thoughtful,

and sweepingly revolutionary.

Both men were unconventional in their faith,

but here, too, they were different.

Adams was a devout Christian, but he was a Unitarian

and flatly rejected standard Christian doctrines

of the trinity and predestination.

Jefferson was even more unorthodox.

- Jefferson was born and raised an Anglican

and sometime in his teenage years experienced

a kind of religious crisis,

became more rationalist, more skeptical.

- He did have great doubts about, well, not just doubts.

He just denied the divinity of Jesus,

and he was accused of being un-Christian.

Well, he said to himself, I am a real Christian

because I believe in Jesus' morality.

- Jefferson did maintain an attachment

to the Anglican church, also known as the Episcopal church,

but mainly for the sake of his daughters

and their activities.

- He did make two statements publicly,

one in his Notes of Virginia where he said,

"What does it matter whether my neighbor believes

"in 20 gods or no God?

"What does it hurt me?"

Well, that did hurt him, that statement,

and then he said in his preamble to the bill

for religious freedom, a very important document,

"Well, religion is no more important

"to our civic rights than our beliefs

"in geometry and physics."

- [Brian] "I am a sect by myself, as far as I know,"

Jefferson once wrote.

- He clearly was someone

who disliked ecclesiastical authority.

He saw it, I think, as an unnecessary layer.

- In his own mind, he was a deeply religious man

because his faith and his knowledge were all of a piece.

- [Brian] Jefferson knew how controversial

his own version of faith would be

if revealed in public, so he kept it very private.

- [Man] Our particular principles of religion

are a subject of accountability to our God alone.

I inquire after no man's and trouble none with mine.

Thomas Jefferson.

- [Brian] Adams very deeply believed

that government and religion should be separate.

He later wrote how pleased he was that the United States

were founded on the natural authority of the people alone,

without a pretense of miracle or mystery.

Yet Adams also believed that religion played

a crucial role in public life.

Only a religious people with God-fearing leaders

could guide an orderly and rational popular government.

He had, he said, a veneration for the religion

of a people who profess and call themselves Christians.

- [Man] Without religion, this world would be something

not fit to be mentioned in polite company.

I mean hell.

John Adams.

- [Brian] For the next 50 years, these two men

at the forefront of American politics

would be friends, rivals, enemies, and friends again.

Their agreements and differences alike

would shape the nation.

Almost 50 years after the events,

ex-president John Adams wrote about the history he'd seen.

- [Man] They thought themselves bound to pray

for the king and queen and all the royal family

and all in authority under them

as ministers ordained of God for their good,

but when they saw those powers bent

upon the destruction of all the securities

of their lives, liberties, and properties,

they thought it their duty to pray

for the Continental Congress.

John Adams.

- [Brian] By the autumn of 1774, British policies

like the Stamp Act and the Coercive Acts

had incensed many Americans.

Revolution was in the air.

Every colony except Georgia sent a delegation

to Philadelphia to discuss what measures to take,

how far to go.

This first Continental Congress was the first time

that the separate colonies had met in a single assembly.

Could they act together?

A crowd milling around outside the meeting hall

expected news and wanted action.

Yet on the first day of the first American Congress,

with the overpowering issue of rebellion hanging

in the balance, the first issue discussed was faith.

A delegate from Massachusetts proposed

that they open the meeting with a prayer,

but as delegate John Adams wrote his wife Abigail:

- [Man] The motion was opposed because we were so divided

in religious sentiments, some were Episcopalians,

some Quakers, some Anabaptists, some Presbyterians,

and some Congregationalists, so that we could not join

in the same act of worship.

John Adams.

- Well, in 1774, everything almost went to a crashing halt

at the Continental Congress over the issue of a prayer.

What would be appropriate, what Bible to use,

would you say something that would alienate

an Episcopalian or a Presbyterian?

And it became just a hot button issue.

- [Brian] Suddenly religion stood like

an immediate roadblock to the entire idea of America.

Among the most prominent delegates

was the uncompromising Samuel Adams.

The firebrand Congregationalist was well-known

for his harsh condemnation of both Roman Catholics

and other Protestant sects.

- Samuel Adams was possibly the most devout

of all the delegates to the Congress.

- [Man] Mr. Samuel Adams arose and said he was no bigot.

- I am no bigot.

Now I can hear a prayer from a gentleman

of piety and virtue, who is at the same time

a friend of my country.

- [Man] He moved that Mr. Duche, an Episcopal clergyman,

might be desired to read prayers

to the Congress tomorrow morning.

The motion was seconded and passed in the affirmative.

John Adams.

- Therefore, for thy name's sake,

lead me and guide me.

- [Brian] An Episcopal clergyman.

It was, as one delegate said, a masterly stroke.

If a notoriously stubborn Congregationalist like Adams

could accept an Episcopalian, the other sects could, too.

- [Man] We must remember this was the next morning

after we heard the horrible rumor

of the cannonade of Boston.

I never saw a greater effect upon an audience.

It seemed as if heaven had ordained

that psalm to be read on that morning.

John Adams.

- Constrain them to drop the weapons of war

from their unnerved hands in the day of battle.

Amen.

(delegates murmuring)

- Certainly there was a need for some sort of unity

in the great project of building America.

There was a need for some sort of, one might call it,

spiritual unity, that did not implicate

the great divisions that the founders had theologically.

I think Samuel Adams understood this.

- [Brian] Despite their partitions,

the 56 delegates of the first Continental Congress

were all one thing, English Protestants and anti-French.

An anti-Catholic rancor was rampant at the Congress,

yet as America prepared to separate from Britain,

the Congress hoped to make Canada an ally.

The assembly composed an open letter to Canadians.

- [Man] What is offered to you

by the late act of parliament?

Liberty of conscience in your religion?

No, God gave it to you.

John Dickinson.

- [Brian] That single sentence was a watershed.

Religious freedom, America's founders were saying,

came from God, not from government,

and if the two could be separated at all,

they could eventually be separated for good.

The revolution did not begin

with the founders declaring independence.

Paul Revere made his celebrated midnight ride,

preceding the impromptu battles of Lexington and Concord,

on the 18th of April in 1775.

Though not everyone knew it, war had begun.

A few weeks later, a second Continental Congress

gathered in Philadelphia.

This time, they voted to create a continental army

with a 43 year-old Virginian as commander.

George Washington was tall, athletic, and sickly.

He'd already suffered from diphtheria, dysentery,

malaria, smallpox, and tuberculosis

and hadn't a single tooth left in his mouth.

He was a supremely successful planter,

quite probably the richest man in colonial America,

yet he was known for his reserve,

a public figure's sense of eternal caution.

- George Washington was the most cautious man

that, I think, I have ever read about.

He was so aware of how everything he did was watched

and would be followed or commented upon,

seen to have some significance.

- [Brian] He was reserved but not unfeeling.

Washington hoped, as he said, to promote

the happiness of mankind.

- [Man] I trust the people of every denomination

will be convinced that I shall always strive to prove

a faithful and impartial patron of genuine, vital religion.

No one would be more zealous than myself

to establish effectual barriers against

the horrors of spiritual tyranny

and every species of religious persecution.

George Washington.

- [Brian] Washington even showed respect

toward the religious freedom of his enemies.

In 1775, he ordered Colonel Benedict Arnold

to invade Canada, hoping the French Canadians there

would jump into the war on the American side

and take up arms against their old enemies, the British,

but Washington gave the invaders

very particular instructions.

- As far as lays in your power, you are to protect

and support the free exercise of the religion of the country

and the undisturbed enjoyment of conscience

in religious matters with your utmost influence

and authority, so forth and so on.

- [Brian] Washington's orders to Colonel Arnold

on the army's conduct

in the Canadian provinces were explicit.

- I would ask you to avoid all disrespect to or contempt

of the religion of this country and its ceremonies.

That is clear?

- The campaign in Quebec was a military disaster.

The American army was turned away from Canada,

which was more than happy to turn away

from the American rebellion.

- [Brian] With the invasion a failure,

Canada would remain British, but a precedent had been set.

George Washington had made it clear that the cause

of American liberty would include freedom of religion.

On the face of it, the American Revolution

was nothing less than blasphemy.

The King of England was chosen by God and aligned with God,

yet virtually every founder felt that religion

was a keystone of his very being.

How could the founders rationalize their rebellious actions?

- What I do think religion did for the founding generation

is it gave them a confidence and

a way of seeing the world in which the individual became

the primary organizing element of the society.

It was no longer the king and the aristocracy.

It was the citizen, and the citizen drew its authority,

drew its being from being a creature of God.

- [Brian] The emphasis on individual rights

came directly from John Locke,

the 17th century English philosopher.

"Everyone," said Locke, "had a natural right

"to defend his life, health, liberty, or possessions."

- It was his thinking that helped them see

that we needed to move from the divine right of kings

to the idea that we were all created equal

and that, in fact, divinity resided in every person.

Rights that came from a king, or even from a mob,

were rights that could be taken away by a king or by a mob.

Rights that came from God were permanent.

- [Brian] Not only did individuals have rights,

America's founders were willing to claim those rights

in the face of the armed might of the English Crown.

In the summer of 1776, a committee of five,

including Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin,

submitted their work.

56 members of Congress then signed

the Declaration of Independence.

(gentle music)

- You were putting your life on the line

for liberty by signing that document.

(gentle music)

- [Brian] The Declaration of Independence

was a secular document based on implicit faith.

It mentioned God four times,

twice in the first two sentences.

- Even as it ticked off a list of reasons for the rebellion,

some of which may seem quite petty today,

it raised the dimension of the demand for independence

and made it a spiritual thing.

- [Brian] Where did their right to rebel come from?

From God.

It was not a king, pope, preacher, or politician

who bestowed freedom on human beings but God.

The laws of nature and nature's God, the declaration said,

entitled the American people to be both

equal to the British and separate from them,

and all men are endowed by their creator

with certain inalienable rights,

including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The third reference to God

was an appeal to the supreme judge of the world.

The fourth acknowledged the protection of divine Providence.

God was there four times in just 1,337 words,

yet more important were things

that the declaration did not talk about.

- Christianity was not mentioned,

Jesus was not mentioned, the trinity was not invoked.

The founders understood that it was going to become

a country of many different faiths,

of many different tongues,

and they wanted to preserve the right of everyone

to pursue that part of their lives

in as free a context as possible.

- [Brian] With so many different faiths,

religion could have broken the new country apart,

but diversity could also bind Americans together.

Difference, paradoxically enough,

was something we all had in common.

We were all part of a diverse whole.

As Madison would later argue,

the fact that there were so many different groups

could act as the best guarantee of religious freedom.

No single powerful group could bully the rest.

- There is such a rich legacy

that comes to us from the founding of America,

a rich culture of faith and morality

that teaches us that other human beings matter,

that we should care for them,

that there is something like transcendent truth out there.

- They've held us accountable for justice and equity.

- Alexis de Tocqueville in his classic work,

Democracy in America, asked the question,

what has been responsible

for America's Democratic greatness?

He argued, that the difference was America's mores,

its character, its national sense of values and ideals.

- To be an American is to believe in some things,

and those things are equality, liberty, constitutionalism.

And those founders created this basis for nationhood.

There was no nation in 1776.

- No one has ever come up with better principles.

No one's come up with a better principle

than the equality of human beings,

the basic equality of human beings as children of God.

No one's ever come up with a better principle

than the idea that we are endowed by our creator

with certain unalienable rights,

rights that the government didn't give us

and therefore the government has no right to take away.

Those are principles that are perennial.

They'll live forever.

- [Brian] For all the soaring grandeur of the declaration

and the greatness of the American character,

the new country had a tragic flaw,

one that would ruin millions of lives.

- I see a paradox that is so extraordinary

that it does not submit itself to honest reasoning.

They were fighting for their freedom.

At the same time, they held large numbers of people

in slavery with no intention,

with no intention of setting them free,

and spending their time rationalizing

why they should not be free.

- [Brian] Thomas Jefferson was among dozens of founders

who owned slaves, including Washington and Franklin,

yet he was also the author of the immortal words,

all men are created equal, and he hated slavery.

- [Man] The rights of human nature are deeply wounded

by this infamous practice of slavery.

Thomas Jefferson.

- [Brian] But would all 13 colonies agree to unite

if slavery were outlawed in the new nation?

Jefferson didn't think they would.

Without allowing the infamous practice,

there would be no America.

In his own life, too, Jefferson felt trapped.

His plantations needed slave labor to compete, and survive.

- [Man] As it is, we have the wolf by the ear,

and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go.

Justice is in one scale and self-preservation in the other.

Thomas Jefferson.

- Part of him that was trying to survive

was saying, there's nothing we can do about this,

or, it's up to another generation.

He turned his eye away while recognizing,

there is no way that the notion all men are created equal

does not include our black brothers and sisters.

He was divided right down the middle.

You can call that hypocrisy if you want.

- This is a manifestation of the fact that the founders

were human, just like we're human today.

They fell short of their ideals

just like we fall short of our ideals today.

What rescues the founders for me, though in this,

is that they put into place the principles

that would over time repudiate slavery.

- [Brian] In the Declaration of Independence,

the founders did not mention slavery at all.

- We do justice to them, not by deifying them,

but by taking them all and all and realizing

that if human beings as flawed as Washington

and Jefferson and Adams and Madison were

can do great things, then potentially we can, too.

- [Brian] By may of 1778, Washington's army had survived

a killing winter at Valley Forge,

but how could the tattered remnants of an army win a war?

The powerful British forces took control

of America's major cities, sat back,

and waited for the rebel army to disintegrate.

The colonials were poorly paid, badly fed,

and sometimes overwhelmed by the formidable army they faced.

What could hold these troops

from entirely different colonies together?

For Washington, the challenge lay in establishing unity

in an army and a country with disparate beliefs.

- Those differences were never clearer than on Sunday.

The sabbath was a day of rest in New England,

and it was day of recreation in Virginia,

and so when Washington would declare

these days of Thanksgiving,

which were to celebrate a great victory,

he made sure everyone went to church in the morning,

and then he invoked play and recreation

as the agenda for the afternoon.

So everyone was 100% half satisfied.

- [Brian] Washington himself

was a kind of religious amalgam.

By his mid-30s he'd served as a vestryman

in his local Episcopal church.

- Even though he was a vestryman,

he never joined a church, never took communion,

was very, very mum on Christian matters.

- [Brian] Yet Washington authorized the appointment

of army chaplains, something not common in European armies.

It would be a good thing, he thought,

if his men were devout.

- To the distinguished character of patriot,

it should be our highest glory to add

the more distinguished character of Christian.

- Washington encouraged religion among his troops

during the Revolutionary War.

He encouraged it for purposes of troop morale.

He wasn't cynical in that.

He knew that many soldiers were themselves religious.

Washington saw a military usefulness in that.

I think he also saw a moral usefulness in that.

- The founders, all of them were believers in God.

There's not an atheist among them.

They were not emotionally religious people, most of them,

but faith in that sense was important to them,

but it was important as an inculcator

of virtue, of morality.

Society needed religion to survive.

- [Brian] Yet Washington was more comfortable

talking about Providence rather than God.

- His letters are full of statements

about the hand of Providence intervening

and that assertions that the revolution

could not possibly have succeeded

without God's intervention.

His work overflows with references about Providence,

but his exact nature of his private religious beliefs

is hard to discern.

- [Brian] In 1779, Washington gave Benedict Arnold

command of the vital West Point stronghold

on the Hudson river, north of New York City.

Arnold was a traitor.

He devised a plot to turn West Point over to the British

and gave the papers detailing his plan

to a spy named John Andre.

Andre disguised himself in an American uniform

and rushed with the plans

toward British headquarters in New York.

The next morning, a wandering group of American soldiers,

absent without leave from the Continental Army,

stopped Andre for no reason at all.

They searched him and discovered the papers,

ending Benedict Arnold's treasonous plot.

- [Man] In no instance since the commencement of the war,

has the interposition of Providence appeared

more remarkably conspicuous than in the rescue of the Post

and Garrison of West Point from Arnold's villainous perfidy.

Your humble servant, George Washington.

- [Brian] The word Providence was used often

by many of the founders.

It meant the benign intervention of God, but what God?

- There's become a tradition

of great Americans of invoking God,

but it's a god not of a particular sect.

It's a universal god, an American creator.

- Providence meant that he was moving forward

the good causes.

So when the revolution occurs, it's very important to them

to know that God is on their side

because he was active in history.

- Washington thought God was looking after the Republic.

He thought he was looking after him personally

because he survived the Revolutionary War.

So I think faith in that sense was important to them.

- [Brian] In 1630, John Winthrop had hoped

that Boston would be the city on the hill,

the perfect model for the world.

Almost 150 years later, many of the founders hoped

and believed that America would be the nation on the hill,

a model for the world.

In 1776, we were fighting for independence,

and even then, it was already clear that we were fighting

for much more, a new kind of nation.

For almost 170 years, the government of Virginia

had been closely intertwined with the Anglican church,

but as the war went on, Virginia began to take

the first steps toward another kind

of revolution, religious freedom.

George Mason drafted the Virginia Declaration of Rights

in June, 1776.

It would deeply influence both

the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights.

Mason's first draft included a clause

that guaranteed toleration of all religious creeds.

- [Man] All men should enjoy the fullest toleration

in the exercise of religion, unpunished and unrestrained.

George Mason.

- [Brian] It was a giant step forward,

but for James Madison not enough.

The small, frail boy who'd been moved by a sermon from jail

was now a small, frail man with weak nerves

and a squeaky voice.

He was once described as a man

no bigger than a half piece of soap,

but Madison was an incisive thinker

who prepared with incredible thoroughness

and a voracious student who was passionate

about religious freedom.

- What he got out of his readings

was a firm belief that he carried through life

that it was the individual's pursuit of religion,

that it was not doctrine that had to be spoon-fed you,

that you needed to read scripture

and come up with your own interpretations

and be a church unto yourself.

- [Brian] As a young lawyer, he defended Baptist preachers

arrested for preaching without a license

from the Anglican church.

For Madison, the idea that the government

could tolerate various beliefs was not sufficient.

Nor was the idea new.

In 1689, the English Parliament had passed

the Act of Toleration, granting freedom of worship

to Protestants alone, and dissenters like the Puritans

had to register with the church.

Toleration presupposed that there was a dominant church

willing to let the others exist.

- Toleration was a very different thing

from religious liberty.

It took a long time for a true understanding

of liberty to develop.

- [David] It was Goethe who said that toleration

is an insult because when toleration is granted

it can always be withdrawn.

- [Brian] So the quiet Madison helped Mason rewrite

Virginia's Declaration of Rights.

It was now quite different.

- [Man] Religion can be directed only by reason

and conviction, not by force or violence,

and therefore, all men are equally entitled

to the free exercise of religion,

according to the dictates of conscience.

James Madison.

- The great challenge to the American founders,

the great experiment that they undertook,

was to see if it would be possible,

as the first federalist papers said,

to create a government based on reflection and choice

rather than on accident and force.

- [Brian] Toleration had become freedom.

Yet the amended declaration of rights also suggested

that the government depended on Christian virtues.

- [Man] It is the mutual duty of all

to practice Christian forbearance, love,

and charity towards each other.

James Madison.

- [Brian] Madison's friend and fellow Virginian,

Thomas Jefferson, still wasn't satisfied.

- He was a legislator in Virginia

when he authored a bill for establishing religious freedom.

Its main point was quite simple,

all men shall be free to profess and by argument

to maintain their opinions in matters of religion.

- [Brian] When Jefferson was appointed minister to France,

he took care to pack ample copies

of his bill for religious freedom.

The great thinkers of Europe had created

the theory of man's natural rights of man,

but it took the new American spirit

to put those ideas into the language of law,

but Jefferson's bill was not yet a law.

In Virginia, the bill stalled in the legislature.

In 1783, the Treaty of Paris ended the Revolutionary War.

Against all odds, the Americans had won.

- [Man] I was but the humble agent of favoring heaven,

whose benign interference was so often manifested

in our behalf and to whom the praise

of victory alone is due.

- I think at the end of the war

Washington's view of divine intervention was heartfelt,

and I think he was humbled by what had happened,

almost crushed in New York,

Valley Forge, all the great images that we know.

No rational person would have bet on us in 1776,

and so certainly, it seemed like a miracle.

If anything, I think Washington believed

that it was virtue rewarded

and that a great sense of responsibility came with that,

that this was a covenant.

This wasn't victory without strings.

The strings were you have to live up

to what you've been given, fought for, but also given.

- [Brian] A conquering general had always taken up

the reins of authority.

Power was the usual reward for victory,

but George Washington went home to Virginia.

His home state was in the midst

of a very different struggle.

Several states had passed what was essentially

a religious tax, government support for churches

in the form of a general assessment.

Thomas Jefferson was outraged.

- [Man] To compel a man to furnish contributions of money

for the propagation of religious opinions

which he disbelieves and deplores is sinful and tyrannical.

Thomas Jefferson.

- [Brian] The Baptist church, too,

opposed the general assessment,

but the powerful Anglican church strongly supported the tax,

led by the eminent Patrick Henry.

The revolutionary orator famed for,

"give me liberty, or give me death"

had been raised as an Anglican,

but as a lawyer, he defended both Baptists and Quakers.

He'd even been known to pay the fines

of imprisoned Baptists out of his own pocket.

His bill would eliminate the idea

of a single state-supported church

but it would deliver tax money to ministers

of various Christian denominations,

linking government with church.

- He thought that religious morality

was absolutely critical to sustaining liberty

and therefore government had some role to play

to shore that up.

- [Brian] Jefferson and Madison opposed

any state support for religion,

earning themselves a formidable political foe.

The fiery Henry was universally revered in Virginia

and had been elected governor four times.

To a friend, Jefferson wrote:

- [Man] What we have to do, I think,

is pray devoutly for his death.

Thomas Jefferson.

- [Brian] Instead of praying, the scholarly Madison wrote

a persuasive, if anonymous, argument against Henry's bill.

"The state had no authority to involve itself in religion,"

Madison said.

"True religious freedom did not mean that all churches

"would be linked to the government

"but that none of them would."

An effective argument.

Some 11,000 Virginians signed a petition opposing

the general assessment, and the measure soon died.

Jefferson's act for religious freedom,

instead, became Virginia law in 1786.

- The legacy of the Virginia Act

is providing the intellectual foundation,

underpinnings, and argument for a culture and nation

in which religion is a matter of choice and not coercion,

and almost every other country,

it had been an issue of coercion.

- [Brian] Jefferson's act took a simple

but revolutionary step.

It entirely separated the institutions

of government and religion.

Jefferson and Madison had redefined the modern state.

- [Man] We have in this country extinguished forever

the ambitious hope of making laws for the human mind.

James Madison.

(gentle music)

- [Brian] Within a few years after it had begun,

the United States was on the brink of failure.

The former colonies were united only loosely

under the articles of confederation.

The federal government could neither pay its debts

nor protect its people.

Something had to be done.

In the summer of 1787, delegates from 12

of the 13 states gathered in Philadelphia.

James Madison came from Virginia 11 days

before the meeting was supposed to begin.

He needed to be prepared,

for Madison wanted his delegation to present

an ambitious plan to the convention.

Instead of fixing the broken government,

the assembly would create

an entirely new system, a constitution.

The United States Constitution

had a long, difficult nativity.

Four months of wrangling, compromise, and distrust.

So much of Madison's original plan was discarded

that he became bitterly disappointed.

Before long, the assembly

was on the verge of breaking apart.

- Sir, fairness demands that each state

be represented equally and not.

- [Brian] The only one who could not be discouraged

was 81 year-old Benjamin Franklin.

Not known for his public speaking,

Franklin delivered a perfectly timed

and delicately articulate suggestion.

- I have lived, sir, a long time, and the longer I live,

the more convincing proofs I see of this truth,

that God governs in the affairs of men.

- Benjamin Franklin was virtually

a second father of this country.

George Washington had attained his high standing

in the public mind through his generalship.

Benjamin Franklin attained it through diplomacy,

so though he said very little

in the Constitutional Convention,

whenever he spoke, everyone listened.

- I therefore beg leave to move that henceforth,

prayers imploring the assistance of heaven

and blessings on our deliberations

be held in this assembly each morning

before we proceed to our business.

- For the people's sake and for the country's sake,

they needed to invoke God's blessing.

- Your excellency.

- [Brian] But what the founders did next was astounding,

a kind of American revolution all by itself.

Most of them thought that a common religious belief

was necessary for a moral society,

yet the venerable Ben Franklin was quickly voted down.

On the bottom of his speech, Franklin scrawled,

the convention, except three or four persons,

thought prayers unnecessary!

The impasse over the representation of states

was eventually circumvented, and the Constitution

was written during the course of 1787.

- The constitution is an amazing document.

It's an amazing document in a structural fashion.

It's an amazing document as a political fact

because it was forged in a sense from nothing.

It is amazing in its inventiveness, its creativeness.

Nothing like this had existed before.

And it's frankly amazing in its secularity,

that is, its power isn't derived

from claims about the divine.

- [Brian] The only mention of religion

in the original Constitution was meant to enforce

the idea of religious liberty.

It came from Charles Pinckney, an unlikely source.

Pinckney was an ambitious, unrestrained South Carolinian

from a powerful family.

He had no apparent interest in religious freedom.

Against the inclinations of many delegates,

Pinckney eventually pushed through

a seminal line in article VI.

- And so I propose that no religious test should be required

as a qualification to serve in public office

or the other public trusts.

- [Brian] Pinckney's line distinguished

the United States from the old world and pointed the way

toward a secular conception of the state.

In the finished Constitution, God was not mentioned at all.

Who was in charge?

"This constitution," the document says,

"shall be the supreme law of the land."

- The religion question wasn't seen as proper

to a question about the structure of government.

It was also seen as dangerous.

In other words, if you put the religion question

out in the structure of government,

would that undermine the chances

for the ratification of a new federal government?

- [Brian] To an extent,

the Constitution displeased everyone.

Benjamin Franklin lamented that it didn't abolish slavery.

Several delegates lamented that the omission

of a bill of rights, including religious freedom,

was an appalling mistake.

Near the end, Ben Franklin offered the convention

his wisdom one more time but decided it would be

more effectively delivered by someone else.

He asked his friend James Wilson to read it.

- I doubt whether any other convention we can obtain

may be able to make a better constitution,

for when you assemble a number of men

to have the advantage of their joint wisdom,

you inevitably assemble with those men

all their prejudices, their passions,

their errors of opinion, their local interests,

and their selfish views.

It therefore astonishes me, sir,

to find this system approaching so near

to perfection as it does.

(delegates murmuring)

- [Man] Hear, hear!

- [Brian] Moments later, all but three of the delegates

signed the constitution.

After its passage, even the disappointed James Madison

began to look approvingly on the document.

Many of the ideas in the constitution had been his work,

but he now pointed toward a different author.

- [Man] It is impossible for the man of pious reflection

not to perceive in the constitution

a finger of that almighty hand which had been extended

to our relief in the Revolution.

James Madison.

(triumphant music)

- [Brian] The Constitution was finished and signed.

The question was whether it would be accepted by the people.

For it to become law, nine states

would need to ratify it in special state conventions.

The debate was long and contentious.

Finally the supporters of the Constitution,

called the Federalists, agreed to add a Bill of Rights.

With that concession, the U.S. constitution was ratified.

On April 30, 1789, George Washington

became the first president of the United States.

His was a job and a role that was entirely undefined.

- Newly independent Americans were acting

on centuries of tradition in looking to their leader

for guidance on religious matters,

but George Washington was extremely careful in that regard.

- He was deeply aware of his responsibility

to bring people together.

He did not want religion

to be a divisive force in any way.

To use language of Jesus and Jesus Christ

often could be seen as divisive and unneeded.

- If you appeared to speak

in one form of religious language,

you're going to alienate people who spoke

another religious language, and Washington knew well

that he had to rise above that fray.

- We can credit him with laying the groundwork

for religious freedom by leaving his own position neutral.

- [Brian] In 1790, when George Washington

was in the second year of his presidency,

he received a letter from the Jewish congregation

Yeshuat Israel of Newport, Rhode Island.

In reply, he wrote a memorable response

about religion in America.

- [Man] For happily the government of the United States,

which gives to bigotry no sanction,

to persecution no assistance,

requires only that they who live under its protection

should demean themselves as good citizens.

- [Brian] People still come together

at the synagogue in Newport every August,

the anniversary of Washington's letter.

- The reading of the letter is a very special occasion

because the words are among the most important

in terms of American history.

"May the children of the stock of Abraham,

who dwell in this land"

- [Man] Continue to merit and enjoy

the goodwill of the other inhabitants,

while everyone shall sit in safety

under his own vine and fig tree,

and there shall be none to make him afraid.

- [Brian] There shall be none to make him afraid.

The president's biblical reference

was a poetic and powerful assurance,

but Washington wasn't going to be president forever.

- Everybody knew that religion

would ultimately come to affect politics,

and the question was if the wrong group or groups

got power with the federal government,

wouldn't they try to establish

their church as the national church?

Couldn't some group just lop on

to the federal government and say,

okay, the Presbyterian church

is going to be the national church,

or, the Congregational church

is going to be the national church?

And so there was a fear about the religion question

if it wasn't handled.

- [Brian] What rights did small religious groups

have in a new nation, and what about individuals?

Perhaps a more power-hungry president

than Washington would want

to tell the people what they could say

or where they could pray?

Critics of the new Constitution clamored for changes,

the changes that had been promised

during the struggle for ratification two years earlier.

- I beg to differ with you, Mr. Madison.

The people of Virginia insist there be a list

of assured individual liberties.

- Patrick Henry, George Mason,

these prominent anti-federalists

are ones that really put the heat

on James Madison and others to say,

if you're gonna have our support,

or if we're gonna move forward,

we really need to have a Bill of Rights as part of this,

and one of the things that is preeminent there

is a commitment to religious liberty.

- [Brian] Baptists, too, were strong supporters

of religious freedom for a very good reason.

- The baptists' experience had been,

unless it is made explicit, we are going to be burned,

government will turn against us,

the established parties will persecute us,

will tax us for the support

of other religious institutions, namely their own.

- Madison opposed a bill of rights on principle.

- [Brian] For James Madison,

a list of certain individual rights implied

that there couldn't be other rights.

Whatever you didn't list could be denied.

And changing the Constitution

might be like opening up Pandora's box,

all kinds of bad laws would follow.

- Madison was forced by his Baptist constituents

to deal with what he called,

this nauseating business of amendments.

- [Brian] If it had to be done, it would be better

if Madison just did it himself.

He took the lead in writing the Bill of Rights,

10 amendments that guaranteed what we now see

as the basic rights of Americans.

The very first amendment began:

- Congress shall make no law respecting

an establishment of religion

or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

- That, I think, is rightly interpreted

as meaning that the founders wanted to make sure

that the institution of the church

and the institution of the state

were separate institutions.

- The First Amendment has two parts.

It bans the idea, it bans the possibility

of an established church,

and it argues that everyone should have

the free exercise of religion.

- The First Amendment applied at the outset

only to the federal government

so that we have to keep that in mind

that that First Amendment was saying

the federal government cannot interfere with certain rights,

but the states were still free to put limits

on religious freedom and speech.

- [Brian] The first amendment was a milestone

in world history.

For the first time, a national government promised

to stay out of religion.

- The Declaration of Independence,

the Constitution, the Bill of Rights,

our charters of freedom, they're our glue.

They are what make us a country,

and once we have that pulling us together,

then we have the freedom and the ability

to be diverse in all kinds of other ways.

- It's not simply the freedom to choose whether

to be a Mormon or an Episcopalian or Catholic or a Muslim.

It is the liberty of those not to believe.

I am gonna pursue my own destiny, my own code,

my own vision without being pressured by

or buffeted by larger forces.

- The first real life test for religious freedom

took place in the election of 1800

between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.

- [Brian] Adams was running for a second term

against Jefferson, his long-time friend,

and by now his political opposite.

Together they'd done much of the work

to create the Declaration of Independence,

but Adams had beaten Jefferson in the last election.

Then as president, he moved to suppress criticism

of his government.

He had made the government a force in religious matters

to great discontent.

- Adams declared a fast day, a national day of fasting.

It was written in very Christian language.

Adams himself believed that the support of the church

was necessary if government were going to stand.

The fast Eve, there were riots in the streets.

That fast day led the sectarian Christians,

the Baptists, the Methodists, and also Jews and others

to be very wary of Adams as a religious president

who would impose his religious views upon them.

- [Brian] Jefferson, the vice president, was outraged.

The election campaign of 1800 was bitter.

- The election of 1800 was a crucial moment

in our national history.

People think our politics today is polarized, and it is,

but, boy, if you wanted to see polarization,

you should look at the election of 1800,

bitterness, recriminations, nasty campaigning.

- [Brian] Jefferson hired James Callender,

a writer who specialized in political slander.

- [Man] Adams, the corrupt and despotic monarch!

A hideous, hermaphroditical character!

- [Brian] The Jefferson campaign called Adams a fool,

a hypocrite, a criminal, a tyrant,

but Adams' supporters retaliated.

Jefferson was branded a weakling,

a libertine, and a coward.

Perhaps the worst accusation of all,

this politician who said he was in a sect by myself,

did he believe in God at all?

- [Man] The only question to be asked by every American,

laying his hand on his heart,

is shall I continue in allegiance to God

and a religious president

or impiously declare for Jefferson and no God?

- Jefferson was accused of being an atheist,

and he felt he was not an atheist.

He never was.

He learned his lesson,

which Franklin had voiced several years earlier,

1784, he said, look, anybody who speaks out

against religion, it's like spitting in the wind.

You just don't do it in America.

- [Brian] The brutality of the campaign severed

the old friendship.

It was a tragedy of spirit that seemed to endanger

everything that the two great men had worked

so hard to create, the American system itself.

- There was great fear that America

was gonna be destroyed because suddenly

this two-party system had reared its head,

and the Adams crowd, the federalists, were saying

that he was a pagan, Thomas Jefferson, a crazy deist,

and that he was going to forever ban Christianity

in the United States, and it got very heated.

- [Brian] The partisan maelstrom created genuine fear.

Citizens actually believed that Jefferson

would banish the Bible.

- In 1800, one of the questions was,

are we gonna go the Jeffersonian/Baptist route

with no established religions of any kind

and take the risk that religion will diminish in America

and virtue will go down with it?

- [Brian] It was a close and confused election.

In the end, Jefferson won.

- The election proved a point that reverberates to this day,

that the implementation of religious freedom

and separation of church and state

were laws laid down by the founders,

but the protection of those ideas

was in the hands of the people.

- [Man] If the freedom for religion,

guaranteed to us by law in theory,

can ever rise in practice under

the overbearing inquisition of public opinion,

truth will prevail over fanaticism.

Thomas Jefferson.

- [Brian] Jefferson and Madison both realized

that freedom is a greater spur than force.

The absence of federal government intervention

actually helped religion to grow.

- There was tremendous upsurge.

I was reading the diary of William Bentley,

who kept talking about how the common people

of the town were holding night religious meetings,

and there'd be sailors preaching,

there would be women preaching,

there would be African-Americans preaching.

- I shout, hallelujah, when I think of His life.

- The First Amendment forbids an establishment

and also protects the right of religious worship,

and both of them working together have encouraged

religious groups to go out and seek members.

In the old days, in the days of an establishment,

you didn't need to seek members

because the state paid for religious services.

- Look at the yellow pages of any town in America,

and you can find forms of faith that the founding fathers

would have found unimaginable

but would have given free choice to any individual

to belong to a wide variety of groups or to no group,

and I think that would have pleased them.

- The state of the United States

at the beginning of the 21st century suggests

that they were completely correct.

They couldn't have been more correct.

We now live in a society that has far more religions,

far more religious participation,

far more religion involved in the nature of society

than happened to have been true at the time

of the American Revolution

and the creation of the First Amendment,

and that in part is a testament to their conviction

that religion would flourish on its own.

- The great good news about the country

is that religion has shaped us without strangling us.

- [Brian] The American Revolution we all know

came with drums and guns, with battle and bloodshed.

The quieter revolution was less spectacular

and much slower, coming only step by step,

but it was more unique in human history.

This was the story of an idea, a government devoted

to maintaining liberty, not uniformity.

- The story of liberty is never a simple story.

That requires constant attention, constant thought.

It requires argument and debate,

and only out of that process can we achieve

the goal that we want, which is religious freedom for all.

- The founding fathers not only created

the institutions by which we still govern ourselves,

but they infused into the culture, our culture,

all of our highest aspirations, our ideals,

our greatest values, including religious liberty

being one of the most important.

- The struggle for religious liberty

is a perennial struggle.

There will always be the temptation

to cut back on religious freedom.

There will always be some end in view,

some fear that people have that will tempt us as a people

to dishonor the fundamental right to religious freedom

and the right to bring faith into the public square.

- It was a world historic contribution to say that

yes, religion matters for the health of a society,

but government must leave people free

to pursue their beliefs as they see fit.

- It is a system that we should change

with great care, if at all.

- [Brian] Ben Franklin was the first to go.

By 1790, he was 84 and quite ill.

One day his daughter said,

"I hope, father, that you will yet recover,

and live many years."

"I hope not," Ben Franklin said.

His wish was granted.

He died that April, 1790.

It was soon discovered that he'd added a note onto his will.

- [Man] My fine crab-tree walking stick

with a gold head curiously wrought

in the form of a cap of liberty

I give to my friend and the friend

of mankind, George Washington.

- [Brian] Washington himself still had miles to go

before he could rest from his eight years as president.

It was 1796 before he would write

his farewell address to the American people.

An advisor suggested that Washington mention

a generally received and divinely authoritative religion

in the address.

Washington refused, but he believed that faith

needed to be a part of the national character.

He was leaving a nation that was,

as he said, "in command of its own fortunes."

- [Man] I anticipate with pleasing expectation

that retreat in which I promise myself

the sweet enjoyment of good laws under a free government.

- [Brian] Less than three years after leaving office,

George Washington died and was buried at Mount Vernon.

James Madison was the last founding father to die.

In 1817, he retired to Montpelier, his tobacco plantation.

For his final 19 years, he never left Virginia again.

Among his last works was a protest

against the appointment of chaplains for Congress.

Even at the end, James Madison was a watchdog

for the revolutionary American concept

of separation between church and state.

- [Man] I am far from desponding

of the great political experiment

in the hands of the American people.

Much has already been gained.

Much may be expected.

- [Brian] The bitter election of 1800 had severed

the friendship between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams.

In time, the two great men reconciled.

- [Man] Now, my friend Jefferson, there is now,

ever will be, and never was but one being

who can understand the universe

and that it is not only vain but wicked

for insects to pretend to comprehend it.

John Adams.

- [Man] These are things which you and I

may perhaps know ere long.

We have so lived as to fear neither horn of the dilemma.

We have, willingly, done injury to no man

and have done for our country the good

which has fallen in our way.

Be our last as cordial as were our first affections.

Thomas Jefferson.

- [Brian] John Adams died on July 4, 1826,

exactly a half century after

the Declaration of Independence.

Adams' last words were, "Jefferson still survives."

He was wrong.

Thomas Jefferson had died just hours before,

but what they had created

with the other founders still survived.

The shocking and very basic American principles

of a separate church and state of a nation,

that guaranteed religious liberty in these United States.

Religious freedom has always been a fundamental human right,

but freedom does not always come easily.

America's first freedom was freedom of faith.

As Thomas Jefferson wrote,

"Almighty God hath created the mind free.

"No man shall suffer on account

"of his religious opinions or belief,

"but all men shall be free to profess their opinions

"in matters of religion.

"Truth is great and will prevail if left to herself."

(gentle patriotic music)

- [Man] First Freedom was made possible

by the generous financial support of the GFC Foundation,

The Annenberg Foundation,

the Larry H. Miller and Gail Miller Family Foundation,

The Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, dedicated to

strengthening America's future through education,

The One Foundation,

Garfield and Margo Cook,

The Sorenson Legacy Foundation,

the Brent and Bonnie Jean Beesley Foundation,

Bill and Roceil Low,

the Alan and Jeanne Hall Foundation,

Bud and Dixie Stoddard, through the Stoddard Foundation,

the George S. And Delores Dore Eccles Foundation,

Jeanne and Wayne Quinton,

Glenn and Mary Potter,

and the Legacy Films Foundation.