Ken Burns' America Pretends God Doesn't Exist
The filmmaker suggests Christianity had nothing to do with the nation's founding in his newest documentary. He's wrong.
What’s God got to do with it? When it comes to Ken Burns’ conception of the American Revolution and America’s founding, not much.
We once were rightly taught that the United States of America—before, during and after its formation—Was a nation heavily imbued with a Judeo-Christian ethos. In other words, a nation inspired by God. The evidence was everywhere and still is everywhere if you look. The Liberty Bell in Philadelphia is inscribed with a Bible verse, for God’s sake.
But "historian"/documentarian Ken Burns made sure he closed his eyes to almost all of it. His just-aired 12-hour PBS documentary on the American Revolution that treated God and Christianity as bits in a great play starring Indians and slaves.
Remember the devout Christian Pilgrims landing on Plymouth Rock in 1620 with their Mayflower Compact, establishing a beachhead of God-fearing Englishmen who would become American colonists? Not mentioned by Ken Burns.
Remember the First Great Awakening in the 1730s and 1740s, a massive Protestant spiritual revival that swept through the colonies, uniting and energizing the colonists to stand up to tyranny? Not mentioned by Ken Burns.
Any honest historian would have noted these events as part of the American founding story. Not Ken Burns.
Burns was too busy with his fixation on Native Americans and "enslaved people," the woke-approved phrase to describe slaves. Is this just the off-the-cuff ranting of a conservative American? Let’s look at the data. I checked the transcripts of all 12-hours of the documentary, tallying up the key words. Here’s what I found:
Slaves and Indians were mentioned 6.5 times more than God or Jesus in Burns’ documentary. And the times God was mentioned, it was sometimes used to either downplay His role in America’s formation, or in one instance as part of a curse phrase.
Burns is a leftist and it is his right to produce a leftist documentary about the American Revolution. However, many Americans are under the illusion that Burns and PBS are producing non-political documentaries and they will undoubtedly be shown to millions of youngsters. All paid for with your tax dollars.
That’s why the brilliant Charlie Kirk knew conservatives had to fight back against this type of propaganda, meant to denigrate and reshape our Founding into something it wasn’t. This viral video in five minutes shows what Ken Burns purposely ignores.
Among the arguments that Kirk makes is that 9 of the 13 original state constitutions mandated that officeholders be Bible-believing Christians, with all 13 requiring a declaration of faith. Pennsylvania’s required an explicit declaration that Jesus Christ was your Lord and savior.
Kirk also notes that 55 out of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence were active, Bible-believing, church-attending Christians.
As conservative Matt Walsh points out in his effective critique, Burns attempts to create the impression that the Founders were "deists" who believed that God is a passive bystander to events of America’s founding. Burns, perhaps not coincidentally, describes himself as a deist.
Such a belief is directly contradicted literally hundreds of times in the Bible, where God actively raised up and set down kings and other rulers. Who rationally believes that God had nothing to do with the bullet that grazed Donald Trump’s ear in 2024 instead of blowing his head apart?
Providence also was evident throughout the American Revolution, as noted expertly in Michael Medved’s multi-part audio series on America’s Founding back in 2011. Medved outlined the times that George Washington’s life was spared in a series of close calls.
Horseback Washington strode into key battles to the front lines, with his imposing 6'4" stature and white horse, bullets whizzing past his head. The only person who dodged more lead successfully was Sonny Crockett of the TV show Miami Vice and that was all made up.
Another time, in 1777 during the Battle of Brandywine in Pennsylvania, a British sniper had Washington clearly in his sights at close range, but declined to pull the trigger because the American commander had his back turned and the sniper thought taking the shot was thus ungentlemanly.
Did God intervene to save the man even Burns acknowledged was the indispensable American, a man whose demise would have meant American defeat? You and your conscience have to wrestle with that question.
As Walsh and other conservatives opined, the airing of a documentary on the American Revolution is a positive development because we are losing touch with our Founding. They also rightly say that the role of slaves and Indians in the story is important and should be included, even if those facts are uncomfortable. Propagandists like Burns don’t wholly reinvent our Founding story, they just elevate the parts they want to elevate and deemphasize the parts they don’t like.
Among the most obvious woke inventions is Burns, at the beginning of part 1, suggesting that America’s founding model was inspired by the Iroquois Indians. The evidence of this is a passing reference Benjamin Franklin made in a letter to a friend, taken out of context. In the millions of words describing the construction of our form of government, not one word backs up Burns’ ludicrous invention.
Another odious Burns invention is a smear against George Washington that he once treated a young boy rudely. The incident, which doesn’t show up anywhere until 100 years later, is akin to a modern Jussie Smollet leftist fable. Even if true, it is of such little import that it has no business in a serious documentary other than a cheap attempt at denigration of our finest historical leader.
Burns can pretend that Christianity had no bearing on our Founding and is inconsequential to America. He can pretend the Bible doesn’t say that Christians will one day be raptured to heaven in the blink of an eye. Only then can Ken Burns test his theory that Christians and Christianity are unimportant to America. By God’s grace, I won’t be around to see it.
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