Ken Burns

You ask anybody on the street, you take your camera out there and you stick the mic and they say it's freedom of speech.

And then maybe you get somebody who says freedom to redress your grievances, protest, whatever it might be.

And then those are the second and third parts of a three part thing.

The first of which is that the Congress will make no establishment of any religion.

And so one of my favorite sections in all of the revolution film is one on deism, which becomes this sort of aggregate, not default, but kind of aggregate conscious choice of many of the mostly Protestant founders, you know, capital F founders.

And the whole idea, and our scene begins with Thomas Jefferson saying, if my neighbor believes in 20 gods or no god at all, it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.

So religion has heretofore, the founders understood, always been the cudgel.

Every country has had an established faith, and that has been the source of a great deal of the problems.

But in fact, as we've begun to understand- It's quite enlightened to understand that fact, actually.

It is.

We are an enlightenment invention.

That is the enlightenment.

And the idea is that God, we always, you know, you hit a home run and you thank God, you know.

When you hit into a game-ending double play, you don't thank God, right?

Yeah.

And somehow God is always responsible for this.

And the anthropomorphizing and the narcissism that's involved, the founders came to some very incredibly amazing, enlightened idea that they believe, almost all of them believe, in a supreme being, supreme architect, divine providence.

You hear those words, right?

And they believe that God takes no interest in the daily affairs of mankind and makes, obviously, therefore, no distinctions between religions.

So it then becomes, in pursuit of happiness, back to that,