A grand, if limited, look at American spirituality

But the story of the Spanish settlement of New Mexico is exceptional, for the conversion of the Pueblo Indians was less successful than the friars had hoped. The Pueblo nation had its own religion, and the result was conflict, persecution, and rebellion. Because they could not persuade the native people to accept the Catholic faith as the one, true religion, either by preaching or force of arms, Spanish settlers withdrew from this frontier, though they long endured elsewhere in the new world. Alas, this is the only mention of native populations in the whole six-hour documentary, and they fared far less well in the European settlement from then till now.

The narrative turns to the Puritans of New England, and their drive to build “a city on a hill’’ that would be a light to the Christian nations they left behind. Though they sought freedom to read the Bible and determine its meaning unhampered by bishops or king, these settlers developed their own religious authorities. But their Puritan convictions carried seeds of new dissent that bloomed in the new settlement. One woman, Anne Hutchinson (portrayed here by Laila Robins), developed confidence in her personal experience of God and found a following as she talked about the need for believers to each experience the divine. She was seen by the ministers, and most of all by Governor John Winthrop (Michael Emerson), as a threat to the order of the settlement and was finally banished.

That was the dynamic the storytellers see in the nation’s religious history, the ever-changing conflict between the forms of religion and the personal experience of God. It was a war fought not only in church but also in the wider society. The first Great Awakening, a revival movement both in town and on the frontier in the middle of the 18th century, shook up religious authority and gave individual colonists a conviction of personal liberty that influenced the American Revolution 20 years later. And after the Constitution was adopted, it was largely conflict between established churches and the revivalist movements of the frontier that shaped the Bill of Rights and the guarantee of religious freedom.