Ken Burns: America’s Founding Is the Most Important World Event Since Christ’s Birth
Legendary filmmaker Ken Burns says in a new interview that the birth of the United States and the proclamation of freedoms enshrined in its founding documents rank among the most significant events of the past 2,000 years -- second only to one. Burns is the director behind the new six-part documentary epic The American Revolution, but he has been the nation’s leading documentarian of American history for more than three decades thanks to projects such as Baseball, Country Music and The Civil War.
He began working on his Revolutionary War series more than a decade ago, during the final years of the Obama administration, and finished it just in time for release prior to the nation’s 250th birthday.
“I think the American Revolution is the most important event in world history since the birth of Christ,” Burns told the podcast History This Week.
The significance of America's founding, he said, lies in the Declaration of Independence's second sentence and its bold claims about life and liberty, which, he argued, laid the foundation for the expansion of rights to others, including enslaved people and women. That sentence reads: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
“I think it's the most important sentence in the English language after ‘I love you,’” he said.
America’s Founders, he said, were inventing a new form of self-government rooted in freedom and individual liberty -- a system that other nations at the time opposed.
“Even for people at the margins, the Declaration is deeply significant, because no one's ever said this before,” he said, referencing, in part, the eventual abolition of slavery. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, America’s first and third presidents, respectively, owned slaves but acknowledged slavery’s evils. Inwardly, he asserted, they opposed it but did not know how the nation could function without it.
America’s founding released “great ideas into a world that [had] been suffering from the miasma of not big ideas.”
“And the big idea is that human beings can govern themselves; they do not need to be under an authoritarian rule,” he said.
Another big idea, he said, is that all men -- and eventually, by extension, women -- are created equal.
“The great historian Bernard Bailyn, who passed away before we finished our film, says on camera [that] before the Revolution, slavery was not talked about. There were a few people, he said, who made an argument about how evil it was, but nobody talked about it. Once the Revolution started, that's all anyone talked about.”
America’s founding documents provided the moral framework for generations to expand the promise of liberty, Burns said.
“And then slavery is over, and then after that women have the right to vote, and Native Americans get included, and we debate the unborn, and we talk about the elderly,” he said.
The American Revolution is available on home video, the PBS app, and PBS Passport.
Photo credit: Unsplash/Aaron Burden
Michael Foust has covered the intersection of faith and news for 20 years. His stories have appeared in Baptist Press, Christianity Today, The Christian Post, the Leaf-Chronicle, the Toronto Star and the Knoxville News-Sentinel.
Listen to Michael's Podcast! He is the host of Crosswalk Talk, a podcast where he talks with Christian movie stars, musicians, directors, and more. Hear how famous Christian figures keep their faith a priority in Hollywood and discover the best Christian movies, books, television, and other entertainment. You can find Crosswalk Talk on LifeAudio.com, or subscribe on Apple or Spotify so you never miss an interview that will be sure to encourage your faith.
Originally published July 06, 2026.
