Episodes

The first hour of God in America explores the origins of America’s unique religious landscape--how the New World challenged and changed the faiths the first European settlers brought with them. In New Mexico, the spiritual rituals of the Pueblo Indians collided with the Catholic faith of Franciscan missionaries, ending in a bloody revolt. In New England, Puritan leader John Winthrop faced off against religious dissenters from within his own ranks. And a new message of spiritual rebirth from evangelical preachers like George Whitefield swept through the American colonies, upending traditional religious authority and kindling a rebellious spirit that converged with the political upheaval of the American Revolution.

Hour two considers the origins of America’s experiment in religious liberty, examining how the unlikely alliance between evangelical Baptists and enlightenment figures such as Thomas Jefferson forged a new concept of religious freedom. In the competitive religious marketplace unleashed by this freedom, upstart denominations raced ahead of traditional faiths and a new wave of religious revivals swept thousands of converts into the evangelical fold and inspired a new gospel of social reform. In a fierce political struggle, Catholic immigrants challenged Protestant domination of public schools and protested the daily classroom practice of reading from the King James Bible.

Hour three explores how religion suffused the Civil War. As slavery split the nation in two, Northern abolitionists and Southern slaveholders turned to the Bible to support their cause. Former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass condemned Christianity for sanctioning slavery. In the White House, Abraham Lincoln struggled to make sense of the war’s carnage and the death of his young son. The president, who previously had put his faith in reason over revelation, embarked on a spiritual journey that transformed his ideas about God and the ultimate meaning of the war.

During the 19th century, the forces of modernity challenged traditional faith and drove a wedge between liberal and conservative believers. Bohemian immigrant Isaac Mayer Wise embraced change and established Reform Judaism in America while his opponents adhered to Old World traditions. In New York, Presbyterian biblical scholar Charles Briggs sought to wed his evangelical faith with modern biblical scholarship, leading to his trial for heresy. In the 1925 Scopes evolution trial, Christian fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan faced off against freethinker Clarence Darrow in a battle between scientific and religious truth.

Hour Five explores the post-World War II era, when rising evangelist Billy Graham tried to inspire a religious revival that fused faith with patriotism in a Cold War battle with "Godless Communism." As Americans flocked in record numbers to houses of worship, non-believers and religious minorities appealed to the US Supreme Court to test the constitutionality of religious expression in public schools. And civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. emerged as a modern-day prophet, calling upon the nation to honor both biblical teachings and the founders’ democratic ideals of equal justice.

The final hour of God in America brings the series into the present day, exploring the religious and political aspirations of conservative evangelicals’ moral crusade over divisive social issues like abortion and gay marriage. Their embrace of presidential politics would end in disappointment and questions about the mixing of religion and politics. Across America, the religious marketplace expanded as new waves of immigrants from Asia, the Middle East and Latin America made the United States the most religiously diverse nation on earth. In the 2008 presidential election, the re-emergence of a religious voice in the Democratic Party brought the country to a new plateau in its struggle to reconcile faith with politics. God in America closes with reflections on the role of faith in the public life of the country, from the ongoing quest for religious liberty to the enduring idea of America as the "city on a hill" envisioned by the Puritans nearly 400 years ago.

In a special two-part series, acclaimed filmmaker David Sutherland (The Farmer's Wife, Country Boys) creates an unforgettable portrait of Robin Charboneau, a divorced single mother living on North Dakota's Spirit Lake Reservation. Sutherland follows Robin as she struggles to raise her two children, further her education, and heal herself from the wounds of sexual abuse she suffered as a child.

In a special two-part series, acclaimed filmmaker David Sutherland (The Farmer's Wife, Country Boys) creates an unforgettable portrait of Robin Charboneau, a divorced single mother living on North Dakota's Spirit Lake Reservation. Sutherland follows Robin as she struggles to raise her two children, further her education, and heal herself from the wounds of sexual abuse she suffered as a child.

A FRONTLINE digital exclusive. Frontline explores what happens when a juvenile offender is sent to adult prison.

A look at Brazil's efforts to combat mosquito-borne illnesses, most notably Zika fever.

A trio of reports from FRONTLINE, Marketplace and PBS NewsHour on what Donald Trump's promises mean to voters in California's Central Valley (farming and water), West Virginia (coal industry), and Erie, Pennsylvania (jobs)

In 2010, the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision changed the landscape of campaign finance in America. The decision held that political spending is a form of protected speech and let corporations and unions spend unlimited amounts of money in campaigns. But to avoid corruption, the court said the money can’t go directly to candidates; it has to go to independent outside groups. What did that mean in reality? The 2012 documentary Big Sky, Big Money, from FRONTLINE and APM’s Marketplace, offered an on-the-ground look. With that year’s election cycle underway, correspondent Kai Ryssdal traveled to Montana, a battleground over campaign finance at the time, and uncovered startling new evidence of outside interest groups’ influence on local campaigns.

Independent homelands' for blacks was the centerpiece of Prime Minister Hendrick Verwoerd's vision of apartheid. Part 3 focuses on how the white government found African leaders to collaborate with them in a plan to make foreigners of black South African citizens by deporting them to independent homelands in rural areas of the country. The program looks at the increased resistance to the homeland policy as seen through the first nationwide attack by young black South Africans in the Soweto ghetto in 1976.

Part 5 looks at an unprecedented meeting in the struggle for South Africa’s future. Two years before the release of Nelson Mandela, dissident white Afrikaners met with black leaders from the outlawed African National Congress in Dakar, Senagal, to discuss strategies for change in South Africa, presaging the reforms that would come later.