I will say this for Kirk Cameron. In Saving Christmas he failed as a theologian in this mini TV series Monumental, he's probably a bigger failure as a historian. But if you want to see the fundamentalist Christian interpretation of our history watch this with a load of Salt from the great Salt Lake.
Each colony of the original 13 has its own story. Earlier than the Pilgrims arriving Jamestown in Virginia in 1607, there was a colony in Roanoke that was wiped out before that, a mystery as yet unsolved. In 1619 a year before the Pilgrims arrived, a boatload of slaves came to Virginia and started that horrible tradition. But for reasons of asserting Christian the story of the Pilgrims suits the fundamentalists well.
No doubting the courage of these people who came to a strange forbidding land and made a home there. That their faith sustained them is also a proved fact. The Pilgrims were a dour sort though, didn't mix well with most folks they were an extreme Protestant fundamentalist bunch. The Pilgrims, these particular folks were part of the Puritan movement who took over Great Britain and overthrew the Stuart monarchy a quarter century later. After living under the Puritan military dictator Oliver Cromwell the British were glad to restore the monarchy as the Puritans were not real tolerant of people who didn't view things their way.
For the 16th and 17th century Europe was racked with wars between Catholic and Protestant nations. For a while you could not tell where religion left off and power politics began. So when it came time to found a new country those folks who wrote our Constitution decided on a novel idea, the federal government would show no preference and would not support an established church. A concept that today's Christian just cannot grasp no matter how hard they try to rewrite our history.
I think the idea of no established church is one of the great things about this country. But it's something we have to be eternally vigilant to protect. In 1776 we were just trying to get Protestants and Catholics to get along. Now we have Moslems, Hindus, Buddhists and we're one cosmopolitan country. I think we can be better than ever with these new immigrants.
People like Kirk Cameron and fundamentalist historian David Barton who appears here are scorned and should be. They're centuries behind mixing religion and politics trying to assert their view of Christianity as prime over all.
If Cameron were presenting this film as an honors thesis he'd be rejected out of hand.
