Inside The Story of God with Morgan Freeman

Morgan Freeman and exec producers Lori McCreary and James Younger talk about the landmark show, which will be screened for the international content community at MIPDoc.

In keeping with its belief in the power of storytelling to change the world, National Geographic Channel will be premiering the ambitious series The Story of God with Morgan Freeman on Sunday, April 3, in the U.S. and then on its channels around the world.

On a quest to understand how faith shapes our lives, Freeman visited more than 20 cities in seven countries. He sang the call to prayer at a mosque in Cairo, took meditation lessons from a Buddhist leader, discussed Galileo with the head of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in Rome and visited the hieroglyphs inside the pyramids that provided the first instructions for the afterlife and much more.

The Story of God with Morgan Freeman is produced by Revelations Entertainment, founded by Freeman and Lori McCreary, and National Geographic Channels. The journey it follows and the questions it seeks to answer actually stem from a visit Freeman and McCreary made to Istanbul in 2009, when they were visiting the Hagia Sophia with a guide. “This lovely gentleman was walking us through,” says McCreary. “I was looking up to the ceiling and saw these beautiful mosaics. It looked like one of them was a baby in a manger and another was Jesus with the Apostles and on the end it looked like there was a cross with somebody on it. Hagia Sophia had been a church and a mosque and I asked if when it was a mosque they had covered over those frescos. He said, ‘No, no, no, these stories are in our tradition as well. We believe these stories of Jesus, [we recognize him as] a prophet.’ I was with Morgan and I raised my eyebrows and he did the same and I felt surprised, but I was also upset with myself that I didn’t know that. Morgan and I started talking about it and thought perhaps there are other people in the world that don’t know [about] these connections between the three Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. That’s the basic idea of where this story then grew from.”

During his travels and explorations into the world’s major religions, Freeman made a couple surprising discoveries. “Hindus, for instance, are not all that enamored with reincarnation [as I had previously believed]. It’s not something to look forward to, it’s something almost to dread, because a guy has to go through the whole thing again trying to reach some sort of perfection. So every time you are here on Earth, you have to go through this chore. They would rather not; they would rather just be here once and get it right and then be able to not have to come back. Because if you don’t have to come back, it means that you’ve become pure energy; you’ve done it right and you’ve moved on, you’ve been liberated. You’ve become godlike. I found that surprising because I had been going through the whole of my questionable, questioning life thinking that [reincarnation] was something to look forward to.”

Another surprise for Freeman was the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, set up by the Catholic Church. “I don’t know if they were looking to see if there was something counter to God and religion, but I think what they found is that science and religion—it all works together. For example, Georges Lemaître, the guy who came up with the theory of the Big Bang, was a priest.”

Freeman, McCreary and fellow executive producer James Younger had to determine how they would tackle the vastness of the subject matter. “We thought about how [we could cover the major] religions of the world and the most obvious thing was to start at the beginning and go through [each], but that wouldn’t be interesting,” says Younger. “We wanted to make it a living journey, where we would go to every country and touch on many religions in every episode. So we decided to organize [the series] by existential fundamental questions: What happens when we die? Why do miracles happen? Where do we come from? Who is God or what is God? What is evil? So we took basic questions and it didn’t take much research to realize all religions ask a handful of very similar questions.”

The six episodes of the series are “Beyond Death,” “Apocalypse,” “Creation,” “Who is God?,” “Evil” and “Miracles.” Freeman speaks with experts and scholars from various religions and cultures, as well as doctors and scientists.

At a time when religion is often used as a divisive force, Freeman, McCreary and Younger all agree that their travels, interviews and discussions for this series have reinforced quite the opposite stance.

“I think there is much more that we have in common,” states Freeman. “You only have to go to Jerusalem and see the numbers of people there who share the same belief system. Go to India. There are two main religious groups that exist side by side in India without any apparent strife at all: the Hindus and the Muslims. I think the strife that we see today is more political than religious.”

“Part of the misunderstanding that is going on in the world, in terms of this strife [is due to] our own lack of knowledge about what people really believe in the different religions,” explains McCreary. “People attribute the strife to religious beliefs when it’s actually political beliefs. We are hoping to unveil what we found while we were doing these explorations, and that is that we have so much more in common [than what divides us]. It’s just that sometimes the media looks at things that are easier to point out that are different. We are digging a little deeper.”

When asked if this personal journey has changed his own beliefs, Freeman said no. “When I went to the Zoroastrian temple in Los Angeles I discovered that I, along with many, many, many, many people who don’t realize it, am a Zoroastrian. My beliefs line up with Zoroastrianism back to the days, 3,000 years ago, of Zarathustra.”