Hello and welcome to Mormon Stories Podcast.

My name is John DeLin.

As always, I'm very excited to have you with us today.

Today we have a very special guest and a very special topic.

But before we begin, I just want to thank you all for your continued listenership.

Thank you for those of you who have visited us at MormonStories.org to leave your comments up on the blog.

And most importantly, those of you who have taken the time to make small donations or donations to help support the costs and the time.

Put in this podcast we appreciate it and we just most importantly are grateful to have you guys tuning in.

So today we're going to be talking about a very important fundamental dilemma that the LDS Church is facing in the 21st century.

And the dilemma revolves around the notion that for over a hundred years, a certain version of the Church of History has been taught.

In soccer meeting, in Sunday school, in priesthood, in release society meetings, in the Church Manuals and Seminary Institute.

And any of us who are lifetime members of the Church are pretty familiar with the basic facts of that history.

Well, the dilemma comes in that there's a pretty significant chasm or disparity between the version of the history that we've all learned and have been taught over the years.

And what the history and the facts and the data actually show.

And it turns out that this history, this discrepancy is a material one. It's a significant one.

And there are thousands and even tens of thousands of faithful, you know, good, righteous, LDS people all over the world who have stumbled on to this history.

Not because they are doubtful, faithless, sinning type people, but maybe they're called as a seminary teacher. Maybe they're called into the Seminary Institute program.

Maybe they want to be a really good gospel doctrine teacher. Maybe they just take their faith so seriously that they believe that understanding the history, just like an American citizen would study US history to become a better citizen.

And LDS person might decide that they want to study Mormon history so that they can become a better Mormon.

Regardless of the origins, these people start studying this history more in depth and very quickly start asking themselves, whoa, I didn't know that.

Whoa, why didn't I learn that earlier? Whoa, why is the version that we're taught? So fundamentally different from what the facts and the evidence actually show.

And I have to add that these facts and evidence don't necessarily come or don't in any way necessarily come from anti-Mormon literature. These come from journals of our early church leaders.

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