Welcome to the Maxwell Institute podcast. I'm Joseph Stewart.

The Constitution of the United States guarantees that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

Despite that promise, Latter-day Saints in the 19th century sometimes found themselves as victims of legal and extra legal violence against their

leaders and lay members alike. When Joseph Smith ran for president in 1844, he made religious

freedom a central component of his campaign. In this episode of the Maxwell Institute podcast, we speak

with Dr. Spencer McBride, an associate managing historian of the Joseph Smith Papers Project, and the host of

the Joseph Smith Papers podcast about his host of the Joseph Smith Papers podcast

about his book, Joseph Smith for president, the prophet, the assassins, and the fight for

American religious freedom from Oxford University Press. We'll include a link to the book in our

newsletter, which you can subscribe to at m.b y.b yu.edu slash monthly dash m.m. dash news.

Spencer McBride, welcome to the Maxwell Institute podcast.

Thank you. It's good to be here.

Now, you're a historian of the Joseph Smith Papers, and as mentioned, you also host the

Joseph Smith Papers podcast.

What did you explore in your first few seasons of the podcast, and what's happening in the

season that you just released?

So the goal with the Joseph Smith-Fabris podcast was to do something a little bit different than

what was already out there in Latter-Base and Mystery. We wanted to produce podcast mini-series,

is what we call them, certain events in Joseph Smith's life. So in 2020, we released the first vision, which is a six

episode podcast trying to recreate the world in which Joseph Smith had his first vision of theity.

We followed it up in 2021 with the priesthood restored, which looks at the restoration of the

priesthood, not as a singular moment in 1829 and shortly thereafter, but as a process that extended throughout Joseph Smith's life,

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