Welcome to the Standard of Truth podcast, hosted by historian Dr. Garrett Dirkmont,

where we explore the early days of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

and gain rare historical insights into how a young farm boy was able to establish a new church

and grow it by way of visions, manifestations,

and miracles.

Hi, welcome to another episode of the Standard of Truth podcast.

I'm your host, Dr. Garrett Dirkmont, and I'm joined by my friend, Professor Richard Leduc. Hello, Garrett. In part one last week, we talked a little bit about Marlene's

email where she talked about this idea of God's will and the connection between our

obedience and faithfulness and prosperity or blessings coming our way.

And she used a specific example from her mission that she had been taught,

and we don't know who taught her this,

although we have a pretty good idea,

that as long as you're working really hard and as long as you're super faithful, if you are A

and you are B, then C will happen. And C is you'll have a bunch of bad. Because there is a law,

Garrett, irrevocably. Decreed in heaven. And so we want to talk a little bit about some, Garrett taught quite a bit about Calvinism

and kind of this idea of how this kind of has made its way into Latter-day Saint theology.

I mean, or not theology, but in terms of what people believe.

In Calvinism, even to the point of, you know, we read how this ideology of if people are

suffering, it's obviously their own fault, you know, was that type of was used to justify

slavery as we read in part of read in part of our last podcast.

So I think we wanted to bring this a little bit more up into our current culture

so that you can see how in popular culture sometimes this is being presented

...