Hello, welcome to Scripture Central. I'm Lynn Hilton Wilson and I am so excited to be back into church history.

I love the doctrine covenants as we deal with the background, the context, the hard questions that follow along and parallel the Sunday school classes for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints program for studying the scriptures in 2025.

On this first week, I wanted to step back and take a broad view of the American religious history.

I want to be able to make sure that you realize that the doctrine and covenant sections are so much more meaningful when we can look

at them in the context of history. And since we are a global church, and since I know we have

people in Scandinavian around the world who may not be as familiar with American religious

history, I'd like to focus on one or two hard questions every week,

but this week I'm going to focus on the question of, was Joseph Smith a product of his environment?

Because this time in the American religious history is the Second Great Awakening,

Joseph seems to fit in like a glove. And so is just his faith tradition part of that

American growth and exuberance and enthusiasm over religion that came in the entire span of his

life? In addition to my lectures here on the religious background and the content of Come Follow Me and the hard questions,

I would also encourage you to watch Scott Woodward and Casey Griffiths come follow me

on the content of the Doctrine and Covenants.

And they'll be focusing more on the scripture and I'm focusing more on this history.

I also won't be doing this alone. I last year I was able to

have Jack Welch is my guest for the entire year in the Book of Mormon and this year I've got many

specialists who are coming in. We'll bring in people who are specialists in Navu and Kirtland and

Missouri and Harmony and I'm excited next week to have Dr. Stephen Harper here, who's just one of the best of the best.

But let's start in now with this question of American religious history.

Many people came to America, supposedly for religious freedom.

You know, our first pilgrims in 1620 were trying to find a place where they could worship

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