Project Purpose and Objectives
The purpose of this project is to demonstrate a simple idea: that although church history is complicated and sometimes uncomfortable, more study brings in clarity and strengthens the church’s position, not make it weaker. Despite what people might say, there is nothing within the historical record that disproves the truth claims of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
The Project
Here is the first episode of the series, where the tragic story of the Mountain Meadows Massacre. The hardest part of this honestly was production. Church history is very easy to access and very well documented, and I love talking about it. That was not a hurdle at all. The hardest part was actually putting together the material and producing it in a video editor. It takes a lot of work to do this, but I think I did a good job overall!
Project Processes
The first step of course is research. Once a topic is decided upon, I do not first go to R/exmormon or straight to the church website, rather, I go directly to the scholars and be as agnostic as possible. At that point I put together what appears to be the historic narrative, assemble the slides, and record!
Experiences during the project
I had a few experiences researching the Mountain meadows massacre specifically that really struck me. This is an event that gets thrown in members faces all the time as a terrible example of Religious violence and Latter Day Saints overstepping their bounds. I did not realize just how unbelievably unjust an terrible it was, and it made me quite emotional reading the firsthand accounts of what happened. However, it also became immediately clear to me that although this was awful, it has little to nothing to do with Mormonism itself. Do we believe those who did 9/11 represent all of Islam and its doctrines? Do we believe that those who did the crusades represent all of Catholicism? Of course not. We should remember what happened, but ultimately it was selfish, prideful men that happened to be LDS that did the massacre. They did not do what they did because they were LDS, but in spite of it. Also, Brigham Young pleaded against doing anything violent at all against the innocent wagon train, his message however did arrive too late.
Insights
Producing a podcast is very time consuming and difficult thing to do. It is not merely talking into a microphone, there is so much planning and post production that goes into it that I have actually gained a lot of respect for podcasters. Its an industry that requries your full time and dedication to do properly!