A new survey shows that Americans know little about the Church—but most don’t dislike it.

Sen. Joe Lieberman has a stern warning: Leave Mitt Romney’s religion out of this. “I have been watching the recent controversy over Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith through two prisms,” the Connecticut senator said in an op-ed penned in The Washington Post. “One is the vision of the appropriate relationship between government and religion, as set out by America’s founders; the other is my own experience in 2000 as the first Jewish-American to be nominated for national office.”

Each member of the Church must build a deep faith in Christ, Elder M. Russell Ballard and Elder D. Todd Christofferson of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles told members in Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua during recent assignments in Central America. Along with other Church leaders, they counseled members to strengthen their families through prayer, scripture study, temple service, family home evening, observance of the Sabbath day, obedience to the Lord’s commandments, and sharing their faith with those around them.

Mockery of Mormonism comes easily for many Americans. Commentators have offered many reasons, but even they have found it difficult to turn their gaze from Mormon peculiarities. As a result, they have missed a critical function of American anti-Mormonism: the faith has been oddly reassuring to Americans. As a recent example, the Broadway hit “The Book of Mormon” lampoons the religion’s naïveté on racial issues, which is striking given that the most biting criticisms have focused on the show’s representations of Africans and blackness. As a Mormon and a scholar of religious history, I am unsurprised by the juxtaposition of Mormon mocking and racial insensitivity. Anti-Mormonism has long masked America’s contradictions and soothed American self-doubt.

Thanks to the Deseret News for making us aware of this story.

NBC's American Ninja Warrior is a test of skill, strength, and endurance that pushes athletes to their limit. But this year, four Latter-day Saints have competed on the show and made it to the finals in Los Angeles, and they all have some pretty incredible stories of how they ended up on the show.

“Typically we start out wanting to do well at our jobs, do well at school, do good things in the community, learn to play the piano or sing, and so on,” Muhlestein said, “As the world lauds these accomplishments, it usually doesn’t take long until we start to use worldly standards and measure success by how well we do at work or what kinds of degrees we have.”

Whether it's climbing up the infamous 15-foot warped wall or jolting up the salmon ladder, American Ninja Warrior is known for testing contenders to their physical limits.

In a new survey conducted by Gallup, 81% of Americans said they would vote for a presidential candidate who is Mormon.

Editor's note: The following is excerpted from Chapter 4 of the book "The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith," by Matthew Bowman, published this week by Random House. Copyright © 2012 by Matthew Bowman. All rights reserved. If the Mormons saw themselves as a new Israel, the trek west was inevitably their Exodus. For generations of Mormons, including the one that walked across the prairies, what mattered more than the destination was the act of the journey. It was a collective rite of passage that thousands of Mormons endured, as they had learned to endure all suffering: the death of their prophet, their flight from Ohio and Missouri, and their march across the plains all were taken as divinely sent education, clarifying and refining, testing the bonds that the temple ordinances had created, and they saw God's hand in every bush of berries. Many Mormons were rebaptized upon reaching Utah; they had traveled not only from the United States to the Utah territory but also from the secular realm to God's promised land, reborn into a sacred world. The banks and courts still close in Utah on July 24, the day Brigham Young crossed into the Salt Lake Valley, and the Mormons there celebrate it still, though the number of those who have ancestors who walked across the plains is a fading minority. They have become an archetype.