Mormonism

In a 2026 episode of Flightless Bird, host David Ferrier sets out to understand Mormonism—the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—and comes away surprised. "I kinda came away thinking, ah, not so bad. I kinda like them," he says early on, framing the episode's central tension: a religion often dismissed as a cult with "magic underpants" turns out, on closer inspection, to be a deeply American, surprisingly optimistic faith that has managed to grow from a fringe 19th-century movement into a global community of 18 million.

The Most American Religion

Ferrier's core argument is that Mormonism is "perhaps nothing more American than being a Mormon." The religion's founder, Joseph Smith, was from Vermont, and he published the Book of Mormon in 1830—an American man producing an American scripture in an era of Jacksonian democracy, frontier expansion, and what historian Harold Bloom called "the American religion." Terrell Givens, a believing Latter-day Saint and senior research fellow at Brigham Young University, explains that Mormonism arose during a period obsessed with individualism, the self-made man, and an optimistic reappraisal of human potential. "Mormonism is without a doubt the most kind of theologically ambitious and creative of Christian traditions," Givens says. The early Mormons were persecuted, run out of Missouri and Illinois, and eventually fled to what