Are you intending this as a response to my post? If so, I must not have expressed it sufficiently. For one things, Mormons would answer “Yes” to that question easily. There were people who lived and died following Joseph Smith and who sacrificed their own self-interest for the sake of his teachings. They took care of their families and followed their moral principles.
But my point here is not just that there can only be one “bad guy.” My point is that if the LDS Church is a fraud, it is a fraud of astonishing evil. This is most evident precisely from the sufferings that Smith’s faithful followers endured. When Mormon blood started getting spilled in Missouri - including the murders of nine and ten-year-olds - Smith had to decide at that point to press on with his mission, and there is no discernible sign that his conscience was affected by that decision. If he was prophet, then he did the right thing. If not, it reveals something very dark in his soul, for it shows that Smith considered the deaths of these people, though not his own doing, to be an acceptable price to pay for achieving his fraudulent ends. He didn’t kill, but he was willing to accept casualties. If you combine that with the level of mendacity that would have been necessary to fabricate the BOM in the first place, it is hard to avoid concluding that here we have a straight-up sociopath on our hands. If we don’t accept Smith as a prophet, that is our other option.
But conspiracy theories fall into problems at this point, because attributing to Smith an uncommon degree of wickedness makes it less likely that he would have accomplices. In the first place, not many people are that evil. More importantly, anyone who worked with him in writing the book would, for that reason, have had power over him. They could have pressured Smith to do what they wanted by saying, “I can expose you,” and has time passed and things got out of hand, they would have found their consciences pricked to do so. In any case, it would have created problems for Smith in consolidating power that he does not seem to have had.
Now Mormons never make the argument I just gave you, probably because entertaining the possibility of sociopathy on Smith’s part is not an idea they want to foster. I don’t blame them for that, or expect them to just agree with me here. Yet it is worth pointing out that the possibility does need to be taken seriously for the historical probabilities related to Mormon origins to be fairly weighed. I think a lot of Mormon arguments to the effect that “If the Church were untrue, Smith would not have done such and such” are only persuasive if one underestimates to capacity of antisocial personalities to behave in ways that radically defy our rational expectations. This is something that anti-Mormon arguments also need to take into account. I do not think that composite theories of BOM authorship do so.
