Latter-day Saints, even some who have studied the history of the Church, and even those who have focused on the early history of the Church, come to believe what Joseph Smith said; viz., that God commanded him to reestablish His Church on earth. Whatever rules or commandments came, came from God, including plural marriage.
Latter-day Saints do not tend to see the introduction of plural marriage as Joseph Smith’s attempt to get laid. In addition, they point to various legends that Joseph Smith was unwilling to introduce this practice, but was basically threatened by the Lord to do so (something about an angel with a flaming sword confronting him with his cowardice and disobedience, whereupon Joseph Smith came forth and revealed the revelation on plural marriage).
I, personally, cannot determine either way. I am biased in that I believe in the Church, but who am I to judge a now-dead person’s intentions, whether they were good or bad? All I know is what I have been told, what I have read.
This is where the issue gets fuzzy. How do we determine a religious leader’s true motivations?
What about forcing teenagers to marry him? Was that an attempt to get laid? What about the accounts of him in the “earlier days” telling young girls that God wanted them to have sex with him? I’m not having any luck searching the archives, but I’m pretty sure that one or two of these were discussed in an old Straight Dope column. If I get a chance, I’ll see if I can find it in one of my Straight Dope books. In the meantime, anyone have any better luck and able to provide a link?
Obviously, ther is only so much we can ever know about a person’s life. However, speaking purely for myself, I feel like I know enough about this particular guy’s life that I am comfortable concluding that a) he was a charlatan, b) a LOT of the things he did were for the purpose of getting laid, and c) he was not a very good guy.
Again, this does not mean that there are not good people in the Church or that the Church itself is necessarily bad (although I personally find its history rather unsavory). And I don’t think that this Church, as a whole, is particularly worse than, say, the Catholic Church–or any other Christian church–in terms of the harm done to humans or humanity in general. It is interesting to me in that we know so much more about the guy who started it. In comparison, the Paul of the biblical epistles, who was responsible for so much of the subsequent Christian dogma, is a person we know next to nothing about, other than vague theories about whether he might have had epilepsy.