I'm not sure God has a dog in this fight either. And I rather expect the authorities/management of the LDS Church don't either. If somebody did an actual analysis of LDS authoritative statements, tracing sources attributed as basis for LDS beliefs, isolating actual teachings unique to the Book of Mormon, and not found in the Bible, as one "source", it would surprise many members that the Book of Mormon ranks about fourth place as a source of current teaching, after the authorities who quote one another, after sociologists and anecdotal references, after the Doctrine and Covenants and Pearl of Great Price, after the New Testament.
I'm not sure I have a dog in this fight etiher. In 1978 I read the Solomon Spaulding Manuscript Found, and more or less concluded with the idea that Sydney Rigdon who worked for several years in the printshop where the manuscript was supposedly gathering dust, might have worked on the story idea a bit. Given that he was I think an Amherst or some other early American graduate of a theological program. Later, as an innovative Campbellite preacher with a congregation of some hundreds of followers, he was found preaching ideas essentially the same as those found in the Book of Mormon, within a hundred miles of where Joseph Smith lived and where Joseph found the gold plates, allegedly. And with most of those followers became a significant majority of early converts, enough to cause the new Josephite church to settle nearby in Kirtland. Just seemed to raise some questions about some tail wagging the boy wonder prophet.
The Book of Mormon contains a set of religious beliefs not found in any place or time other than frontier America centering on Signey Rigdon, and including the fairly common belief of many of that time that the Indians were a remnant of the Lost Tribes of Israel.
From an intellectual standpoint, the fact that Manuscript Found is a chronicle of two nations warring across the Ohio River, between a white race and a brown race allegedly the antecedents of the American Indians.. . . The Kentucks. . . . with the white race being of Roman and Christian origin, sailing across the ocean a few hundred years after Jesus, just seems a bit too serendipitously similar to the major historical theme of the Book of Mormon. I'm not sure the Bible Belt Baptists are ready to claim Mormons as their spawn just yet, but they are showing signs of having pre-emptive designs on some major distinctly Mormon ideas like the fatherhood of God over mankind and families being reunited as families in the hereafter.
And while Jesus was pretty clear on the Fatherhood of God over mankind and Himself, the Catholics left no scrap of reference to families in eternity in the Christian tradition, if ever it was taught after Jesus. That Jesus considered his family important is evident to me from the story of Lazarus, the brother of Mary and Martha. Just how important. . . is today not permissible authorized teaching among Mormons, but these women who were at events throughout Jesus' biblical chronology were listed variously as women who turned to Jesus to settle a quarrel over household chores, blaming Him for not being there when their brother died for the presumption that He could have prevented it, and as being the women who were intending to care for his corpse on the morning he reportedly got up and walked to where the Apostles were gathered in mourning.
However, all in all, I find the most intriguing fact in the whole Book of Mormon element of Mormonism to be the fact that Joseph Smith, Hyrum Smith, with the survivor friends John Taylor and Wilford Woodruff spent the last few hours, of Joseph Smith's (and Hyrum's) life reading a few passages from the Book of Mormon, turning down a page of two for a way to mark the places, and bearing testimony to one another of it's factual origin.
The Biblical account of Jesus on the way to the Cross is without parallel as a testimony of His sense of mission in his life, but the martyrdom of Joseph and Hyrum is as close a parallel as there is, and to me just as compelling.
Mormonism maintains today, a sense that no basis is necessary except being a live link with God. Whatever the history or science may say, a Mormon is a Mormon on the faith that God is God, and that God still cares for us.
